edited by MEGA and Nicola Ricciardi
Gavoi, Municipal Museum
11/06 – 03/07/2016
On the occasion of 13th edition of the Literary Festival Island of Stories , the artists Diego Perrone and Andrea Sala they return to deal with a discipline distant from their usual sculptural practice, namely the photography , understood in the etymological sense as “ writing by means of light ”.
The unreleased one collaboration proposed by MAN for the spaces of the Gavoi Municipal Museum , found its first original formalization in April 2016 with an exhibition at the MEGA space in Milan (“Unghia”, curated by MEGA [ Davide Giannella, Delfino Sisto Legnani, Giovanna Silva ] And Nicola Ricciardi ). On that occasion Perrone and Sala exhibited a series of works created within handcrafted darkrooms in cellars, waste spaces and disused rooms. In these homely but transitory places, over the course of a year, the two artists therefore became familiar with the chemical processes of photographic development and with the freehand drawing on photosensitive supports , using a small electric light source, also built manually, as a brush. The resulting canvases—characterized by a plastic, almost sculptural materiality—represent apparently abstract forms, which nevertheless allude to some assumptions underlying their research: the blind observation of technique, engraving as a primordial writing tool, error as a category of experience (hence the recurring iconography of the bumper).
If the first stage was characterized by the squeeze collaboration with the photographer Delfino Sisto Legnani — who took the shots that subsequently inspired the drawings — for this second moment the artists decided to meet and interact with the protagonists of the Festival . In fact, since the Milan event, the collaboration between Perrone and Sala has found strength and traction precisely in opening up to continuous experimentation in terms of formats, contexts, approaches, and participations. For the Island of Stories , the proven technique of “ write with light”—intended as a practical and at the same time theoretical methodology—is made available to writers, who are invited to enter a darkroom specially built and designed for the spaces of the Municipal Museum; here the literary guests will be asked to write sentences, thoughts, considerations, without there being a pre-established theme, but being guided by the unstable equalsbooks between photographic processes and typographical characters. The resulting pages of photosensitive film—hybrid objects between sculpture, photography and literature—will live as autonomous and at the same time collective works of art, and will be exhibited during the Festival together with the works originally presented in Milan. “Frottage athlete” however does not simply represent the second chapter of “Unghia” but rather its narrative development, the evolution of an investigation into the links between technique and language which in this new context becomes a more explicit exploration of the relationship between the word and its physicality.
