As part of the fifth edition of Rome Art Week, the artist Marco Galletti (aka Kaey) invites us to an exhibition that projects the visitor in an unspecified place, in the exasperated vision of the present.
The 11 sculptures installed become allegorical stages of a journey that re-evaluates pop icons and images of current events, in an attempt to stimulate reflection on certain social, political-economic and moral conditions, and to unleash a constructive controversy on the found remains of our contemporaneity.
The exhibition will be open to the public from 18:30 to 22:00, 27 to 31 October 2020.
To encourage full compliance with the anti-contage regulations currently in force, access will be restricted and guided by the staff who will accompany visitors in the spaces of C.S. Brancaleone.
The path begins with the Simbiont, a sculpture buried in the garden of Brancaleone, which reflects on the possibility of a positive cohesion of natural and artificial elements for the purpose of Creation, a will that sets the human being in motion in all his actions and activities. This is opposed to the Zeitgeist, the spirit of time and essence before the emptiness of life, which is galvanized in the anathema “Diezeitfrisstalles”: time devours everything.
The next step leads us to the Carillon (War in a box) whose music attracts the visitor like the song of a siren, welcoming him with his sweet melody in a mysterious environment animated by the terrible shadows of conflicts and wars.
At this point Before/After da revolution intervenes, the mask of humanity that uses pop icons to embody social and political ideologies.
The risk faced by the artist is to confuse a leader with a character who pursues nothing but the realization of a personal project of social revolution.
ComFortZone brings us back to the present and represents a face that explodes and expands outwards, on which faces are projected. The face represents the Virus and comes from an appeal launched by Kaey during the quarantine called by the Italian government: the artist asked anyone who wanted to participate to retract their faces into their home, in the way they preferred, and then project the images collected on the sculpture/virus.
Among the projections there are smiling expressions, suffering, fragmented, afraid.
The goal is to reflect on the sudden realization of never being safe, because now more than ever we are all equal, we are all locked up, we are all healthy, we are all infected. There is no real enemy. The virus takes everyone, it makes no distinctions.
Similarly, the Parasite becomes a metaphor for the technology that invades our lives by appropriating every part of our being and feeds on our energies (and our data) growing and acquiring more and more power, so as to overwhelm the host organism.
Continuing we meet the Cores, whose discovery represents the rebirth and introduces the turning point of our journey: Pneuma, a sensory experience that resumes in an oxymoric parallelism the Zeitgeist and invites the viewer to reclaim his time, to rediscover the pleasure of details, reflection and introspective.
This last part of the journey can be summed up in man’s attempt to give a new form to Nature and its elements, suited to his needs and subjected to his needs. Modern Prometheus vol. II presents a figure of human features, in whose back the artist has stocked 23 knives. The creature, conceptually similar to M. Shelley’s Frankenstein, becomes the victim of the failure of the human-creator, who betrays the fruit of his own intellect and tries to destroy it in an attempt to hide his own error from the sight of the world.
Persephone is presented as a double installation where the vision of the video-performance made in 2017 by Kaey, which tells of the Persephone kidnaping, is flanked by the exhibition of the masks used by performers, reworked in order to emphasize at the extreme the allegory of each character, showing the way in which the same element can be re-read and revalued by its own creator in which different moment of his life, also in the light of a different context and current events.
Our journey ends with Agata: an entity that encloses in itself everything that is the expression of good and right; a new point of reference for men and for the artist who, at the end of this path of destruction, loss and reconstruction, finds in Agatha its own gravitational center and the source to which turn his attention.
This is the press release redacted by Marcella Magaletti on the occasion of the personal exhibition “Anthropologika“, which took place from 27 to 31 October 2020, at C.S. Brancaleone in Rome.
The QR-Codes here allowed participants to deepen through descriptions of the works, also by Dr Magaletti. Click to access it.
The artistic project involves the close collaboration of the artist K. with the director Maurizio Rodio, the scenographer Francesco Paolo Cipullo and the production director Myrlande Nardi, aimed at carrying out a social experiment on the involvement of the social audience through storytelling.
The idea of K. assumes shape in the intense storyline developed by the working group, which saw rodio protagonist in a series of mysterious events that escalated to a fictitious aggression. Rodio looking for answers found himself following “clues”, left behind by a strange figure, that eventually led to him an abandoned building… All this, documented by short videos – or stories – and images posted on social media, culminated in a live Facebook in which Maurizio explored the spaces of Brancaleone together with two friends and then find himself catapulted into a meta-earthly universe, in a timeless history, told by the installations of the series Anthropologika.
The live was a success, thanks to the masterful direction of Rodio and its interpretation more than convincing, together with the valuable participation of Gabriele Wegner, also the protagonist of the live-video and outside, giving further credibility to the story.
The video produced on 26 October and broadcast on Wegner’s social profile collected about 1500 impressions and followers, many of whom then visited the exhibition with interest.
Below, the images of the exhibition and diary written by Basiago Moberli, fictional character created by the group as the engine of the story, as well as the link to live Facebook.
Ph. Roberto Marchesini.
Basiago Moberli‘s diary, made by K.