Auto Sacramental
February 28–April 12, 2018
On February 28, FuturDome introduces the most complete survey on the oeuvre of Guido van der Werve (1977, Papendrecht, The Netherlands), a monographic exhibition boasting 20 different works, realized from 2001 to 2018.
As unfinished building and independent museum, FuturDome turns its spaces into a natal homing environment for the Dutch artist. The exhibition includes his most representative endurance narratives and it’s becoming a paradoxical, extreme domestic stage for an unedited performance, during miart fair week (April 9). The performance title is: Nummer achttien, The Things That Lie Behind Us. Third movement, menuet funebre, and it’ll be accompanied by the Orchestra Filarmonica dei Navigli.
Guido van der Werve’s retrospective, titled Auto Sacramental (from the Spanish “auto,” act or ordinance and “sacramental,” pertaining to a sacrament) evokes the one-act devotional play produced in Spain, from the sixteenth until late eighteenth century. This theatrical genre is defined as a dramatic, cyclical and strictly-outdoor representation of the mystery of human faith, in a double embodiment: in the incarnation of divinity as a man and in the miracle of transubstantiation.
An auto sacramental glorified not a past event, but an ever-present miracle, where a cradle and a grave are permanently displayed as a memento among life’s polarities. But Guido van der Werve acquires and overturns all of this stylistic elements giving a new critical meaning to the genre.
Starting from three of his first films, like The Walking Pigeon (2001), Suicide no 8945 till 8948 (2001) and Nummer Twee, Just Because I’m Standing Here Doesn’t Mean I Want To (2003)—all his works are numbered in Dutch and subtitled in English—the material stage, as well as the highly codified landscapes that gives viewers pertinent information on apparently-doomed accidents, contributes to the viewer’s understanding of what might conceivably transpire there.
Each scenario, as in Nummer Acht, Everything Is Going to Be Alright (2007), requires us to wrestle with the social and the physiological construction of bodies, through annihilating contexts, asking the spectator to pay attention to visual and music details, concerning the attributes of the characters. Formulaic structures that predispose ritual evidences, as in Nummer Negen, The Day I Didn’t Turn With the World (2007) and yet allow for reversal, parody, and change, as in Nummer veertien, Home (2012), show the Guido van der Werve’s capacity to transform us into participants, spectators, or witnesses, needing to be there, as nowhere-parts in the act of transfer. In FuturDome, scenarios conjure up past situations, at times so profoundly internalized by a society that no one remembers the precedence.
Building on his training in music as well as topics ranging from archaeology and industrial design to Russian literature and chess strategy, van der Werve will find home for a selected series of films, all titled with numbers and based on the traditional naming convention for musical opuses.
By Auto Sacramental, FuturDome keeps on becoming, increasingly, an housing museum, cultivating emerging international talent and offering a home to pioneering thinkers of new expressive languages. A territory, where contemporary arts and disciplines become an integral part of daily life, with the aim to engage unpublished projects in direct contact with a historical domestic atmosphere. Once, this Liberty House was the meeting place of world renowned artists who were part of the Futurist Movement. During the Forties, the last Futurist artists met, worked and debated in the building assigning the Italian avantgarde to a new future.
Curated by: Atto Belloli Ardessi and Ginevra Bria
Media and institutional relations: Maddalena Bonicelli
maddalena.bonicelli [at] gmail.com / T +39 335 685.7707
For special visiting tours and more information please contact: futurdome [at] futurdome.org / T +39 392 7900 203
