What makes us humans is our ability to signify, to create meaning, to accumulate it and to shape memory. Meanings are fundamental tools to the individual and collective creation of reality: they produce a common field through which we communicate, think, easily navigate the world and to exist.
Bonis Bona, Malis Mala - Nicola Lorini
Curated by Azzurra Pitruzzella
January 23 - February 25., 2018.
t-space, Milan
Historical research has an essential role in the creation of meanings: it selects, elects winners and losers, joints facts creating a post-hoc linear and rational logic. It establishes a fixed and vertical order to contain and digest meanings and, immobilising them, makes them finite, tangible and stable, like pillars. They are, instead, fragile and arbitrary, they go through walls, like fluids.
The irruption of the digital method has undermined and questioned the verticality and stability of meanings of the traditional historical research: the limitlessness of the accessible information, its coexistence and the absence of spatial and temporal boundaries, weaken its rigidity which, in the internet, acquire limitless possibilities and create infinite possible connections.
Bonis Bona, Malis Mala is a show that strains the linearity, completeness and verticality on which traditional historiography lies. Historical elements like archaeological remains, sculptural pieces and commemorative monuments are analysed through an approach inspired by digital culture that introduces empathy, fluidity and horizontality, limitlessness and coexistence of information as research criteria. Here meanings are dismembered, become unrecognizable and fragmentary, free themselves from the fixed logic in which they have been forced and go back to their primary fluidity.
The exhibition features ceramic and sand sculptures mixed with production waste pieces. They are inspired by pre-Columbian archaeological remains, sculptural elements from the Monumental Cemetery of Milan, mythical Japanese figures masks, all elements originally pregnant of symbolism from which they are emptied and made available to absorb new meanings. The collocation of the pieces in the space does not follow a hierarchic order they, in fact, are all places on the same semantic level and, taken out of context and nature, create new and infinite energy circuit where they can exist and signify.
Nicola Lorini (b. 1990, Como) is an artist and researcher based between London and Milan. He works across sculpture, installation and lens based media, in an ongoing negotiation between empathic behaviours and archaeological metaphors. Often working with culturally charged artefacts and symbols, he pairs diverse points of inspiration to instigate a dialogue between material production and the interpretation and transmission of information. Nicola Lorini received his MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and his recent exhibitions include: 2018, Metadata, Lethaby Gallery, London, curated by the Bilderfahrzeuge Project (Warburg institute); 2017, And The Horizon Was Dying Over the Tourist, Republic Gallery, London, curated by Federico Sargentone; Take me Out (with Bora Akinciturk), 97 Graham Road, London, curated by STIMULI; Annihilation Event Prototype (Tate Exchange), Tate Modern Switch House, London, curated by Louisa Minkin and Elizabeth Wright; Distributed Monuments, Geddes Gallery, London, curated by Naomi Ellis; Taiyr (with Fatima Bianchi), Ex Chiesa di S. Pietro in Atrio, Como, curated by Davide Giannella.
Azzurra Pitruzzella (b. 1990, Agrigento) is an independent curator that divides her activity between London and Italy. After graduating in Philosophy and the University of Catania, in 2017, she concluded a MA in Culture Criticism and Curation and Central Saint Martins in London. Some of her projects include: “Heritage: a User’s Manual” at the Southbank Centre in London and “Self/Control” at Punctum gallery. Her upcoming projects include an artists’ residency at the archaeological park of Scolacium in Calabria, Italy, next September. Born and raised in Agrigento, the city of the valley of temples, Azzurra has always been fascinated by archaeology. Her research, in fact, engages themes like the mechanisms behind the persistence of historical memory in the present and, above all, in the contemporary mind, influenced and accelerated by the digital.
