Single-channel HD video, sound, 30’50’’ and installation
11 Canon CR2 raw image to JPEG digital image file (5184 × 3456 px)
2 thermosublimation prints on brushed aluminium, 30 x 20 cm
19 Hyperlinks
Set and still-life design by Elena Radice
As the bonds of this generation have been dispersed by powerful rhetorics of culpability, we have been growing up infantilized, indebted, deprived of imagining a future, and eventually accused of being incapable to deal with reality. Neverthless we do have the powers to fabricate compelling antidotes: could it at least be an enchanted materialist storytelling; an apotropaic realist magic to disarm the suicidal embeddedness which belies into our social structures, within and beyond individual understanding and agency.
This is the kind of fabulative sorcery I’ve been trying to materialise through Angelo Azzurro in 2014, when I was invited by artist Georges Jacotey to produce new work for the final show of his internet-based #0000FF, a non commercial gallery operating under the guise of a Facebook fan page.
The exhibition opened on Thursday August 28, 2014 (8pm EEST), a midsummer night’s reparatory dream in which carnivalesque unconscious blends with history, attempting to mend the traumatised genes of EU-culpability: a reader of hyperlinks mainly composed of bits and clips of press lamenting the disintegration of the “Eurozone” alternated with ecstatic testimonies of liberation through raving, eleven postcards of temporary imaginary scenarios dedicated to European-born suicidal thinkers, and a docu-fiction musical made up of found footage, poisoned cocktails and “eurodance.”
Angelo Azzurro has been later exhibited in a number of different arrangements, including a clumsy funereal meta-assemblage photographic set and video installation at the 16th Quadriennale d’arte di Roma (2016), inside “Cyphoria” curated by Domenico Quaranta.
Link to full video: https://vimeo.com/102998927
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