Expanding upon the terms ‘site-specific’ and ‘site-sensitive,’ which have become somewhat outdated, we should now speak of ‘site-coexistence‘ in contemporary discourse. This entails attempting to create not a confrontation, but a dialogue among multiple existences; a more impactful experience, even if limited to the time and space of the performative event.
The time has come to conceive an artistic action that challenges the dominant current, emphasizing its aesthetic and ethical resources and highlighting a social system that trivializes the body and its vulnerability, relegating them to a mere consumeristic, nostalgic fiction serving a market culture. The research project from 2020 to 2023 focuses on the ‘corpus‘ and ‘vulnus‘, actively repositioning them within the disruptive dynamics to broaden the viewer’s scope of attention.
The exhibition space thus assumes a singularity that transcends its physical dimension, transforming into a mental space beyond common conventions. Take, for instance, ‘contemporary cathedrals of vulnerability’: former prisons, former asylums, former slaughterhouses, former hospitals, former migrant boats – abandoned places in our metropolises where we can discover what lies behind the functional world. These are spaces deliberately chosen to adopt a different perspective on art, where the focus is not only on aesthetics but also on ethics and political implications. This space challenges the viewer, evoking an emotional impact.
This space represents a potential experiential field, a meditative place in its essential bareness, where the viewer is invited to reflect starting from the vibrations of preexisting elements, from the very essence of this unique and unrepeatable space, thus creating a new and deep empathetic connection with the world.
Space, therefore, takes on the meaning of freedom, opposition to conventions, superficiality, and entertainment that degrade and subjugate art. These places are capable of hosting ‘Communicating Artistic Organisms’ positioned at the border between the aesthetic and the lived, enveloped in silence and the patina of decay, becoming custodians of the abstract value of the void between things. In this silence and emptiness, it is possible to hear the background noise, discover, see, and feel the space that opens up between the nodes and connections of our habitual mental network.
Instead of rushing from one fragment to another, from one painting to another in galleries and museums where contemporary art has been confined, here and now, it is possible to allow the mind to relax and immerse itself in the interstitial space that opens up between culture and nature. It is the relationship that is established, more than the form itself, that defines the aesthetics and ethics we experience, turning into a place imbued with meaning, where art has always resided.