Pinksummer goes to Palermo

 

Press release

“Palermo at that moment was passing through one of his intermittent periods of social gaiety; there were balls everywhere. After the coming of the Piedmontese, after the Aspromonte affair, now that specters of violence and spoliation had fled, the few hundred people who made up ‘the world’ never tired of meeting each other, always the same ones, to exchange congratulations on still existing.”
At the risk of being banal, we could not have missed the occasion to begin the press release that announces pinkusmmer pop-up time in Palermo, called for sake of coherency Pinksummer goes to Palermo, with a citation from ” The Leopard”, one of the novels we have loved the most, that we feel is suitable here. Obviously, we do not expect the ladys’ dresses coming all the way from Naples, nor even the bustle of milliners, hairdresser and shoemakers, rather we wish that this city, defined temptress and cosmopolitan, that we always imagine being the capital of Sicily before realizing it is the county seat of an Italian region – dream landing place of many souls that, from the bottom of the sea, would be eager to exchange congratulations on still existing, and fictional or imaginary nightmare of the Europeans – will give a diversely coherent imprint to Manifesta’s nomadism and hopefully to the dialogue between art and society.
On the other hand, in his Borges and The Memory the neuroscientist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga affirms that we have inside the brain a group of neurons held in the hippocampus, located in the temporal lobe, that get active only when facing the images of celebrities or particularly meaningful places, such as the map of Italy to which we add the one of Sicily.
Basically, we felt like sneaking into Palermo:
1) to run away from “our” Genoa sometimes, that, at the moment, if different moments ever existed apart from the wonderful Baroque period of Rubens, Van Dyck and of their local followers, is definitely not watering the seeds of any contemporary iconic turn from the political-administrative point of view.
2) Pinksummer goes to Palermo happens thanks to our friend the curator Paolo Falcone, his consort Olimpia Cavriani, Anna Maria and Roberta Falcone who have granted us the space, or more precisely the spaces, of Via Patania 25/27 from Spring to Autumn. The fellowship between the Falcone and pinksummer is a collaboration that by now has a history: the support given across the years by Paolo Falcone, his family, the Sambuca Foundation, with Marco and Rossella Giammona, to the artists we represent for the production of their artworks for the Venice Biennale. A friendship that let special flowers blossom, such as Galaxies Forming Along Filaments, Like Droplets Along the Strands of to Spider’s Web by Tomás Saraceno in 2009 at the exhibition Fare Mondi curated by Daniel Birnbaum; Mariana Castillo Deball’s artwork El donde estoy The goes desapareciendo/to where the am is vanishing presented at the exhibition Illuminazioni curated by Beatrice Curiger in 2011; Luca Vitone’s olfactive sculpture Per l’Eternità presented at the Padiglione Italia within the exhibition Viceversa curated in 2013 by Bartolomeo Pietromarchi; Michael Beutler’s work Shipyard for the exhibition Viva Arte Viva curated by Christine Marcel in 2017.
The blueprint of Via Patania’s space, an awkward maze made from 9 little rooms, former storage and offices, and the magic air of Palermo with its weird sundial in form of a dodecahedron built by the mathematician Lorenzo Federici at Villa Giulia, suggested us the idea of arbitrary transform the invitation card for the exhibition called Pictorial Goose Turn into a goose game board. As a matter of fact, pinksummer goes to Palermo will open on May 24th with a single exhibition, that will last until October, a group show hosting 4 little solo shows displaying the projects purposely conceived by the artists for those specific little rooms. The solo show of Peter Fend titled Costa Verso Costa, Koo Jeong A’s Tengam, Invernomuto’s Med T-1000 and Sancho Silva’s one (he did not tell us the title yet, but we would like it to be XKX, like the only mysterious not random contender of the game of the goose of the United States in Le testament d’un exentrique by Jules Verne) will be the spaces of a track composed by the artworks, most of them never showed before, by Michael Beutler, Mariana Castillo Deball, Plamen Dejanoff, Amy O’Neill, Tobias Putrih, Tomás Saraceno, Bojan Šarčević, Georgina Starr, Luca Trevisani, Cesare Viel, Luca Vitone and Stefania Galegati, whose nearest Caffè Internazionale ( that by now has a rich history in Palermo), will represent a displaced space of the exhibition for the projection of Escape Artists by Guy Ben-Ner.
Even our verbal description of the gallery group show starts feeling like some sort of goose game, which by the way we found out being a very old game of position, inherited from ancient Egypt, but most likely invented in Troy. It is a right-handed spin track, that is said disguising the initiatic path towards knowledge, somebody wrote that it is supposed to be the popular version of the alchemic opus magnum, leading the initiate from the darkness to the light, to the rebirth. In the center of our goose game in form of invitation card we set the Chestnut tree of the 100 horses, one of the oldest trees in the world, born in Sicily between 2000 and 4000 years ago.
Being the exhibition a group show of artists working with pinksummer, this press release does not have and shouldn’t have any exegetic value in itself, especially since, because of the limited space and our personal choice, we are not used to set up group shows in Genoa. Such a freedom allows us to be totally counter-clockwise in this short text and to embrace in toto the backward-in-time casualty of the retrocausal wave for Pictorial Goose Turn. The law of the finality coming from the future, rather than the logic of causality coming from the delayed wave of the past. Thus we focus on the anticipating potential that images have always had in respect of the upcoming history. Absurdly hoping that images/pictures could have again, or more, a propitiatory value similar to the one of the snake ritual, which Aby Warburg witnessed among New Mexico natives: some sort of presentation of strange and complex anticipative solutions, propelled by a goal existing already there in the future.
After all, humans began using pictures as a form of mimetic magic, in order to activate those meaningful coincidences through some non-random links, that were discussed in depth by Leibniz and called synchronicity by Jung. As if art could really be an interlace of chthonian and uranian elements: matter/chance and antimatter/purpose, that by annihilating themselves would turn into a super-causal paradigm in order to produce the clean energy needed for the change towards the complexity, the differentiation and life against the leveling, the homologation and death. On the other hand, progress was always born from counter-intuition in which images/pictures haven’t had a minor role, rather positive than negative, assuming that they exist as particles of opposite sign in the world. Finally, we would want the works presented in this exhibition to be political, as political as the artists that we represent can diversely be, as political as the Jung patient who, in a situation of crisis, dreamt of a scarab and, while he was telling Jung about his dream, a real scarab landed on the window pane of the room where they were sitting.