Eppur si muove [And yet it moves]
September 18–October 18, 2009
Palazzo Ducale,
Piazza Matteotti, 9.
Genova, Italy
info [at] fondsrr.org
Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and Fondazione Edoardo Garrone present Eppur si muove (And yet it moves) from 18 September to 18 October at the Palazzo Ducale in Genova. The exhibition comprises works by Rosa Barba, Emanuele Becheri, Eva Cenghiaro, Rä di Martino, Patrizio di Massimo, Caterina Nelli, Giulia Piscitelli, Moira Ricci, Davide Savorani and Elisa Strinna.
Eppur si muove [And yet it moves] is curated by Inti Guerrero (Colombia/the Netherlands), Julia Kläring (Austria) and Pieternel Vermoortel (Belgium/UK), fellows of the third edition of the curatorial residency of Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and Fondazione Edoardo Garrone coordinated by Ilaria Bonacosa (Italy)
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In Le Mépris (1963), French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard sets silent movie director Fritz Lang on the roof-terrace of the modernist Villa Malaparte in Capri shooting The Odyssey. The final shot pictures Odysseus facing endless waters as an invitation for the viewer to project his/her own narratives upon the void between past and present.
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In 1908, on the Mediterranean island of Capri, the exiled Russian writer Aleksei Maksimovich – better known as Maxim Gorky – was planning his Capri School. Far from the epicentre and ideals of Lenin’s Bolshevism, the School saw myth and religion fulfilling a central role in the revolution. It was then, during the summer of the following year, that eight Russian workers arrived to take part as students in Gorky’s peculiar utopia.
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At the SISMOS center of the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia in Rome, Italian artist Elisa Strinna found a seismographic recording of the Messina earthquake of 1908. This scientific data collected during the movement of faulting tectonic plates in the Mediterranean, is an excerpt from a registration of one hundred years of Natural History. Through a musical translation, Strinna recalls the archival strata.
*The true method for making things present is to place them in our space (and not us in theirs). That is why only anecdotes have the power to move us. We don’t displace our beings into theirs: they step into our life. [Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, conceived in 1927 – unfinished].
It seems as though when artists deal with data, documents or moments from collective or personal histories, their ways of relaying them, acting upon them or even modifying them, are close to Benjamin’s aforementioned potential of the anecdote and its retreat from messianic historicism. In this exhibition the anecdote does not depend on the viewer’s empathy with the story told, but allows the event to be seen through diverse simultaneous temporalities.
