Last week Francesco Finizio's show ARKPARKCRAFTRAFTCLINICCLUBPUB opened at MoBY. The title of Finizio's exhibition is largely indicative of its spatial character; it integrating different spaces into a single portmanteau word - ark, park, craft, raft,clinic, club, pub. What usually defines a space is the very fact of its immobility. Even the French word for real estate “immobilier,” follows this logic of “immobile property.” However, in our reality, space itself has become monetized, and so the nature of the space that we occupy at any given moment, is constantly changing. Market economy was able to make the space flicker and shiver - from the skyscraper that enabled the extrusion of the rentable floor space per unit area of land, to the suburban sprawl, that gave a spatial expression to the socially engineered form of lifelong indebtedness, the mortgage loan.
In this reality we become disorientated - the interchange demonstrates the counterintuitive nature of the current spatial reality; to take a left turn we need to get off at the right hand exit. In this reality you get offered to buy an insurance policy at the privatized post office and a shaver at the commercial gas station. When everything is exchangeable you are no longer sure where you are.
ARKPARKCRAFTRAFTCLINICCLUBPUB combines a survey of some of Finizio’s key works together with new projects he has developed especially for MoBY; a monochromatic boutique, a dining hall for cats, a dream transmission platform, a store that changes its business ten time during one week, a shanty town of toy houses ,an employment bureau for Lenin doppelgangers to take shifts at his mausoleum, a campfire made of skateboards, an electronic playroom, a home experiment in identifying human figures in explosion clouds while defecating, a vision test center for chairs, and a souvenir shop for a theme park that is a construction site, are some of the projects that the exhibition includes. Together, they transform the museum space into a sort of dysfunctional shopping center that was fused with a UFO that went off course and ended up in a disarrayed community center. Â
Finizio’s work is dictated by the overwhelming material saturation surrounding us. With simple yet sophisticated tools, he utilizes the resources available to him. By employing concrete and everyday means, Finizio’s ongoing research into the languages and gestures of consumerism and mass communications, produce new and poignant articulations of our economic, cultural, social, political and artistic condition.
Through the use of DIY aesthetics and an often off-the-cuff approach full of humor and self-irony, Finizio has been developing a unique and idiosyncratic body of work rooted in the observation of incidents and phenomena that revolve around questions of exchange and value, agency and cultural meaning. His installations operate as both events and models. They entangle the depiction of scripted spaces of commerce, habitat, display, construction, archive and work, with a model-like quality that actively speculates on the uses, statuses, and sentiments that these spaces perform.
Since nothing is certain under the rule of capital, we are all busy speculating - both the investment banker and the precariat, are constantly compelled to create models by which they can conduct themselves. The only invariant element in these models is the perpetuation of the market economy. Under capital, speculation has changed from independent and inverted thinking, to a way which ensures that the economic and political world remains intact.
With their playful makeshift style, Finizio’s clever installations push a given situation to its breaking point, revealing contradictory states and hidden dimensions of the economic world we live in. By proposing the familiar world as it is folded inside-out, Finizio's work suggests a mode of operation that we can call counter-speculation.
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