THE HOUSE

Jaana-Kristiina Alakoski,
Benni Bosetto, Reilly Davidson, Giulia Essyad, Adham Faramawy, Cleo
Fariselli, Chiara Fumai, Jason Gomez, Ellie Hunter, Uffe Isolotto
,
Gregory Kalliche, Lito Kattou, 
Lucia Leuci
, Aniara Omann,
Catherine Parsonage, REPLICA (Simona Squadrito, Lisa Andreani, Chiara
C. Siravo), Giuliana Rosso, Namsal Siedlecki
, Oda Iselin
Sønderland, Federico Tosi and Bruno Zhu.

Only one person will be allowed
into the space at a time. The exhibition will be experienced in total
isolation. The gallery will have no staff and no physical interaction
is allowed. The exhibition experience is thus transformed: from an
otherwise ordinary social event to a private dimension in which the
vision becomes the space of self-reflection.

Monstrous, abnormal, deformed,
hybrid, supernatural; a sign sent by the gods, an omen – according to
Greek etymology (τέρας); warning (mŏnēre) and demonstration
(monstrāre) of desirable behaviour, in the Latin sense (monstrum),
but also prodigy, an exceptional fact happening and, in a sense,
standing out, as an exception, forcing people to question what is
otherwise ordinary.

In late antiquity and in the
Middle Ages, a monstrosity is no longer a prodigy; it becomes
associated with natural history, leaning towards the fantastic and
ending up, in our time, in the realm of horror and science fiction,
which outline the existence of alien and cyborg life forms. The
history of the word “monster” and of the constellation of
meanings that branches out from it through the succession of
historical eras up to our current era, in which, once its moral
undertone is accepted, we witness the “monsterrification” of
objects, individuals, groups, events. The idea of diversity generally
takes on a self-punishing value; bodies differing from the norm (or
normality), which, by deviating from impossible standards, set up
alternative ways in which corporeality presents itself, thus becoming
a violation of the norm. The prohibition becomes radical because it
is pervasive, crossing the fine line between the inherent antinomy
between a normal and an abnormal, monstrous, grotesque body. This
involves corporeality and physicality in their entirety, in the
present world, in the present era – in which an invisible,
parasitic microorganism becomes a threat to the survival of human
beings and makes any form of bodily interaction illegal, thus
radicalizing the measure of personal space and making the
contamination of such space an unavoidable pretext for punishment.

Body snatchers (The House)
is a super private, perhaps purely speculative and phenomenological
project, which leads the visitor into a bubble which is both familiar
and alien. In a scenario which is at once pre and post human, the
visitor finds him/herself surrounded by numerous, presumably human
(but no one can say for sure, no one can confirm it – if there’s
no one else to ask) bodily presences. Bodies, their representations,
their performances, their transformations, their fragmentations, and,
of course, their absence, piling up. Are these bodies too made up,
too dismembered, and distorted, to be human? Are these fragments too
elusive to be simply skin and flesh? The visitor will be forced to
see themself in other people’s “non-body”, in the trace left
after they cross their boundaries and become distorted, dismembered
and with multiple limbs, like real forms or materials, but improved,
like a disassembled and reassembled collective and personal self. A
restructuring of meaning is permeated by an outstanding pars
destruens, which, in
turn, imposes its own urgency. Looking away is not allowed, nor is
turning away: the other side has the same characteristics and the
same urgency. The possibility of staying uneasy is unwavering since,
perhaps, it is not the bodies on display which are monstrous or in
transformation, but rather it is the visitor’s body itself. The
more we forbid ourselves to conceive of hybrids, the more possible
their interbreeding becomes.

When bodies cross their own
boundaries, or parts are separated from the whole, they become
something disturbingly different. This forces the viewer to
renegotiate the boundaries between the inside and the outside,
between the bodies themselves – fragmented, “distorted” –
and the source of their own anxieties and fears. Thus, the uncanny
reveals its duplicity, just like an object which, while unknown and
maybe unknowable, unintelligible, and therefore deadly, is at the
same time somewhat familiar. The borderline between nature and the
unnatural reveals its fleeting and vague character, giving rise to a
disorienting effect when reading and interpreting what we perceive,
which amounts to a sense of discomfort towards a body which is it not
possible to immediately discern whether it is alive or dead, real or
ghost; a three-dimensional and anthropomorphic body, that is, which
questions the certainties reality’s categories and ambiguously
mixes the opposite concepts of life and death, which are otherwise
necessarily experienced as binary, together.

Body Snatchers (The House)
– to be understood as a single collective work / experience –
lines up together speculations on reality and fiction, on
subjectivation but also on intersubjectivity, hierarchy and becoming,
the encounter with otherness, the relationship (interaction) between
different components / materials / realities and the negotiation
between the private and the public, I and We, I and the Other (and,
if it still exists, the other-body). As in Abel Ferrara’s
homonymous film, it is difficult to state what is real: you or them –
your body or theirs (and again, us or them – our body or theirs)? The
human body embraces and welcomes the non-human, the otherness, within
itself, harboring it and determining a presence / absence of bodies
in the making, evolving or reacting to something new and unexpected,
thus giving rise to a metamorphosis.

Corporeity is seen as stemming
from the relationship between the body and the organic, where the
organism is both a vital component and a structure, both a normal and
a normative organization. The aesthetics rooted in the states of
change and hybridization, of permanent transition, implies a
rethinking of these aporias with a view to an awareness of the
arbitrariness of the purity claim, of the adherence to the rules of
nature aimed at expelling and condemning diversity, of non-conform,
of abnormality accused of anomaly.

According to Gestalt theory, the
ways through which visual perception operates proceed from a sort of
overview that allows grasping the entirety of what is perceived.
Secondly, the original “holistic” approach is transmuted towards
an analytic understanding of the perceived data, operating a sort of
scanning of the single elements that compose it. Since «It
is at the same time true that the world is what
we see
and that, nonetheless, we must learn to see it»,
it is necessary to decline in a perspective sense our gaze on what
surrounds us, learn to relativize, suspend judgment and,
contextually, sharpen the critical sense. The sleep of reason
generates monsters, in the same way that the torpor of emotionality
generates inhumanity.

Body parts and flesh cuts not
always identifiable force the viewer to a visceral encounter with
both familiar and alien objects. A human corpse is not abject in
itself, but the encounter with it can certainly generate aberration.
But also attraction. A recalibration of one’s relationship to the
object involves the body while trying to assess whether the foreign
object is a source of threat or fascination, perhaps both,
co-belonging elements of a toxic soup that engenders seduction and
carnal interest in disgust, dystopian fantasies of voyeurism and
violence, visceral and sculptural allusions, imagined narratives of
bodily invasions; the rampant grotesque, with elastic, deformed or
monstrous bodies. The possibility of metamorphosing one’s own flesh
and image – of permeating its thresholds – is both intoxicating
and anxiogenic.

Body Snatchers
is a boundary creature that wanders between the edges of everything
that is familiar and conventional. It is eager for transformation, an
open mouth that invites us to descend into other worlds, into a space
of new ideas and ethical riddles. A ripe ground for the rooting of
perversions that push the boundaries dismissing the limits of any
legitimacy, freeing narratives dealing with infection and altered
states. Life is a constant change; we are eating the world, the world
is eating us. We are all mortal. We are all human. We are all flesh.
We cannot escape our inclinations nor our flesh and blood, their
decay and putrefaction. The next generation may also evolve into
cyborgs,while still remaining blood, guts and excrement… contagious
and virulent…

Shit and light.

THE CHURCH

Ed Atkins, Petra Cortright,
Julie Grosche, Oliver Laric, Heather Phillipson, Laure Prouvost,
Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca, Jala Wahid.

Only one person will be allowed
into the church at a time. The exhibition will be experienced only in
total isolation. The church will have no staff and no physical
interaction shall be allowed. The exhibition experience is thus
transformed: from a social and mundane event to a private dimension
in which the vision becomes the space of self-reflection.

The projection of each video
shall follow a random playlist following the order of the Canonical
Hours of the Catholic Church; the hours dedicated to communal and
collective prayer.

The videos appear as visions, as
frescoes that come to life on the walls of the church, as candles lit
for a saint or as prayers. The projections work as large mirrors
through which the visitor can compare and reflect himself (as a
comparison, in the absence of any other human presence).

Body Snatchers (The Church)
takes place at a time when the rules of isolation and physical
distancing are in force, a radically self-reflective time in which
the body does not necessarily have to perform or materially manifest
itself to others – if not through or within an immaterial
dimension. The project becomes extra meaningful given the current
situation of social distancing and expansive digital communication.
As the longing for physical contact with all that’s left behind,
excluded from our intimate bubble, is growing, the confrontation with
flat images gets more painful. We just have to caress the screen and
accept the value of the non-material being.

The project is set within a space
intended to host the liturgical assembly, an aisle which commonly
hosts people who believe in the real existence of the body and blood
of Christ, but which now hosts a body forced to believe that the
others, their substance, and their physical presence still actually
exist. The church is also the place where the faithful believe that
the body (the incarnation of the Divine) is resurrected and returned
to life after death; a place of life and death, of passage between
the two, and of their mutual interchange.

In the Gospels, the empty tomb
and the resurrection are one and the same. Women and apostles never
see the resurrection as the reanimation of the dead body. They only
see the absence of the body and the apparitions in a new and
mysterious form, open to interpretations. It is the absence, the
emptiness, the substance of resurrection.

The dreamy, awaited, escaped and
untouchable body becomes the image of a reproduction which meets the
needs of desire. The lost body is really absent, loneliness becomes
the place of its abstract presence. So is abstraction itself nothing
but absence and pain or is it painful absence?

Waiting for others activates the
manipulation of the object of desire, giving it a body, a face, a
character, intentions, words, which almost never correspond to
reality. The object one waits for itself, the mass-centre of this
dynamic, can actually turn out to be nothing more than an imagined
object: what is this body if not the product of imagination? Isn’t it
an unreal, evanescent body you are actually waiting for? Is the
awaited body endowed with its own objectivity or is its image linked,
by its very nature, to the subjectivity of those who think it?

In a place whose very name
indicates the space dedicated to the community, the gatherings of the
faithful and the liturgical assembly, Body
snatchers (The Church)
speculates on the dimension of isolation, transformation,
presence/absence and on passing and crossing physical boundaries, as
well as on the concepts of nostalgia, loneliness, pain and grief.