#fontepoe

2015

In order to function, the device takes two people. Further it allows just one of the two players to be sitting at the height required to use the table. The “successful” user however is bound to the losing one. A position of equilibrium between the two parties is only possible if both renounce to the comfort /using the table in an appropriate manner.

2015

realized during the residency SAC | Mari tra le mura a project by Fondazione Pino Pascali - Polignano a Mare

A group of people imitates the sound of cicadas among the ruins of an abandoned Romanic church. The action takes place in the south of Italy in early autumn.

The action affirms the right to frivolousness while being also an expression of nostalgia and decadence. It investigates the question of the southern identity through the stereotype of a picturesque rurality. The choir’s claim oscillates between the evocation of lightness and the attempt to connect with nature, the landscape and the once sacred place, turning the ruins inside out. In the classical symbology the cicadas represent the ambiguous balance between serenity and recklessness, joy and negligence. They are the light-headed attribute of the God Apollo. Their uninterrupted mantra turns them often into a symbol of immortality. 

The imitation of the insects suggests their possible disappearance or extinction, turning the action into an idea of a future tradition rendering homage to their existence.Further the cicadas in the southern setting allude to Ingeborg Bachmann’s “Die Zikaden”* which traces an idea of the south as an apparently perfect escape from reality and turns them into a metaphor of humans who flee from life. 

 *Denn die Zikaden waren einmal Menschen. Sie hörten auf zu essen, zu trinken und zu lieben, um immerfort singen zu können. Auf der Flucht in den Gesang wurden sie dürrer und kleiner, und nun singen sie, an ihre Sehnsucht verloren - verzaubert, aber auch verdammt, weil ihre Stimmen unmenschlich geworden sind. (Ingeborg Bachmann)