Title: Corpi Estranei
Type: cross-media site-specific performance
Technique: mixed media (chalk, photo collage, markers, sounds, voices, tuner)
Year: 2019
Corpi Estranei was a performance in which I addressed the issue of immigration and racism. Everyday life leads us to look beyond our horizons; in an increasingly overpopulated world, where economic wealth is concentrated only in a few places, it becomes impossible not to think about inequality. I wished to address these issues and to reflect on the faults of our contemporary society.
In the past I elaborated in an allegorical way the theme of the alien and the different, of the mutations resulting from the drift of contemporary society through different expressive languages ranging from photography to installation, to cinema. With Corpi Estranei I arrived at the performative event, exploring and deepening on the one hand social instances, which are always present in my path, and on the other developing a dimension of performance, also present in all my works, withouth being mediated through the use of photography. The diachronic exhibition becomes synchronic: hic et nunc.
In this work I dealt with themes of pressing topicality, which first of all require a path aimed at awareness. An awareness that could only be achieved through a deep analysis of the emotions that this reality aroused. Emotions that were at times intrusive, disorienting: they were the real foreign bodies with which to deal.
In the environment #1 of the Macro Asylum there was, we can say, the representation of my inner space: a table placed in the middle of the room on which I shaped thoughts and emotions on paper towels made through the technique of collage - a technique I have explored for a long time - which included texts and images taken from magazines and newspapers that I had accumulated over time. I intervened on these large sheets of paper using coloured chalks, reinterpreting and modifying the numerous visual and textual suggestions, merging the images with new figures of tribal descent that I wanted to create using dissonant colours with a strong symbolic-expressive value.
This first performative moment was flanked by the direct testimonies of the migrants, sounds that were activated by the passage of the visitors and voices that recalled the lands of origin, nostalgia, the journey, the suffering, the experience of welcoming, the feeling of estrangement, dreams, pains. To these were added, as a counterbalance, the declarations of those affected by "mixtophobia", of those who, terrified by the harsh realities from which migrants fled, feared to be infected, to lose the few and precarious privileges, and so rejected them a priori, based on ancestral prejudices and fears.
Once completed, each board that I drew was placed along the walls of the room in a long storyboard in continuous evolution that was an extension of my inner space, from where everything started.
The narrative, the message, always need a recipient able to stratify the sense of the narrative itself through interpretation. The artist traced the path, guides towards discovery, but it was the visitor who ultimately borrowed the path of his or her own awareness. This is why each visitor could intervene in turn on the storyboard adding his or her own contributions, a comment, an emotion, according to a concept of the work of art that was not only given to the viewer in the creative act but became in fact fluid, in perennial mutation. The viewer in this way was induced to get out of the indifference, the apathy imposed by media overexposure and to move into action, creating a polyphony, also visual, of different experiences and points of view. An inclusive artistic experiment of comparison that, we can say, was already in itself a concrete example of synthesis with otherness.