The review Maneuvers in its third edition, it changes the formula, and invites twenty-one artists from different countries and realities to work on a project that aims to investigate the idea of home through a multiple gaze, a direct, didactic, ironic, transversal interpretation: hearth, refuge , lair, laboratory, office, prison, circus, proliferating module, theater of the most brutal baseness, place from which to escape and return to, place to build, to search for and probably to reinvent.
“Home Sweet Home” is one of the most well-known and abused popular aphorisms and yet, with the addition of a simple question mark, the motto acquires a disturbing and ambiguous quality: once doubt has crept in, certainties falter. Disruptive and often unspeakable news. Fall of the myth of the family, of quiet and harmony, of the protective and reassuring space of “normality”.
Literature, starting from Edgar Allan Poe up to all the horror and splatter production of the last decades, and even more, cinema, have made the house an increasingly threatening and looming organism, inhabited by invasive demonic presences and supernatural entities or by a hypertrophic but no less pervasive technology. And yet, the news, the most brutal one, surpasses cinema and literature in brutality with its sick fruits of a coveted yet non-existent “normality”, immediately swallowed up by an omnivorous television which assimilates everything and transforms it into a morbid Reality show in episodes. The artists, relating to the news, to the reality of everyday life, struggle not to lose the specificity that separates art from life so as not to transform it into petty sociology or mere documentation of what exists.
Art has often chased the news. They were the years of Posthuman and the artists focused on the bloodiest and most repugnant aspects of reality, transforming “trauma” and “disgust” into new contemporary aesthetic categories.
Home Sweet Home tries to observe the object of his investigation from a different point of view: not chasing reality and its horrifying and spectacularized involutions but avoiding its flattery, and opposing an “unspeakable” shouted and flaunted by the news with the dimension of the “unsaid ” for a proposal that is never satisfied, never approved and pacified but full of disturbing ambiguities. In this cryptic, allusive, oblique dimension, the house, from being the theater of everyday life, of its miseries, its tragedies and its “normalities”, becomes a “non-place” full of destabilizing charm, an indefinite mental space in which the ” inside” and “outside” appear to be relative and interchangeable categories. There is no need to stigmatize or justify anything.
Edited by Ivo Serafino Fenu and Chiara Leoni
There are works by: Frank Bauer, Leonardo Boscani, Filipa César, Cristian Chironi, Enrico Corte, Gruppo Eya, Cameron Jamie, Martin Kersels, Sandrine Lescaroux, Deborah Ligorio, Pinuccia Marras, Oliver Musovik, Andrea Nurcis, Sven Påhlsson, Marco Papa, Robert Pettena, Pietrolio, Salis&Vitangeli, Simona Secci, Gianfranco Setzu, Aldo Tilocca
