Three works by Nicola Samorì welcome us to the exhibition. The large work on the wall in front of us was made by painting a precise copy of a Maddalena by Luca Giordano and, with the paint still fresh, pushing the paint downwards, making the layer curl in on itself and almost entirely compromising its legibility. This is not simply a disfigurement, but a way for the artist to accentuate the existential drama experienced by the saint, who emerges from the void with even greater force. Opposite, two frescoes are torn and engraved, their visual impact accentuated by as many small sculptures: on the right, a Cristo risorto (resurrected Christ) from Germany; on the left, an anthropomorphic statue, made with different materials by the artist himself.
PH MICHELE ALBERTO SERENI
PH MICHELE ALBERTO SERENI
PH MICHELE ALBERTO SERENI
PH MICHELE ALBERTO SERENI
THE ARTWORKS
Nicola Samorì, Il cavacarne, 2014/15 oil on copper, AmC Collezione Coppola, Vicenza Nicola Samorì, Firmamento, 2017 Fresco on alveolam, Courtesy Monitor, Rome/Lisbon Nicola Samorì, Pentesilea, 2017/18, Torn fresco
Se la realtà non è solo un fotogramma ideally closes with dissolving filmframes from two videos: AlessandraFerrini’s essay film Negotiating Amnesia and Jacopo Rinaldi’s video installation Light Meter.
These two works focus, in very different ways, on the theme of memory, and of forgetting or questionino history, as a highly sensitive potential ideological tool.
Ferrini’s documentary addresses the issue of telling the story of Italian colonialism in the Horn of Africa between the war in Ethiopia in 1935-36 and its historic reconstruction in contemporary Italy. The artist asks how ideologies and manipulation still affect Italians’ collective image of the country’s early twentieth-century colonial past and how we preserve and pass on memories, revealing intentional amnesia and partial reconstruction of events and stories.
Rinaldi’s work, on the other hand, is a wider-ranging consideration of vision, of images of our history (and art history) and our mechanisms of vision and construction of the image. The artist photographs the technical systems used in some of Rome’s bestknown churches to light up paintings in sculptures for a limited time, resulting in a constant alternation of light and dark, image and censorship. The result is an apparent metaphor for the action of history itself: the voluntary action of the present, turning on a light which is inevitably destined to go off, casting even the most important masterpieces of western art into the darkness of oblivion.
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LightMeter_2_Estasi di santa Teresa d'Avila, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Santa Maria della Vittoria
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LightMeter_1_Ciclo pittorico di San Matteo, Caravaggio, San Luigi dei Francesi
One of the most complex works Rinaldi has produced over the years focused on Harald Szeemann and his archive, starting with a documentary the artist made in 2014 at the former Szeemann Archive, Fabbrica Rosa, in Maggia, in Switzerland’s Canton Ticino, when it was being emptied and moved to the USA. This inspired the artist to begin reflecting on the relationships between space, curatorial work and the dynamics of projecting the research methodologies of the most important curator of the twentieth century onto the place where he studied and worked. This beginning has led to a series of editorial, graphic, video and photographic works; the exhibition presents a site-specific installation intended to suggest a hypothetical dialogue between Testori and Szeemann. For while the exhibition opens with Alessandra Ferrini’s reflection on Morelli and Longhi’s recognition method, it closes with an intuitive opening up toward the methods and systems of relation and production characterising Szeemann’s contemporary art so far. An entanglement of glimpses and methods which, in the end, affords a new key to interpretation of the entire exhibition project.
In Casa Testori Jacopo Rinaldi reconstructs an installation created in Salento in 2016, designed for the railway line between Lecce and Gagliano del Capo. The artist had replaced the curtains in one carriage of the train with fabrics printed with frames of a short video filmed in 1935 from a Littorina, a motor coach created during the fascist years which came to be synonymous with “train” in Italian popular culture. As the artist writes, “the cars [of the Lecce and Gagliano del Capo line] are very small and have 16 or 17 windows, exactly the number of frames per second the human eye needs to see in order to perceive fluid motion. And so I wanted to print on the curtains of these windows 16 or 17 frames of a video about Africa from Istituto Luce. The video, made for a newsreel, was filmed from a train during the inauguration of the Oltremare Pugliese railway. The idea was intermittency between the fixed image of a video, which is actually in motion, and an image which would be fixed only if the train were not in motion. The result was an intermittent palimpsest comparing different times: closed curtains stationary in the past, open curtains moving in the present”. In this installation for Casa Testori, Rinaldi installs the curtains taken from the train so that they interact with the video from Istituto Luce, creating a new interval between past and present, this time in dialogue with the other rooms in the home and with wider-ranging reflection on the relationship between image and reality that is the theme of the exhibition as a whole.
Jacopo Rinaldi’s environmental installation further develops and investigates reflection on colonialism and twentieth-century Italian history introduced in the previous chapters. The key element of the project is a sheet of metal in which a pattern is engraved which the artist builds through repetition of a graphic element, a design Rinaldi produced from an image Luigi Daniele Crespi made for Pirelli in the twenties. The hands hold each other while at the same time holding a rubber eraser, made of course by Pirelli. Unlike the original design, the artist has the hands wear white gloves like Mickey Mouse’s (first worn by the cartoon character in 1929, in an episode in which his character acts as a “snake charmer”, definitely “non-western”). This graphic element is therefore not so much a historic document as a visual note, the result of historic speculation and a thinly veiled act of accusation combining colonialism, exploitation of primary resources (such as rubber in Africa) and representation of otherness, in a constant process of expansion and negation, like the pattern spreading over the ceiling of Casa Testori, seeking to erase itself with the hands holding erasers.
Starting on the veranda of Casa Testori, and continuing into the fireplace room, Alessandra Ferrini’s long-term research project entitled A Bomb tobe Reloaded is set up in a number of different nuclei. As is often the case of projects that grow and are developed over years, the work is divided into a number of chapters exploring stories and vicissitudes linked with Centro Documentazione Frantz Fanon (CDFF), founded by Giovanni Pirelli in 1963 and dedicated to the famous psychiatrist and philosopher born in Martinique, a naturalised French citizen, whose work was essential for the development of the decolonialisation movements in Asia, Latin America and North Africa. As the artist writes, “The project is divided into a number of chapters exploring different characters and elements investigated during my study of Centro Documentazione Frantz Fanon. The work is based on the structure of a constellation of voices, characters and places that are in one way or another linked with study of the CDFF”. The work as a whole addresses the potential for revitalisation of a resistantarchive, that is, an archive which, despite having been moved and dismembered, continues to have the ability to address and interrogate the present, like a bomb about to go off. The political implications of the entire project are therefore not only in terms of content, but also methodology, because they cast light on possibilities and tools for giving voice to events and stories that are only apparently silent.
And so A Bomb to be Reloaded winds through the rooms of the exhibition:
CHAPTER 0 – Fireplace hall
This chapter acts as an introduction to the project and to the process of researching the CDFF, and in particular the materials in its library and periodicals collection, revealing the international network developed from the Centro, especially with the anti-colonial and anti imperialist movements in Africa, Central and South America and Southeast Asia. Focusing on the spaces containing the materials and the history of their dispersal, the research was conducted in a 2018 workshop with students from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan. It includes documents that belonged to CDFF and documentary material on historic sites of activism in Milan, such as Archivio Primo Moroni, the squatted bakery Panetteria Occupata, and Istituto Nazionale della Storia del Movimento di Liberazione in Italia, the National Institute for the History of the Liberation Movement in Italy.
CHAPTER 1 – Fireplace hall
The first chapter, in chronological order, explores Fanon’s direct influence on Giovanni Pirelli and on the director Valentino Orsini. The installation includes historic documents, publications and quotes printed on large banners, and focuses on the film directed by Orsini, I Dannati della Terra (1969), with an interview Ferrini conducted with Kadigia Bove, an actress who appears in the historic film named after Fanon’s famous book. This presence also attempts to make up for women’s lack of visibility in narration of the historic context of what is referred to as “Third-Worldism”. The installation specifically reveals the importance of self-analysis and self-criticism in the authors’ writing and in the exhibition.
CHAPTER 2 – Veranda
This chapter focuses on composer Luigi Nono’s A floresta è jovem echeja de vida, written in 1965 and 1966 in collaboration with Giovanni Pirelli and first performed in 1966 at Venice’s Teatro La Fenice during the 19th Experimental Music Biennale. Through historic documents and videos, Ferrini’s installation reconstructs the historic performance but “does so partially, focusing on a number of documents that underline the influence of Fanon’s thought on the work and on one of its performers, Kadigia Bove, who links this chapter with the previous one”. Kadigia’s stories enrich the narration with a series of anecdotes and autobiographical stories, opening a window onto the experience of the actress and singer of Italian-Somali origins in post-war Italy.
A Bomb to be reloaded(chapte)_AlessandraFerrini2018-2019
A Bomb to be reloaded(chapter2)_AlessandraFerrini2018-2019
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A Bomb to be reloaded(chapter0)_AlessandraFerrini2018-2019
A Bomb to be reloaded(chapter0)1_AlessandraFerrini2018-2019
Jacopo Rinaldi transforms the great hall in Casa Testori into a green house full of little tropical plants. The installation may be interpreted in a number of ways which go beyond what at first sight appears to be simple botanical interest. The first level of interpretation has to do with the title of the work, Maradagàl: the name of the imaginary town in which Carlo Emilio Gadda sets his novel La cognizione del dolore (Theexperience of pain), 1963. Maradagàl is an imaginary place, but it is also a fictitious reconstruction of Brianza under fascist rule in the nineteen-twenties, and a sharp criticism of Italy’s indolent bourgeois society of the time. In these terms, the plants Rinaldi has selected are an ironic comment and criticism of the bourgeois dimension of the Milanese culture in which Testori himself was born. And the inclusion of a tropical plant in the home, as Penny Sparke points out, is itself a colonial decorative act, originating in Victorian England, legitimising the exotic, aspirational dimension of bourgeois–modernist culture.
But there is, in the simplicity of this action, another level on which the work may be read: the tropical plants allude much more specifically to Italian history and relate to Gadda’s story, the fascist years and the country’s colonial past, in an intimate way, because the plants in the exhibition are of the species Ricinus Communis, commonly known as the castor oil plant.
The exhibition opens with an installation created by Alessandra Ferrini specifically for Casa Testori, an eco system of clues and references regarding the visual culture and critical activity of Giovanni Testori. This is a seminal work in relation to the exhibition as a whole, in that it documents the theoretical approach characterising the entire process, based on construction of a series of visual assonances, historic references and new cultural and historical relations. In this specific case, we find a number of articles written by Testori in “Corriere della Sera” about African art and a series of digital compositions in which a number of details of modern paintings appear. Alessandra Ferrini’s reflection is inspired by Carlo Ginzburg’s essay Morelli, Freud andSherlock Holmes: Clues and ScientificMethod1, in which the famous historian compares famous art historian Giovanni Morelli, Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud, revealing the incomplete arbitrariness of a method of investigation based on the detail and the fragment, whether it be in a painting or in a criminal case. This arbitrariness also characterises the “realist” hegemony of western art history over the cultures we have colonised, which, as Testori points out in his articles, cannot be reduced to European epistemological systems. From this point of view, Ferrini’s work itself becomes a network of clues, in which fragments of paintings, a photograph cut in half of Roberto Longhi holding a magnifying lens and material from Testori’s archive (including letters asking the critic about attribution of a painting to Daniele Crespi) suggest a different point of view from which viewers can read about and approach art history, its limitations and the hegemonic mechanisms it has triggered and continues to trigger.
China, South Africa, Guatemala and Italy, the small room closing the itinerary documents, with images and a brief video created from an online channel of Al Jazeera, the story of the ArtsLords. This group, directed by Kabir Mokamel, has invaded the city of Kabul, In Afghanistan, with graffiti placed on the city walls, erected as a defence against frequent suicide attacks. And not only there. Kilometres of abandoned walls, rubble and gutted buildings are at the disposition of art, to protest against corruption and to develop a cultural resistance on the lines of the Banksy murals, in a land continually oppressed by the Taleban. The work with which the group won the Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani Anti-Corruption Excellence Award is a mural with great eyes that watch and interrogate us. They are flanked by a phrase that is a possible conclusion to this exhibition: “I have seen your corruption which is not hidden from the eyes of God, though you seek to hide it from the people”.
The leitmotif of this room is Rome. Three female artists approach in different ways the theme of a city whose destiny has often entwined grandeur and corruption. Emblematic from this point of view is the work of Elena Monzo, on the right. With a style that manages to be both delicate and hard-hitting, she elaborates the symbol of the Eternal City – the she-wolf. Below the shewolf, we do not find the celebrated twins, but three naked female figures, suggesting the image of a new Babylon, accentuated by a vestal virgin, a neo-Salome, who offers her services, reclining in a niche. Marica Fasoli’s work, on the other hand, evokes a famous episode, bordering on the incredible, that took place when Papal power In Rome was at its apex. It is a present that Manuel I, King of Portugal, gave to Leo X in 1514, an extraordinary albino elephant called Hanno. When the king’s “present” passed through the streets in a procession, it was a real triumph. In 1962, during works in the Giardini del Belvedere, some workers discovered the remains of a great jaw and an enormous fang. Only at the end of the 1980s did the historian Silvio Bedini succeed in reconstructing the story and linking these remains to the elephant Hanno, who did not last long In Rome and died in 1516. The elephant, of which the Pope is said to have been very fond, became a symbol for the degeneration of papal power, all too ready to yield to the flattery of European potentates. A symbol, too, of the deep corruption that aroused the ire of the pro-Lutheran circles. The publication of the Theses and the protestant schism were just round the corner. Placed higher up, and deliberately kept separate, as if watching and interrogating a Rome torn between two earthly powers, imperial and papal, is the work by Adele Ceraudo. This is a photograph – taken by Matteo Basilé – in which the artist poses on the cross. Here, too, is a clear reference to the episode of corruption that brought about the crucifixion of Jesus.
