2023-04-24 17:12:27
Time.news – Freud wrote that the opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real. Consequently the opposite of the real is the game: something like “Ceci n’est pas una pipe” by Magritte or the Priory of Sion. In short, a kind of Truman Show. Which is much more than fake, being above all a joke. A game in fact: based on a technique of disillusionment which is the source of disinformation and which the French situationists called “de’tournement” in the post-war period. If then the game also makes use of elements such as the arcane and the cryptic, very singular results are achieved such as the one that smiled in 1981 at Luigi Serafini, author of a Codex, called “Seraphinanus”, made up of indecipherable illustrations and illegible texts, pure unconventional signs for a new alphabet and an original gallery, more art than literature despite being a book, which tells the story of the unexperienced and also violates Murphy’s Law. An experience that follows up on these suggestions is the one promoted in Palermo by the Palermitan Ark of Exhibits Eliana Urbano Raimondi, curator of exhibitions and writer, and the Roman Ivan Cenzi, scholar of anthropology and cinematographywho have set up an exhibition, “Inventarium”, open until May 6 in the headquarters of the association and perhaps not by chance inaugurated on April 1 (the day of the joke) with a streaming connection with Serafini, who explained the idea to create new worlds, unknowable and imagined, yet so plausible in the dream sphere and pure imagination.
“Inventarium” is inspired by another parallel idea, that of the “fantastic gnosis” as it is called in the exhibition, where “gnosis” does not imply proto-Christian regurgitations but responds to the proper meaning of knowledge, nonetheless and oxymorically fantastic, non-existent. The game is actually more subtle and refined because it has a sense of mystification: the works with their captions are placed on a scientific level but it is only a question of dissimulation. Eliana Urbano Raimondi tells Time.news: “Our project is proposed as a tribute to the ‘Codex seraphinanus’ and in the wake of that surreal encyclopedia we asked thirty-one international artists – many Italians, but also French, Spanish, Japanese, a Russian, an Armenian – to combine their operates a neologism that was linked to a scientific-poetic definition and constituted an encyclopedic lemma. For example, in ‘Domofobia’ Luca Cecioni illustrates, in a canvas where a person is sitting in front of an off television in a bare room, the fear of domestic spaces that leads to taking refuge in anonymous and squalid motels”. The term does not exist nor is it note the psychiatric syndrome. Hence the motif of the fantastic gnosis which opens up to knowledge of an invented world through a formally structured but substantially false pseudo-scientific definition to which the work of art serves as an illustration as in an encyclopaedia. of psychic deviation that of Gaetano Costa who in “Tronofobia” describes the fear of fulfilling one’s apical responsibilities by reducing oneself to infantile and puerile attitudes.
But wit in the Inventarium (repertoire of ideas and inventions) is exercised in the broader field of pure imagination. Piero Schirinzi gave birth to a cross between a swan and a greyhound, calling it “Ciniero” and offering a historical profile of the rare example of a dog that lived in the classical age on the edge of a canal where over time the two species merged and cohabited. The bestiary boasts other fabulous animals, such as the eagle of Gallia Nerbonensis, endowed with super sensory powers, or the Pantoctopus of Mikaelian Corvengi, a black panther with the tail of an octopus present since ancient times on the Armenian plateau and venerated because it protects population from Turkish attacks. The exhibition is divided into five thematic macro-sections, some of which are in turn articulated: “Death and irony, anatomical whims, sacred and myth”, “Rite, body and melancholia”, “Nature”, “Psychotopia, psychopathologies and hallucinated paraphilias”, ” Playful neoarchetypes, self-referential Eros and Thanatos, War and denunciation”. The works are created with the most diverse techniques, from painting to sculpture, from video performance to installation, and are offered to the visitor’s curiosity to stimulate the critical sense in him while entertaining at the same time also for the effects of a pronounced use of storytelling. “We put the artists – says Eliana Urbano Raimondi – in an awkward position and we ourselves performed a maieutic function. And it was possible to verify a close relationship between the work of art and the written text: those with a richer and more sophisticated creative style then revealed a more refined lexicon, while a fringed painting also betrayed linguistic contaminations”. was born during the pandemic and the first products were uploaded to the association’s website. At the beginning of this year, strengthened by numerous unpublished works, the exhibition was physically set up in Barcelona until 6 March, after which it arrived in Palermo, with some modifications of the selected artists and of the exhibited works “The interest immediately aroused by our project – writes Ivan Cenzi in the Catalog – is partly due to the peculiar context in which it was born. That period of crisis, precisely in by virtue of the fact that we found ourselves orphaned of any comfort, it turned out to be a particularly sacred moment: our invitation to give value to the game in such tragic circumstances was perhaps perceived as a thaumaturgical and apotropaic act”. But although the son of Covid, “Inventarium” remains the result of the Codex of Serafini. With the difference that the book by the Roman artist and architect is an album of works of art made up of texts that are themselves configured as decorative and artistic motifs, while the Palermitan exhibition is constituted as a chamber of wonders where one enters with in hand guides and explanatory cards to experience an ultranean and uchronic dimension. Maybe smiling at the jokes on display.
#game #reality #fantastic #gnosis #Inventarium