AZZURRA DE GREGORIO SELECTED ARTIST FOR MEDITERRANEA 17
MEDITERRANEA 17 NO FOOD’S LAND YOUNG ARTISTS BIENNALE 22 OCT – 22 NOV 2015
THE CONCEPT OF MEDITERRANEA 17 IS “NO FOOD’S LAND”
No Food’s Land: questo mostro che ci divora i sensi (Amleto IV, III)
That monster, who all sense doth eat (Hamlet, IV, III)
If the contemporary artist is omnivorous by definition, the voracity with which the cultural materials are collected, elaborated and recombined, refers to a comparison between this kind of practice and a contemporary version of the “science of the Concrete”, by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. It is an ephemeral boarder between science and “mythical thought”, considering this last one similar to an handicraft activity that generates a new cultural artefact, combining meanings and concrete signs, flashing within the intuitive cultural field of the author. An open system that is not self-significant but that, in its incompleteness, grow beyond himself, breaking its own limits, approaching to the assimilation of data, which is the 2.0 era, where nothing exists outside the omnivorous, all-consuming, database. This raises a crucial reflection: in this perspective, is the artist a creator of a critical construction or is he conformed to the information mainstream, turning himself into a lyophilised product ready to be consumed? In addition to this different meaning, the artistic practice, which is a temporal and a transformation process, can be considered similar to the corporal assimilation of food, that turns into nutriment.
The artist passes from the abstract idea to its real and concrete realisation, thus provoking a change of energetic grade, where even the dross becomes an important data as the product of this metaphorical digestion.
The substance transformation is much more important than a finished and static object, therefore forms of art in the making, even potential, contingent, opened to reconfiguration according to an almost organic orientation, are desirable. A sort of “Theory of heat”, quoting Joseph Beuys, that explicit the gateway from raw energy to a significant form, a process that has its roots in the combustion, assimilation, process like alchemy, in a constant balance of powers in dialectical tension. The structural connotations of the artwork are therefore based on metamorphic instances, where the preminent processes are chemical reactions, fermentations, color changes, decomposition, drying of the material, for an image conformation that is permanently unstable.
Concept by Andrea Bruciati
http://mediterraneabiennial.org/17-no-foods-land/artists/
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