Rustan Söderling, Eternal September, 2017, Four channel video installation. Duration 18 min 11 sec. Variable dimensions (detail).

Risky Attachments

Risky Attachments

Andreas Ervik, Lara Joy Evans, Lauren Gault, Thomas Hämén, Jocelyn McGregor, Plasticity, Rustan Söderling, Ittah Yoda

Curated by Like A Little Disaster

16 December 2017 / 18 February 2018, @Foothold, Polignano a Mare

L.A.L.D. is also very happy to present “Risky_Attachements / The_Guidebook”, an analog/ digital publication including interventions and contributions by all artists involved in the show + Penny Rafferty, Sebastian Rozemberg, Ferdinando Boero, Christina Gigliotti and L.A.L.D.

GMO / Chikungunya / PFOS / Wannacry / BSE prions / Radioactive waste / Human cryogenics / Hydroponic agriculture / Molecular gastronomy / Frozen embryos / Open systems / Global warming / Climate change / Ozone hole / Transglobal migration / Deforestation / Acid rain / Sensorized devices / Databases / Natural reserves / Genetic synthesizers / Internet / Sophia / Glass Beach / Renaissance Technologies / Xylella fastidiosa / Surgical Robots / Neural lace / Oculus rift / Particulates / Space debris / Psychotropics / Stem-cells…

How to classify these strange objects?
Are they produced by nature or by society? Are they moral or scientific problems? Are they technological or political matters?
Do these strange objects belong to nature or culture? Where can these hybrids be placed?
Are they human?
Are they human because they are the product of our work? Are they natural?
Are they natural because they are not the result of our activity? Are they local or global?

Reality no longer present itself as the face of an indifferent nature, and we no longer have to deal with simple and natural objects, well-defined and self-contained, “bald” objects without risk. Today, we deal more and more with “hairy”, “dishevelled” objects, with “risky attachments”, quasi-objects, made of multiple connections never fully closed. They are able to trigger unexpected consequences, even in the long-term, and because of that even more unpredictable and uncontrollable. Objects such as these do not simply stand in opposition to the subject but among which man is involved and with whom they share the same destiny.
The objects that surround us are hybrids that rebel against any form of classification, knots of a network that binds multiple and distant factors in an uninterrupted chain, and that risk blowing up all sorts, all programs, all effects. We are witnessing the proliferation of these chimeras that can no longer be relegated solely to the natural world. Their interaction ends up being a question of subjectification/objectification/subjection, human being classifications and the hierarchy of actors and values.
“An infinitesimal cause can have vast effects; an insignificant actor becomes central; an immense cataclysm disappears as if by magic; a miracle product turns out to have nefarious consequences; a monstrous being is tamed without difficulty, In the face of Quasi-objects, one is always caught off-guard, struck sometimes by the robustness of systems, sometimes by their fragility.”

– Let’s spit on Hegel.
– Let’s spit on Hegel too!

It was Kant who consolidated the unjustified division between human and non-human, placing man at the heart of philosophy while at the same time reducing the rest of the world to a set of unknowable objects. Things in themselves become inaccessible, while, symmetrically, the transcendental subject is far from infinite. No matter what variations will be made in the history of philosophy on this theme, the gap between man and world will always be privileged compared to that between tree and moon or fire and wheat.

Pure forms a priori?

I – PURIFICATION.
Contemporary thought continues to dissect the world into two opposing kingdoms. On one side there are humans and their culture and nature and non-humans on the other. Phylogeny on one side and ontogeny on the other. Genetic heritage on one side and technological alterations on the other.
But no, there are not two mutually isolated zones called “nature” and “culture”: there are only “actants”, and it is not possible to split the natural realm from the cultural one – not because they are irremediably intertwined, but rather because the dichotomy between nature and culture is unfounded. There is nothing but a plethora of actants, none of which are intrinsically natural or cultural.

“There are no pure idioms, we are all mediators, translators.”

II – MIXTURE.
These hybrids are a nightmare for any attempt to divide the world into two purified districts. For this reason, the modernist position deliberately misrepresents them as a mash-up of pure forms. But such mixing is impossible if the two pure forms do not exist at all. In fact, our world contains nothing but hybrids, even though the word “hybrid” is misleading with its false shades of a mixture of two pure ingredients. If we call them quasi- objects, the work done by “quasi” removes any trace of an initial or ideal purity.

There are only actants: built through many tests of strength with others, and all partially resist any attempt to disassemble them.

-ACTORS-ACTANTS-HYPHENS-AGENTS-

Following the tracks of quasi-objects, it now looks like an object, now like a tale, now like a social bond, never reducing itself to a simple single body. All that matters are the hyphens and the networks that link them.
Objects are subjects, social actors that move, act, perform in the same way as other human social actors; they interact with each other and between themselves and us. A Quasi-object is first nothing but a sign, a token, a trace that remains, left by the displacement of a body that first arrives, produces, acts and then retreats. It is a holistic touch that remains and persists as trace of the presence of a body’s action.
Compared to the social system, objects do not symbolize, do not reflect, do not reify relationships between subjects, but they contribute to shaping them. Objects, considered agents, work as mediators responsible not for conveying messages, but for building, rewriting, and modifying meanings.
The traditional mediator was only a means to an end, while the agent is both a means and an end.
What we find anywhere and everywhere are simply networks of actors. The actor is not entirely an object and not entirely a subject. Rather it can behave as both, depending on how we see it.

The quasi-object is a relational property that does not possess any substantiality. It is not a distinct reality as opposed to subject, but a relational function allowing it to build real or virtual connections between subjects by immersing them in a collective-social construction.
When the quasi-object creates a community, this community becomes real. We men spend time transforming the virtual into real life.

– What is a coin?
– It is a quasi-object. It can turn into anything. It is a general equivalent. So today there is nothing more real than money, which started out as a quasi-object.

Quasi-Object-Quasi-Subject

Quasi-object is neither an object nor a subject, it is a relationship.

Quasi-objects are phenomena that can only be represented as an interaction between the observing subject and the observed object – or the other way round. They are half object and half subject since they can’t be defined by any of these two polarities. They cross and build social groups, mediating and transforming personal-collective identities and relationships within networks, thus allowing us to pass from the obtuseness of “I” to the fluidity of “Us”.

– But is there really an “I” and “us”?
We dance together with the elements, we are made of billions and trillions of small components each endowed with their own intelligence. There is of course no such thing as “I” or “Us”. What exists are only risky attachments, temporary and fragile balances between different things. And that “Us” has a multiplicity in itself and constantly works with all the other animated-inanimate makers in the world.

The personal pronoun is a sponge, it is a ball!

“It is not an object, but it is one nevertheless, since it is not a subject, since it is in the world; it is also a quasi-subject, since it marks or designates a subject who, without it, would not be a subject. He who is not discovered with the furet in his hand is anonymous, part of a monotonous chain where he remains undistinguished. He is not an individual; he is not recognized, discovered, cut; he is of the chain and in the chain. He runs, like the furet, in the collective. The thread in his hands is our simple relation, the absence of the furet; its path makes our indivision. Who are we? Those who pass the furet; those who don’t have it. This quasi-object, when being passed, makes the col, lective, if it stops, it makes the individual. Ifhe is discovered, he is “it” [mort]. Who is the subject, who is an “I,” or who am I? The moving furet weaves the “we,” the collective;ifit stops, it marks the “I”.(- The furet is the animal. The ferret, as well as the marker in a game somewhat like hunt-the-slipper or button, button, who’s got the button?)

The ego is not a fixed point, an invariable structure, but a being of circulation. The only invariable pronoun is “Us”; it designates the multicentric network, it belongs to everyone and is in common with everyone else.

“This quasi-object that is a marker of the subject is an astonishing constructer of intersubjectivity. We know, through it, how and when we are subjects and when and how we are no longer subjects. “We”: what does that mean? We are precisely the fluctuating moving back and forth of “I.” The “I” in the game is a token exchanged. And this passing, this network of passes, these vicariances of subjects weave the collection. I am I now, a subject, that is to say, exposed to being thrown down, exposed to falling, to being placed beneath the compact mass of the others; then you take the relay, you are substituted for “I” and become it; later on, it is he who gives it to you, his work done, his danger finished, his part ofthecollective constructed. The “we” is made by the bursts and occultations of the “I.” The “we” is made by passing the “I.” By exchanging the “I.” And by substitution and vicariance of the “I.””

– M.E.S.H. –

Political power acts on us, and the rhetoric of the text acts on us, but so do concrete walls, icebergs, tobacco fields and poisonous snakes.

– What ends?
– Nature ends.
– What begins is the mesh, made from risky attachments, made of liquid, viscous, decentralized, gradual and intersubjective entities; always too far or too close. Each entity can be defined only in relation (although not the relationship itself).

The mesh is the combination of all life-forms, but also the whole of all life-forms that have died and have fertilized and modified the Earth, its structure and its history. Everything is life, even what does not seem to be: iron is a byproduct of bacterial metabolism and so is oxygen. Mountains can be made of shells and fossilized bacteria and the decisive thing is that the mesh does not have any more important or essential element than the others.

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And if I left off dreaming about you?, instllation view, Gioia Di Girolamo, Motoko Ishibashi.

And if I left off dreaming about you?

And if I left off dreaming about you?

Stine Deja, Gioia Di Girolamo, Motoko Ishibashi, Lito Kattou, Botond Keresztesi, Maurizio Vicerè – Vice

Curated by Like A Little Disaster

18 June / 18 August 2017, @Foothold, Polignano a Mare

 photo credits: Ivan Divanto, Like A Little Disaster

– When you woke up this morning, you found the world largely as you left it. You were still you; the room in which you awoke was the same one you went to sleep in. The outside world had not been rearranged. History was unchanged and the future remained unknowable. You woke up to reality. But what is reality?
– An ambivalent opposition between what I know and what exists regardless of my cognition. In other words, does reality exists per se beyond my mind, my eye and my experience, or is it ontologically non-existent, so is it an illusion, or rather, a dream?
– I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.

//

Reality needs to feed itself on fictions, because the reality of the world is never enough for human being. It is even less relevant within the technological, visual and iconographic landscape in which we are now immersed, a space where fictionality has acquired a special ability to become real and to erase the originals, of which it is a representation in a perpetual kaleidoscope effect.
The image, as reproduction and representation of reality, confirms its inherent and insidious falsehood.
The gaze, in its interpretation of reality, is increasingly technologically mediated and as such also false, deceptive and producer of new simulacra.
Hyperreality is as uncertain as dream, which is dreamed like the dreamer who dream himself, and so on.

– In the dreamer’s dream, the dreamed one awoke.

The hypertrophic nature inherent the new anthropological spaces of collective intelligence exalts states of subjectivation created by the hybridization of real and fictious, in which is manifested the collapse of the imaginary over reality. We are witnesses of a technological migration – from fantasy to effectuation, with implications concerning the consistence of our co-existence in daily life experience.

The universe of dreams that until yesterday resided in the psychic, emotional and private dimension of man, has currently lost its secrecy, can be easily communicated and shared with others, can become common experience beyond linguistic tool. Everything can be objectified, represented, made alive. Our technological body carries a whole world, an environment in which to thrive, express, grow and to gain strength. And if this happens, the dogma of the uniqueness of reality starts to waver: “Self crushing” brings with it the plurality of the worlds. Parallel universes have left sci-fi books and the most daring cosmological hypotheses of quantum physics to become next-door worlds, which you can enter and exit with extreme ease.

Our social behavior moves into a narrative universe where the flesh no longer needs redemption, because it has already become virtual; body of light. In this perspective, the universe surrounding us becomes the corpus hermeticum of new fanta-technological and para-spiritual mythologies, which describe new collective representation/identification criteria, not only in psychological terms but also in terms of sensory apperception.

New technologies enable us to live the corporeity in a new, immaterial, psychological and philosophical form, something similar to the ghost-like and miraculous form traditionally attributed to ancient saints, ascetics and shamans; in this sense, technology allows us to live a sort of unsettling “journey into the spirit”, which in its original form is characterized – according to ancient traditions – by the dreamlike coincidence between the subject and the object of knowledge, and by the immersion into a sort of transcendental identification with the world. Here, then, electronics – which didn’t allow us to get to Mars – allows us to live this dream collectively, giving it a metaphysical (or speudo-spiritual) body which turns out to be totally credible, engaging, immersive and interactive.

//

All we got left is figuring out why there is today a widespread, and increasingly obsessive, eagerness for evanescent worlds, a feverish desire to project ourselves, at least illusorily, into the rarefied world of non-things. A world that, in today’s collective imagination, takes on the form of phantasmagorization. Because, although things in that dreamy world lose their materiality, the resulting non-things are still lived as simulacra of things. Or rather: as if they were bodies without bodies. Ghosts of bodies. Ghosts of things.

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So Natural! curated by Like A Little Disaster, installation view

So Natural!

So Natural!

Gioia Di Girolamo, Andreas Ervik, Adham Faramawy, Maria Gondek, Julie Grosche, Hannah Regel, David Stjernholm, Struan Teague

Curated by Like A Little Disaster

12 March / 18 April 2017, @Foothold, Polignano a Mare

 photo credits: Ivan Divanto, Alfredo Maiullari, Like A Little Disaster

Contemporary thought is dominated by an unresolved contradiction: the one that opposes the concept of nature to that of culture, and therefore universalism to relativism. In fact, as Barthes observed, “to say that culture is opposed to nature is ambiguous, because we don’t know where their boundaries are”. A confusion caused by the inability to recognize the peculiar features of these two “paradoxical objects”, without contours, antithetical terms and residuals. Yet the human being establishes a relationship with everything that is foreign to him: the mutual hybridization ratios between man, technology and the reference environment has often been ignored by an anthropocentric view that bases everything on the superiority of the thinking being as the only entity that reflects on itself and is aware of being in the world. However, there are different levels of self-awareness and of being, some of which do not belong exclusively to humankind. Creativity, care, communication skills, sense of belonging, orientation, love, territorial defense, nomadism, habits, sense of the community and hierarchy may be found in other mammals (and maybe plants too are endowed with some of the these attributes). The mnemonic properties of minerals such as water are well known, as are the complex, neurological, social and cultural values of the birdsong, or the seduction and imitation games at play among flowers and animals. By following this perspective, the traditional categories separating humans from all the rest make boundaries weaker: the relationship between human and non-human becomes fluid, walking through a circular system of reciprocity. Culture is presented as a zoological opportunity, which man has seized and exercised, but it pre-exists the man himself. In this respect, culture cannot be considered as an antithetical term compared to nature, but as an internal dimension independent from man, which therefore inexorably takes him back as part of nature, beyond any self-proclamation of anthropological exclusivity.
Nature and culture are theoretical objects. This does not mean that their contents and the effects they produce do not exist. What is means is that an earthquake or an art exhibition – which occur in this world and are “naturally” observable – are classified according to culturally-processed categories, which are themselves the results of intellectual choices, albeit unconscious or buried in a cultural past, in linguistic and conceptual traditions. The instrumental reductionism finds fertile ground in the bio-capitalist slime in which we live: it is based on the notion of is based on a notion of “human exceptionalism”, ethnocentric and speciesist and, from here, to the erection of a system founded on the opposition between nature and culture, nature and history, human and machine, male and female, identity and alterity, night and day, body and mind, sense and sensibility. In this game of doubles, each component of the “cognitive couple” is always dominated by its other, repressed and submissive, half.
 “So natural!”, on the other hand, hopes to highlight the divergence of the possible missing meanings, which cannot be explained by any dualistic logic: binary oppositions are considered as a starting point to remove and reaffirm both terms of the binarization within a symmetric relationship with the difference.

No opposition between sense of responsibility and idea of playing / sharing with others and self-awareness / public and private / imagination and economics / aesthetics and politics / ideology and production / science and poetry / algorithms and neural connections / genetic heritage and technological alteration / euphoria and dysphoria / instinct and rationality / mind and body / spirit and matter / reality and virtuality / true and false / organic and inorganic / life and death. “So natural” is an open ground for different practices and poetics, on which experiencing a possible dialectic of complexity, and in which a powerful imagination transforms life experience, personal and collective mythologies, symbols, signs, utopias and dystopias, wants and needs, in a way that takes unexpected or consistently defined forms, where inside and outside, up and down, swap places with each other. Within these formal and mental paths also there is criticism against internalized, acquired and well-established cognitive models; a critical action allowing to radically redefine the rules of any functional system, in order to use the same schemes in a different way, ignoring their original purpose. The works here are not the objectives of a production process, but means and tools to enhance the ability to imagine a space of multifaceted co-evolution, through which searching for the nature in the culture and vice versa, the contingent in the permanent, the identity in the difference, and in which testing new coalitions and alternative routes that may not always take us to faraway places, but may change our point of view, prompting us to consider other possibilities.
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Antonio Trotta, Paquete especial, 1966-2016, steel, plexiglass, 330x145x110 cm

Antonio Trotta. Soltanto il nulla è senza luce

Antonio Trotta. Soltanto il nulla è senza luce

Antonio Trotta

Curated by Like A Little Disaster

1 October / 15 November 2016, @Foothold, Polignano a Mare

Like A Little Disaster is proud to present “Soltanto il nulla è senza luce”, a solo exhibition by Italian-Argentinian artist Antonio Trotta, a leading exponent of international art in the last fifty years. Trotta is a versatile artist who has been researching, conceiving and building a coherent language that has always been pioneering, often lonely but always free from outer constraints, since the end of the sixties. A language that belongs to a mental universe that cannot be imprisoned by closed or binding categories. His modus operandi has expanded the boundaries of countless fields of research; performance, video, words, photography, environmental installations, sculpture. His practice has touched, never fallen for, many currents and attitudes of contemporary art; from modernist avant-garde to spatialism, from conceptual to minimalism, from postmodernism to environmental art.
The exhibition is food for thought on his artistic path through some topic moments, especially those linked to his interest in light as a medium, a phenomenon and a concept. It is seen by Trotta as an entity in which the revealing power of thought clearly emerges, in relation to the contingency and transcendent features inherent to the Being. Revealing light that leads us beyond what we see.
Through an oxymoron we could say that, with Trotta’s works, light becomes pure and “tangible” abstraction, it presents itself both as a medium and as content at the same time, as a perfect balance between presentation and representation of the self.

Works on display:
Paquete especial, 1966-2016. The work was exhibited only at the Castagnino Gallery of Buenos Aires in 1967. It has been reproduced for this occasion and presented for the first time in Europe. The work is characterized by a certain interest for minimalist geometry and the use of materials derived from the industrial and the building worlds, which allow it to give birth to modular works, perfectly adaptable to any environment and any type of installation. Paquete especial is a sculpture made up of an aluminum tubular wrapping around a light beam formed by a group of plexiglas tubes, a material used for its innovative bright immateriality, for its shapeable inexistence and materialized light. Paquete especial is a work which, as Jorge Glusberg writes, “(…) allows the viewer to participate in a new way, by choosing himself the messages that he can receive. Observing a classical work reflects total subordination to an authoritarian and absolute order (which can be identified both in the position and in the ideals of the maker). The contemporary vision introduces a form of communion between the audience and the artist, which is completely different from tradition. The new work of art creates a different dimension to aesthetic enjoyment; it is not placed before the public: it embraces it, it forces it to participate, in a conscious rapture, in a new form of social coexistence and intellectual discipline”. Paquete especial interacts and shares the same space with a series of recent works: Sospiri 1999-2016, in which marble seems to turn into leaves shaken by the wind, or, as Lea Vergine cleverly observes, “the traditional is overturned (…) the Sospiri emulate movement, agility, almost to the point of a trompe l’oeil; they are a hocus-pocus, a trick, an eighteenth-century tour de force. (…) Trotta shifts the weight of the material to a miraculous lightness. But the parody (the world upside down) and the paradox (the absurd, the inconceivable) give, in him, results that, inspired by a sort of classicism, seem enigmatic, never fathomable through and through”.
The Sospiri are “marmoreal sequences” set like paintings: each piece is different and it stands out for the movement and the light which the sculptor expresses and impresses on the material. Despite their total aesthetic autonomy, both “Paquete especial” and “Sospiri” are animated by a common inspirational force. In both works, light is not reality but rather a state of mind through which to investigate the limits between visibility and illusion, as well as the tangibility and intangibility of an element, that subvert the spatial representation of the works.
The presence of light enables us to see, makes our vision possible; in the same way, ideas are understood while we think, because they make our thoughts possible. And just as the action of seeing is indistinguishable from the objects of visions, the action of thinking is indistinguishable from the concepts thought.
Another work especially re-edited for the exhibition is Schema 8: Accoppiamento (1968 – 2016), presented only at the 34th Venice Biennale in 1968. Its conception and realization were carried out during the period that Trotta chose to spend in Rome in preparation for the Biennial. It is the night photography reproduction of a Roman gallery from which, in the real space of the exhibition, a series of neon tubes illuminating the image radiate. The work, as Germano Celant promptly remarks, “(…) tries to approach the observer, not to alienate him/her. It is placed directly in contact with the subject-viewer, involving him/her spatially, generating an unexpected feeling of eliminating the limit between the real and the unreal”.
In this double game of perspectives and visions, experience is simultaneously objective and subjective, material and immaterial, real and unreal, with a level of ambiguity that makes the viewer participate without any rational or individual definition.
With “Finestra su vetro“, 1972 (light boxes, emulsion on glass, 80 x 80 x 12 cm, in collaboration with the architect Giorgio Tagini) Antonio Trotta creates a tautological short circuit that depends on the concurrence of the displayed material (the glass) and the material used as support. This photograph, blended on emulsion on glass, depicts the artist’s studio in Milan. When switched off, the lamp looks like a real window “at nighttime”. When switched on, it looks like a window “during the daytime”. Not only ideas precede actions, but somehow the work seems to contain itself: the real object corresponds to an ideal and pre-existing object. Colonna di Luce, 1972 (Engraved marble, light, 40 x 40 cm. In collaboration with the architect Giorgio Tagini) is one Trotta’s first attempts at marble-working. It is a carved cube of marble illuminated from within: when lit it shows the base of a Greek column broken up into its orthogonal projections. When switched off it returns to be simply the geometrical materiality of a marble cube. Light encompasses the fabric of the origins and of history, following a time circle that, as Borges said, sees the past as an eternal return that is part of the present. Still on the concept of light is Lampada sferica, 1962/72 (Plexiglass, light. 40 x 40 cm). It is a cube of light from which a self-illuminating section is detached. Trotta’s fascination for geometric minimalism makes him to dig in the cube, to see what is inside. Dividing up, dissecting the cube form so as to explore countless aesthetic and conceptual intentions. The aesthetic pleasure of seeing a separate light, a light divided into two parts; the light source, which we are normally used to identifying in its single emission, presents itself as a parceled out solid form that can be, mentally, reassembled.
Libro letto nel 1970 (1970, 23 x 15 x 3 cm.) is a transparent perspex plate printed with the cover of a book: “Carme presunto” by Borges, which, once read, becomes transparent and bright, as does Borges literature itself. This process does not dismiss the viewing experience: we are not facing a merely conceptual operation. We are facing a concrete, albeit very ambiguous, presence. “The world and the book reflect each other’s mirrored images eternally and infinitely. The subtle power of the glare, this sparkling and unlimited multiplier that is the labyrinth of light, is not nothing: it will be all we can find spiraling down at the end of our desire to understand”.

Biography:
Paestum, 1937 – Milan 2019. He moved to Argentina in the mid-fifties and in 1960 is among the promoters of the SI group. He begins to showcase his work at the Museo de Arte Moderno and the Institute Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, and in 1968 he is invited to represent the Argentine Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. From late 1969 until 1973, Trotta collaborates with Nizzoli Associati, with “total design” operations involving architects, graphic designers, artists and critics working as a team and setting up architectural and city planning projects in Italy and abroad (Taranto, Cremona, Seville, etc.). He also produces some covers for “L’Architettura. Cronache e storie” magazine directed by Bruno Zevi. He has had solo exhibitions at François Lambert Gallery, Milan (1970), Galleria Christian Stein, Turin (1971, 1977), Galleria Marilena Bonomo, Bari (1972), Galleria Maddalena Carioni, Milan (1972), Galleria Toselli, Milan (1975), Galleria Borgogna, Milan (1976), Studio Cesare Manzo, Pescara (1983), Galleria Artra, Milan (1986, 1999), Galleria Piero Cavellini, Milan (1987), Galleria Cardi, Milan (1990), at Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana in Buenos Aires (1995), Galleria Omphalos, Terlizzi (1998, 2008), Gallera Invernizzi, Milan (1999)-
He particpated in several important group exhibitions at: the Venice Biennale (1976, 1978, 1990), the Instititute for Contemporary Art, London (1974), the Internationaal Cultureen Centrum Antwerpen (1975), National Museum, Osaka (1979), Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome (1980), PAC, Milan (1982, 1988, 1989), Biennale de Lyon (1984), Galleria Martano, Turin (1984), Dragan European Foundation, Milan (1986), Galleria Bianca Pilat, Milan and Galleria Oddi Baglioni, Rome (1990), Modern Art Gallery of Udine (1997), Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires (2007), Modern art Gallery, Palazzo Forti, Verona (2007), Palazzo della Triennale, Milan (2009), Pomodoro Foundation, Milan (2010), Fundación PROA, Buenos Aires (1998, 2011) MAMBA Museum, Buenos Aires (2015, 2016), Bocconi Art Gallery, Bocconi University, Milan (2015).
In 2007 he attended the opening of the Stio Antonio Trotta Museum and Archive. He is a member of the National Academy of San Luca, a historic Rome-based artists association founded in 1577, since 2009.

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Antonio Trotta. Un maestro della scultura a Polignano

Futuro remoto. La scultura di Antonio Trotta

Fabienne Hess, Madame X, 2016, stampa digitale su seta, 125x170cm

Latent surfaces

Latent surfaces

Virginia Francia, Fabienne Hess, Yuichiro Kikuma, Minhong Pyo, Tenant of Culture

Curated by Like A Little Disaster

22 August / 10 September 2016, @Foothold, Polignano a Mare

“Latent surfaces” is a group show presenting new works by: Virginia Francia, Fabienne Hess, Yuichiro Kikuma, Minhong Pyo and Tenant of Culture.

As Hegel writes, “there is nothing deeper than what appears on the surface.” Between inside and outside occurs a clandestine exchange, that through a mysterious dialectic manages to become clear.

Human beings are a collection of different surfaces. We are “surfaces” characterized by different relations, qualities, contexts and situations. We define the world and, in it, our space and our time.

Thinking about life as a surface rather than a depth, as a multidirectional horizon without transcendence: an infinite, porous and connective immanence.

We stopped courageously at the surface of the world or we have become the surfaces we imagined?

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Mikko Kuorinki, Hit me in the nose so I can become someone else, 2016, mayonnaise, plastic tube, fixing clip

Seminal bricolage (first attempt)

Seminal bricolage (first attempt)

Agnes Calf, Dorota Gaweda & Egle Kulbokaite, Mikko Kuorinki, Erik Larsson, Nicola Lorini, Martina Gold, Tabita Rezaire, Freddy Tuppen

Curated by Like A Little Disaster

10 July / 8 August 2016, @Foothold, Polignano a Mare

In his book ‘The Savage Mind’, the french anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss uses the term bricolage in opposition to the analytical methods of western thought. The term refers to an associative practice experienced by many non-western societies, wherein solutions are invented following paths made of fortuitous, unstable and contingent discoveries.Bricolage constructs multi-directional theories by arranging and rearranging, negotiating and renegotiating heteroclite materials and information, leading to the discovery of new functions and meanings, and original forms of knowledge by crossing strategies of production. Bricolage focuses on the pleasures of a conversation, rather than a monologue. It has a fragile nature that rejects persistence, it is elastic and always in the process of becoming. It is characterized by a perpetual revision, through forms which are built and rebuilt, and where unexpected links pick up new and different meanings through seemingly related fragments.

The term is commonly used in connection with extemporaneous and amateurish manual activities. ‘Seminal Bricolage’ aims to explore the dynamics of bricolage as a mental exercise, as critical language, and in relation to the mythopoeic. The work brought together in this project is the worm in the fruit of a reality considered to be unlimited and arbitrary, as nothing but a collection of fragments.
Sidestepping preset rules, the artists of “Seminal bricolage” play with simulated platforms, actively manipulating microworlds of transition between subject and object, and the intermediate dimensions between the real and the potential. Avoiding merely being a bricolage of materials, they are drawn to the ideas embodied in the fluidity of their materials. This hybridized materiality invades their works, blurring its own meaning in a haze of scents, projections, plastic hoses, mayonnaise, earplugs, vaporized kombucha, the history of twerk, a website, a postgender avatar, a hypersexual performances, identity collages, embroidered bath towels, pairs of slippers and an empty can at the mercy of the winds.
‘Seminal Bricolage’ is particularly focused on the use of objects, materials and signs for their perceived cultural and political value, or as a syncretism of references that begin to complicate each other by their proximity. The works are conditioned, both explicitly and implicitly, by complex intersections of class, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. These correlations become a filter of sorts, reconfiguring the connections we have with the world, our environment, our community, with reality, and above all with our very idea of alterity. Bricolage is the cornerstone of all natural and cultural systems, from the evolution of the species to DNA’s composition, from the organization of thought to developments in knowledge and linguistic constructs, to the making of art. The human mind itself can be considered as the result of these types of accumulations. Bricolage is everywhere!

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AQNB

Rashid Uri, Untitled (13), 2015, grey polystyrene, soundproof on stretcher, 140×180 cm

Difference and Repetition

Difference and Repetition

Lia Cecchin, Kitty Clark, Andrew Gillespie, Zeinab Haji, Emily Jones, Isamit Morales, Imran Perretta, Caterina Rossato, Francesco Sollazzo, Rashid Uri, Simone Zaccagnini

Curated by Like A Little Disaster

12 March / 10 April 2016, @Foothold, Polignano a Mare, Italy

Difference and Repetition attempts to create a grid of connections between the searches of a team of artists who, through very different languages and poetics, implement an aesthetic operation of replacement, giving new perspectives to what already exists. Appropriation, alteration and rethink objects, elements and forms of phenomenal reality marks their action and through these steps, allowing us to think reality as a game of differences, while we normally think of it in terms of similarity, analogy, identity.
Their practice investigates the possibilities of giving new purpose to everyday life elements, removing them intentionally from the dominion of automatic perception and making them abstract in order to place those elements and their relationships, uses, connotations on show.

Through dissociation of objects and concepts, the artifice of the works on show makes the perception slow and permanent, generating a strange contradiction because the same concepts and objects are fragmented or separated from their mechanical use, in order to support a closer and lasting gaze. Like paradoxes, the artist’s interventions have the unique ability to amplify contradictions, speaking out through their confusion, so that the viewer must pause and think about what might be their connections and developments. What “confuses” in the exhibition’s works is that they present us a comment through the attribution of new intentions, offering at the same time a branch of sensations allowing various interpretation cause they activate a chain reaction of reflections.

These premises implicate complex issues such as the relation between copy and original, seen and interpreted by the artists as mutually constitutive of the thing and its double, the thing and the shadow. Through a continuous process of calling into question the logic of representation the artists suggest repetitions, “doubles”, estranged objects and subjects that host multiple realities within them or fall apart, disconnected and become whole. This process alters in countless ways the logic of the original and the copy, so as to deny any rulling image of thought and to emancipate it from the enslavement to any form-default image.