Why should not we enjoy an original relation to the universe?

PRESS RELEASE

Pinksummer goes to, after Rome and Palermo, will go in the countryside in the castle of the small medieval village named Senarega, in Valbrevenna, at the feet of Mount Antola, a very dear one for the Genoese. The name derives from the Greek word ἄνθος (antos), which means flower, therefore flowery mountain where a sixteen years old Albert Einstein (Ulma, March 14th, 1879 – Princeton, April 18th 1955), on the street from Pavia to Genoa, spent a night, looking at that mysterious sky for the first time, at the odd orbit drown by Mercury. But then this year, nothing feels more appropriate than a vacation in the countryside, and the following otium, to refresh before eventual travels or holidays, in a future that we can’t redraw yet in a confidential form.
A middle summer show, that will open the Fieschi castle in Senarega at the end of July, that will be over very close to the fall. For the title of the exhibition we got inspiration from Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston, May 25th,1803 – Concord, April 27th, 1882) which says: Why Should Not We Enjoy an Original Relation to the Universe?
Friedrich Nietzsche (Röcken, near Lützen, 1844 – Weimar 1900) himself got inspired by Emerson when he was imagining The Gay Science in Genoa.
An exhibition to think about a time, our time, when we don’t seem interested in looking at a direct relation with nature or God, both collapsed in the myth, but differently from our ancestors we got to see the biopolitics in action with our own eyes.
The network of powers that manages, or better is managing the body discipline and the regulation of the population. To speak with the
words of Michel Foucault (Poitiers, October 15th, 1926 – Paris, June 25th, 1984): an area where power has access to the body to guarantee life. A space where the law has been substituted with the norm, ductile and malleable on the circumstance as molten metal, that guarantee to power a no man’s land of the state of exception, that Giorgio Agamben (Rome, April 22nd, 1942) feels, in the ultra-modernity is becoming, for some reason, a habit. A norm that in the last few months transformed to a worldwide level in a poisoned distilled of pure terrorism, beyond linguistic aberration of indicating a slight spring rain with the word “alert”, followed by the one indicating the color yellow.
Why Should Not We Enjoy an Original Relation to the Universe? will present work of art by eight artists represented by Pinksummer: Koo Jeong A, Peter Fend, Tomás Saraceno, Mark Dion, Luca Vitone, Bojan Šarčević, Cesare Viel, Luca Trevisani. A show with a fragile intent, to claim full life, burning as if it was a straw and rags scarecrow, the nude life. A passage, like those celebrated in the mountains, to chase away the winter with a fire ritual and welcome regeneration.
A ritual exhibition in the steep mountains of a valley in the Ligurian Appennines, to celebrate the right of the individual, young and old, to subjectivity and intersubjectivity, even inter-species, to freedom and the satisfaction of true desires against any science or statistical or sociological discipline that has dragged us defenseless in the wake of a fake and scaring normality in relation to biological activity.
An exhibition sprouted to remind us that something deeply dystopian happened, and that occurred in the frame of pervasive and deviated neoliberalism, perhaps even pathological, that tends to flatten nature in the ecological-environmental echo, making us forget that when nature wants, can be really evil, even with humans, without any exception, composing and dissolving us almost as if we were clouds. Nature that asks our body and intelligence to adapt continuously. Nature that has no equal between beings for its perfidy and its instinct of beauty and we could never race against it on indifference.
A vicious and anti-ecological exhibition, like the closed circle of Giacomo Leopardi (Recanati, June 29th, 1798 – Naples, June 14th, 1837) poetic through, between man’s tedium and heroic titanism, which could, with some disinterested adjustment, stop considering us, humans, as locusts of the planet, or even comparing us to the meteorite falling on the Yucatan, or the giant reptiles, consumers of prehistory.
Human is in fact an exception between all the species, and our reckless humanism we know that even amongst the best beavers that build dams, there isn’t any Galileo Galilei or any Michelangiolo. The show is an invitation to take a break, briefly, from the blatantly neoliberal hygienic and sanitizing framework of bio-politics because, beyond the misanthropic chatter of the gnome or the goblin of the Operette Morali (Moral Operettas), even Giacomo Leopardi recognized that heroism of the human race lies in the awareness. Some works presented in the exhibition are unpublished, fresh from production, others are phantasmal like dreams, all are humanized and humanizing in the most positive sense.

  • On July 30th a talk by Luca Vitone when the artist will talk about the trees in his drawings presented in Senarega is connected with the Polcevera Park project, where he will participate as an artist within the Parco by Studio Boeri.
  • Close to the night of San Lorenzo, on August 8th, the writer Rosa Matteucci will make a reading of the Tarot created by Tomás Saraceno.
  • On August 15th there will be a performance by the collective of artists Mefistofele Documenta.
  • On September 22nd the beekeeper Alberto Pesavento will talk about beehives and indirectly about polis.
  • On August 29th Cesare Viel will make the revision of the performance “Il giardino di mio padre” held for the first time in the PAC (Pavillion of Contemporary Art) last autumn under the stars during the opening of the solo show curated by Diego Sileo “Nobody anywhere anymore”.

Thanks to Comune di Valbrevenna, l’Ente Parco dell’Antola, the restaurant Il Pioppo and all the participants of the collateral events: Rosa Matteucci, Alberto Pesavento, Cesare Viel, Luca Vitone, the collective Mefistofele Documenta

The exhibition will be open from Friday to Sunday, from 4 to 8 pm or by appointment

EVENTS

  • August 8th, 2020 – Rosa Matteucci reads Tomás Saraceno’s tarot
    Inside the very ancient walls of Senarega Castle, we imagine that everything could happen, except that spiders and insects of any kind are going to become extinct. However the tarots by Tomás Saraceno presented in 2019 together with the application Aracnomanchy, in the Spider Pavilion in the Gardens realized by Saraceno for the 58th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale May You Live in Interesting Times curated by Ralph Rugoff, were created as a mapping and overall exercise against the extinction of anthropods and in general against extinction.
    The on-line application implies, in fact, a sort of trade: the chosen card is read in exchange of sending a photo of a spider web taken where it can happen to find them, in the corner of the bathroom, on the terrace and in general wherever our gaze is wandering, a little more attentive.
    The oracular deck of Tomás Saraceno and in general, the oracles of all time, are aimed not so much at knowing the future, as at transforming it, through possible corrections of the present. A sort of form induced by the syntropy law, intended as the right to life, freedom and the pursuit of happiness, which often excludes not only for humans but for all beings from the mere satisfaction of material needs.
    If the satisfaction of material needs takes place in an environment that generates fear, anguish, panic, there will never be organization and regeneration.
    The well cared oracular reading by Rosa Matteucci, who has already been at the Venice Biennale and at the opening of Aria, the solo show of Tomás Saraceno at Palazzo Strozzi curated by Arturo Galansino still ongoing in Florence, brings out this tension towards anabolic cohesion with the universe, rather than the catabolic breakdown.
    Every cell and every biological system are in fact, throughout life, continuously stimulated by rebounds that come from the past, Kronos or the law of causality and others that come from the future, Kairos and they must adapt and make free will choices, at less for humans we can deal of free will: every willful and therefore rational act can only identify the pursuit of happiness that implies life, finalism and cohesion with the universe as essential.
    Also in Senarega the reading of the Tomás Saraceno’s tarots by the writer Rosa Matteucci will take place as an exchange of thoughts and emotions and in absolute gratuitousness.