May 11–July 19, 2020
Love Stories – A Sentimental Survey by Francesco Vezzoli is a new project curated by Eva Fabbris and presented on Fondazione Prada Instagram account from May 11, 2020. With this new project, the artist Francesco Vezzoli explores the emotional, psychological and sentimental status of a wide online community through social media language.
In 2004 Vezzoli’s work Comizi di non-amore, commissioned by Fondazione Prada for the exhibition Trilogia della morte, reivented the tradition of documentary and cinéma-vérité, contaminating classics like Comizi d’amore (1965) by Pier Paolo Pasolini and L’amore in Italia (1978) by Luigi Comencini with the television canons of reality shows. With “Love Stories” he takes over Instagram’s communication strategies and, in particular, Instagram stories’ poll function to create a new space of sharing ideas, visions and impressions of love, identity, body, solitude, belonging, diversity, future.
In each story Fondazione Prada’s followers and, more generally, Instagram’s users will be invited to choose between two possible options, to take sides in favour of one of the two proposed statements, to accept the necessarily simplistic binary logic of surveys, to participate in an only apparently easy game.
The survey will include over 50 questions asked by Francesco Vezzoli and associated with images that create visual shocks and interpretative narratives. Each week’s surveys will form a thematic focus freely inspired by an aria from operas by Italian composers such as Vincenzo Bellini, Giacomo Puccini, Gioacchino Rossini and Giuseppe Verdi, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni, in homage to Pasolini, who used this piece as a soundtrack in Comizi d’amore.
At the end of each week polls’ results will be commented by personalities of the worlds of culture, art, journalism and television. By using a text, a video or another creative contribution, each of them will try to decode the answers, to interpret the participants’ moods and emotions, to sketch a partial portrait of a community of people sharing existential conditions such as uncertainty, suspension and desire to restart in this historical moment.
Love Stories defies the ephemeral and instantaneous nature of Instagram transforming it into a virtual place of social investigation, artistic reflection and intellectual provocation.
