Margaux Bricler, born in France

The intentions underlying Margaux Bricler’s installation have been modified by the work itself. Originally, in fact, it was to suggest the absence of a body. This was implied by the wooden structure, by the slight impress of a silhouette conserved by the clay and by the decomposed mantle, symbolizing a sudden awakening, perhaps in the middle of the night, of a restlessness not assuaged by sleep or dreams. This project, which we wish to keep in mind in order to show the relation between intention and creation, altered over time and is even now acquiring a new conformation. The installation, as we now see it, evokes a single bed, of normal size except for the unusual height, recalling the structure of the Sleeping Hermaphrodite, in the version conserved at the Musée du Louvre of Paris, the mattress of which Gian Lorenzo Bernini sculpted with a surprising wealth of detail (1620). In Bricler’s work, the mattress becomes the body. The layer of clay, chosen also for its reference to the creation and decay of every material, reveals its own existence, its own life in the work. There is not only the memory of the body, therefore, as was originally intended. There is another body, the essence of a body that needs neither form nor semblances to prove its vitality and energy. It makes its presence felt with its own pungent odour as we enter the room. Its movements and fractures are an index of the impossibility of any container to resist its content. At the beginning of the exhibition, the layer of clay was uniform on the wooden surface, its classical composure accentuated by the alabastrine mantle, the consistency of which plays an optical trick on the viewer – is it marble or skin? With the passing of time, however, the material has gradually assumed a life of its own, proclaiming its own presence. At the same time, the widening cracks emphasize the idea of something precarious, transitory. An increasingly sepulchral image has increasingly emerged, suggesting an object with a presence of its own lasting for centuries. A table? A bed? A tomb?

Mohamed Keita, born in Côte d’Ivoire

Among Mohamed Keita’s photos, J’habite Termini is a selfportrait. The photographer immortalizes his baggage when he arrived in Italy. These suitcases might be a face and a bust, they substitute his members, without rhetoric, without exaggerated contrasts. A foreground against a scarcely defined background, a place of passage, anonymous, where the faces mingle, people hurry by, without stopping. Two bags and a box relate the departure from Côte d’Ivoire, a long journey and the arrival in Rome.

Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-30

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Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-31_tagliata

Maki Ochoa, born in Venezuela

The three photos were chosen from an archive of times and places that do not correspond to the moment in which they were shot. Each is accompanied by a caption that apparently deceives the viewer, but which in reality reveals the artist’s intentions, giving us access to his memory. A code refers to a catalogue where the fictitious date has the same importance as the real one. It does not matter where and when they were made, each of these images portrays Caracas, Maki Ochoa’s native city. They have in common a tonal uniformity that makes their temporal location indefinable. The have the opaque patina of memories, even if they were taken recently. They are ephemeral appearances, immortalized by the camera in a format that also contemplates error. They are déja-vu images introducing a further environmental superimposition. With a site-specific installation, in fact, the artist takes us to the Venezuela of his memories, among mango leaves, hooters and parrot cries – alter egos that refer to linguistic and mnemonic superimpositions. The cage that held them is by now empty, los loros – the Spanish for “the parrots” – have gone. With an oneiric interference, the space becomes Quinta Elizabeth, the house of the artist’s grandmother.

Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-2

Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-1

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Enej Gala, born in Slovenia

Enej Gala’s obstinate insistence is destined to failure and repetition. The artist knowingly demonstrates this in his repairedobjects, where the loss of function underlines the origin. Among the sculptures belonging to this series, the materials evocative of the home reflect, by repairing their functionality, on their roots in daily life and recall lives that have been lived, lost or were not as expected. They are elements accompanying everyday – and everyone’s – existence. Elements that inhabit every home, every drawer, but which are transformed and transfigured through these obsessive repairs. What is conserved, therefore, is a sense of profound fragility and instability, emphasized and exaggerated by a forced precariousness.

Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-7

Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-8

Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-9

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Felipe Aguila, born in Chile

Filum is an attempt to return to the artist’s origins, to analyse their distance from the present. It is a two-channel projection in which Felipe Aguila compares himself with his father. Have time, distance and different customs modified their identity or does an invisible thread – a filum – remain, regardless of the different continents and spaces separating them? The comparison evolves through a series of parallel gestures that no longer coincide. This is underlined by the subdivision in two screens, requiring the observer to pass repeatedly from one to the other. The landscapes change, the interiors change – how  do the identities change? The artist emphasizes how, in his own thought, not only linguistic identity but even cultural affinity have weakened. Ways of walking, eating and travelling therefore become external evidence of a new way of conceiving time, of planning one’s own life. Attention to minute details, to involuntary gestures, measures the distance and the extent to which this thread has been stretched.

Oscar Contreras Rojas, born in Mexico

A fusion between different traditions, but which have the same idea of transformation: The Popol Vuh (“Book of the Community”) and Ovid’s Metamorphoses are the starting point for Oscar Contreras Rojas’s work. Both in the collection of myths and legends of the various ethnic groups inhabiting the Quiché land, one of the Maya reigns in Guatemala, and in the Latin epic poem, the fulcrum of the story is, in fact, metamorphosis, the possibility to change, to evolve. Thus, the small sculptures of the Mutant series are an assemblage of different materials. Some are objects found here and there, some have been artificially constructed. They are made uniform by the red wax, which helps convey the idea that this is an ongoing process, that these shapes can be further modified.

Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-19

Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-20

Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-21

Alek O., born in Argentina

Did you notice them? Did you see them? If you were barefoot you would feel them under you. With hard bristles, on which hundreds of soles have been wiped, thousands of feet have waited. Maybe you are waiting for someone to open the door, maybe you are looking for your keys in your bag. If you have passed over the threshold, you are not outside, but you are on another threshold. Suspended, not knowing what lies beyond. In an interior, with a shift that is your first disorientation, as when you enter an area where something is out of place. Something that is no longer itself, but which conserves almost everything of itself: form, colour. Another function, certainly. It tells its own story, in another place. Now, it retains something of your footprints, of your passage.

Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-18

Andrea Mastrovito 

This was the last room I designed and made for the exhibition. For its achievement I thought of Martin Creed’s work, and of a Luigi Polla’s tale. When Luigi met him – one night he told me – Martin, who was no more then a boy, showed him a salt and a pepper shakers, made in copper and steel. He leaned them on the table where they were eating. They were almost invisible among all the dishes. He explained him that, by his nature, he didn’t want to to anything. But not doing anything, for an artist, is impossible. And so he had always found the way to make the easiest thing, to do the minimal effort. I have always been struck by this tale (I recall his filled-with-air balloons, his creased papers, his metronomes…). So I thought that an empty room would have been perfect to close the course of the exhibition. Even because, then, I was too tired to do something more. But actually something was missing, a grip to the slang violence of Testori’s stories, invented and lived stories. And so I remebered his frienship/unfriendship with Luchino Visconti. Visconti who was inspired  by Testori’s Il ponte della Ghisolfa for his Rocco e i suoi fratelli. At that time they were friends, respecting each other; but then happened that Alain, Testori’s partner, didn’t get a part – promised – in Ludwig, Giovanni was very pissed off and started to hate him (so hard that he presented public excuses after Visconti’s death) so bad that in the unpublished epilogue of L’Ambleto, he rails against the “sozzialista registore”, insulting him and saddling him with sins and perversions: “for you, to love, is like having a dog’s cock to lick”. That’s why I took as a starting point the playbill of Rocco e i suoi fratelli, where is depicted Simone while raping Nadia. The violence of the act is mitigated by the invisible transparence of the image obtained scratching the matt glass of the french door, whose counterpart is, on the left wall, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, a work made for my personal exhibition Postmodern, in 2006. In this work the relationship between man and woman is inverted (literaly, the woman is on the top), and the Magritte quotation is explaining also here “what love is”, playing on the fact that “pipe” in french means – as everybody knows – pipe, and blowjob, as well…

Andrea Mastrovito 

To make this room I kept in my mind one of the rare pictures portraying Giovanni Testori in his private study. Here the writer used to guard paintings of naked men that he attributed to Courbet and Géricault. In this picture, over the library, you can spot five painting in the background. About four of them we have informations and dimensions, but about the fifth – a man’s trunk above a black man portrait – we don’t know anything. Looking at the picture, I reproduced in their precise original position the four well-known paintings, just by using the material that made up the walls, or layers of paint, the plaster till the cement and bricks, as in the room with the picture of the  whole Testori family. In this work who is talking is the absence: whenever we take off from the wall a picture that has been there for a long time, we realize that on the wall, where the pictures was, a darker silhouette remains, saved from the wear of light and dust. Starting from the idea of that trace left by paintings, I got to imagine that the whole image was imprinted on the wall that, pierced, blended and carved, it eventually gave back the memory it was retaining. Exactly in front of those four carved-in-wall paintings, a plasma TV is proposing a selection of 13 films, all about Art and History of Art, made thanks to Zizi’s (Marco Marcassoli) direction between 2003 and 2006. All these films are a reflection – both critical and not – about Art, its gears, about the History of Art itself and the relationship between artist and work, and they all find here, in that room where Testori used to spend long hours, their natural place. The journey starts from the Haikus – a sort of tableaux vivants or little sketch also about contemporary art claims – to arrive to those 150 plastic tacks to improve your artistic talent where I imagine a number of famous modern artists when they were six years old and give them some plastic tacks to reproduce their most famed works in the simplest forms, to arrive to CH where, with Stefano Arienti and Luca Francesconi as main characters, a museum is stormed – as for Tim Burton Batman – and all of its works are destroyed and defaced in the name of a new and violent ultra futuristic avant-garde.

Andrea Mastrovito

The Band Queen has always been a landmark for everything I did. I discovered them 20 years ago, as almost everybody, when Freddie Mercury died. My high school teacher used to teach us english making us listen Innuendo. For the first time I understood what was said in a song… thus is natural that they often come out in my works. I mean, an artist has to talk through what he knows, feels and loves/hates, in his works, and fairly why we should untie ourself from purely consumerist areas while we are totally surrounded by them? The first video works on Queen born exactly from a meditation about the concept of myth, star and on his possibility of “Technological reproducibility”, paraphrasing Walter Benjamin. So it has been natural to take the band I knew better for having collected its stuff for all the years of my youth. The first step was Sburzum & Zizi Live in Budapest ’86, where, making an accurate assembly and disassembly work of sequenze taken from Queen Live in Budapest ’86, I could make Zizi sing with Freddie Mercury – that, among other things, heralds “tonight, for the first time, we are going to sing a new song, a special one, for you all…” reading the song’s lyric written on his hand – a ballad composed by me and my group, the Madhush, reversing the usual canons for which boy bands are covering more famous bands’ pieces. 

In the two next works, specially in The Freddie Mercury Photocopied Concert, what is being unhinged is the concept itself of originality of the hic and nunc event, of the concert video, of the artist-audience oneway relationship, and all that just by the “photocopied concert”. Photocopying concerts is actually pretty easy: you take the original DVD of the event, you patiently stay in front of your computer and extrapolate every frame where all the musicians appear clearly, the singer, the instruments, etc. At this point, with a photo-retouch program every frame is increased to life size, divided in small, identical sections and printed one by one in (colour) copy format. Now, with the help of scissors and scotch tape, costumes, faces, instruments and microphones of the actual concert’s protagonists are recomposed and, once that they are worn, the concert is reinterpreted, spreading the music playback directly from the original DVD. And everything is recordered by the audience with a variety of channel, from the video camera to the photo camera to the iPhone, exactly like real concerts. The achieved result allows us to break, temporarily live and depending on the shots in the last film, the boundary between facts and fictions, bringing back to life – in the real world – just with some paper, something that is no longer alive, but in analog or digital shots; and at the same time, this result shows the scene fiction’s boundaries, because the photocopies are covering the onlookers only frontally, and so the disbielif’s suspention is never complete and continuous, but it shows the king naked at each movement. Under the television that constantly broadcasts music and video – photocopied – of Queen, there is a piece of furniture containing my CDs and books about this topic, as it was reproducing a young fan’s bedroom, and it serves as link between the two big mirror works on the wall, both made with the same matrix, one by felt-tip pens and the other by collage.  In this pair of photocopies I focus my attention to Freddie Mercury’s histrionic homosexuality, underlining it just using the colours of the rainbow. His way of living homosexuality was deeply different from Testori’s one, who considered it as a sin. Nonetheless Giovanni Testori himself was a big fan of Queen, enough to make Bohemian Rhapsody jangles in all the rooms surrounding his one, in his last days of life, choosing it as viaticum for afterlife. That’s why Queen’s room is exactly located between the room of his youth and the one of his maturity.

Andrea Mastrovito 

This work initially arises from a song, the cover of Soft Cell’s Tainted Love. I refer more to the video then the song, the constellations coming to life, and, as made-of-stars dancers, pushing a guy to leave his home and his insane love. I instantly thought to use the fluorescent stars, the sticky ones that are used in children bedrooms, to get a situation that defuses the Nietzschean emphasis of the work in the next room – 120578, in which I represent myself and the world piercing the sky by grapeshots – and that were a prelude for the following one, genuinely playful by using the pop icon Freddie Mercury in his ’80s style version. Of course the work would have been too light without linking the fluorescent stars with a modest and ancient material, meaningful of opposite meanings, as the carbon paper is, that, matt, it catches and chews lights and colours, swallowing them into the darkness. Thinking of this work and of the powerful contrast between a shiny white and a total black, I figured the image of my mother in the day of her church wedding. Inspite of all the brides she was total black dressed. I remember that when I was a child, every time she was showing to friends the family pictures, I used to ask her why she was dressing like that. “I liked that way” was her answer. So I started to look for one of those pictures, I wanted one of them, where both her and my father were distracted by anything. And I got to find it! You can clearly see both of them (and my grandfather as well) observing and pointing something in the ground. I took them and moved in the wood, at night, where without lights you can’t see in your own hand. And like this is the wood drown in the carbon paper that reproduces in negative the original big pencil drawing (not showed here). Of course, presented in negative, my mother’s dress is lighter than the black of the background: the whitening process is totally achieved on the infront-wall where, lights off (a timer alternates one minute of light and one minute of darkness), you can spot the mirror and shiny images of Anna and Nicola, made by thousands of fluorescent stars. On the ground, in a messy pile, there are other thousands of shiny stars, the only item that you can see whether lights are on or off and directly matched with the two images that otherwise wouldn’t cross: it’s about a love that lasts every day, in spite of everything. And it’s natural, spontaneously adapting to the soil, contrary to the violent vision of love in the opposite room: Rocco (Siffredi) e i suoi fratelli.

Andrea Mastrovito 

This work,expressly made for Casa Testori, has deep roots, in fact it rises from an idea for a lightbox entitled My Birthday that I presented in Ginevra a couple of years ago, during an unfortunate trip with Zizi and Eugenia. The work was representing myself, with a gun in my hand, shooting skyward and thus redrawing, with the back light, the precise position of the constellations that could be seen from Bergamo the 12th May 1978, my birthday. During the several inspections at Casa Testori, I was always pointed out the importance of the big room upstairs, where Testori was conceived, born, where both his parents passed away and where, after his mather’s death, he moved. It seemed natural to me to think to repropose that concept of birth, but extending it to the whole room and at the same time making it global and intimate, through the videoprojection in two separate rooms. In the room next to that big patriarchal room, in the dark, here I am (video projected and animated) repeatedly shooting to the opposite wall, the one next to the big room where, as the shots go on, and thus drawing on the ceiling that precise position of constellations that could – indeed – be seen from Lombardy the day of my birth. This goes well, I thought. But I needed something more, and so I started to plick fleas off young Testori’s pictures, until I looked up the biography and read: Giovanni Testori (Novate Milanese, 12th May 1923 – Milano, 16th March 1993). Astonished, I realized that I no longer have to look for anything, we were born on the same day.