Museum for Preventive Imagination: winter 2022

Nicolás Guagnini, Farces and Tirades
February 10–May 22, 2022
REHEARSAL

Remoria
Organized with Valerio Mattioli
February 10–May 22, 2022
With contributions by Akoi 1 and VEGA with Michele Zanotti
With the participation of DOM, Claudio Kulesko, Nicola Lagioia, Annalisa Metta
BIBLIOGRAPHIC OFFICE

Presto!?, Four Musical Procedures
February 10–June 12, 2022
Featuring James Ferraro, Florian Hecker, Chal Ravens, Emir Timur Tokdemir (aka Mechatok)
CHAMBER MUSIC

Goda Budvytytė, touch, colour and fold
February 24–May 22, 2022
With Bernardo José de Souza, ĒTER, Rasa Juškevičiūtė, Ula Sickle
IN-DESIGN

Ciao!

I’m happy to introduce my new exhibitions for the winter season.

With Farces and Tirades (February 10–May 22, 2022) Nicolás Guagnini (Buenos Aires, 1966) presents over 15 years of work, in an exhibition freely based on the dramaturgical structure of the commedia dell’arte. On view in my REHEARSAL section, the works are the “masks,” the exhibition space the stage on which they improvise their “farces and tirades”. Adhering to a simple scenario, the show is organized in two acts in which the works-characters enter and exit, taking turns, changing their positions, relationships and attitudes. Under the viewer’s feet lies the script of this enactment: an installation of sheets of paper, printed with a conversation between the artist and Luca Lo Pinto. The complex social and economic context in which the artist operates, and all the symbols and normative discourses in which he is embroiled, become constituent factors in his work, together with traumatic biographical episodes and questions about desire, the body and masculinity. All these contradictory and neurotic elements mingle, repeat, reflect and cross each other in different media, and thanks to the alternation of irony and subversion—just as in the commedia dell’arte—they explode into dreadful therapeutic laughter.

With Remoria (February 10–May 22, 2022) the story and mythology of the Eternal City beyond its limits, through the suburbs and its outer neighbourhoods, takes shape in my BIBLIOGRAPHIC OFFICE section. Published in 2019 by Valerio Mattioli, the book Remoria takes on an atmospheric role in the material context of the exhibition form. A video by VEGA with Michele Zanotti stands at the centre of the space, like a totem, and reveals the underground and archival materials that allowed the author to trace his narrative. A series of posters featuring Delirious Centocelle, a short essay on the Centocelle neighbourhood of Rome, plaster the walls like frescos in a nave. Escaping the printed page, Mattioli’s words welcome visitors into the experiential landscape of a Rome made of subcultures, rubbish tips and the Grande Raccordo Anulare. The exhibition is complemented by a public programme that brings together Roman philosophers and writers, experts and researchers on architecture, urban planning and history.

Four Musical Procedures (February 10–June 12, 2022) is an exhibition devoted to Presto!?, Milan based experimental record label characterised by a rule-breaking perspective and a keen dialogue with contemporary art and design practices. Established in 2008 by electronic musician Lorenzo Senni, Presto!? has released nearly forty records by artists from across the globe, spanning multiple generations and musical genres as well as challenging the boundaries between creative disciplines. The exhibition unfolds in four consecutive chapters developed as context specific sound installations for my CHAMBER MUSIC listening room, each featuring the work of a different artist from the label: music journalist Chal Ravens, producer Emir Timur Tokdemir also known as Mechatok, artist Florian Hecker and experimental musician James Ferraro. Four Musical Procedures reflects the label’s musical heterogeneity as well as the variety of approaches that contemporary artists engage with in their individual musical practices—from conceptual to gestural and material, to collaborative—in an effort to push the boundaries of a category that can be defined most broadly and simply as audio.

For touch, colour and fold, Goda Budvytytė’s takeover of my IN-DESIGN section (February 24–May 22, 2022), the graphic designer has decided to unravel the process of bookmaking through both visual and haptic perception. By starting from its primary material—paper—and by synaesthetically unfolding its constitutive elements in a spatial and performative dimension, touch, colour and biding emerge as intertwined agencies to mutually affect one another. Each noun in the exhibition’s title corresponds to a specific component of bookmaking: touch stands for paper; colour for ink; fold for binding. These aspects are explored alongside practitioners from different fields and backgrounds: choreographer and dancer Ula Sickle, who will lead a series of participation-driven guided sessions in the exhibition space, photographer Rasa Juškevičiūtė and writer and curator Bernardo José de Souza. At the centre stage, an open-ended book-like structure, conceived in collaboration with architecture practice ĒTER, acts as a maelstrom of sorts, an axis around and through which all contributions create an ever-expanding field of sensorial perception.

Please visit my website for updates, extra content and to explore my current exhibitions—including Cut a Door in the Wolf by Jason Dodge, Autoritratto come Salvo and Chi ha paura di Patrizia Vicinelli.

I’m waiting for you!