ENRICO BOCCIOLETTI / SARA ENRICO / STEFANO FAORO / BENEDETTA FIORAVANTI / REBECCA MOCCIA / VALENTINA PARATI
06.05.2023 — 23.07.2023
Curated alongside Katherine Jemima Hamilton and Ariane Sutthavong
Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Guarene, IT
When thinking of “political time,” what often comes to mind is a vociferous convergence in a space—rallies, protests, uprisings. Moments of stillness are rarely treated as part of the same cycle, instead regarded as an individualistic retreat from politics. With power structures having stripped assembled bodies of their potency, radical action is left as a hollowed-out site. The body is rendered exhausted and shattered by the physical and mental toll felt in the aftermath of “the event.” Even the warmth of community is elusive or hard to comprehend because it isn’t known yet or hasn’t been felt in a while. Talking about “the event”—let alone assembling around it—seems unthinkable.
Embodied by a sense of dormancy, of being on the cusp, this exhibition is situated within intervals of quietude, in the valleys of political time. The artists evade framing stillness as refusal, instead grounding it within the body—be it social, collective, machinic, of images—and finding potentiality in an exhaustion charged with eroticism. A way of harnessing power and information, and characterised by an acute awareness in the doing, eroticism transcends physical encounters and shapes resistance outside “the event.” Obfuscating regimes of visibility, which require mobile, coherent and co-optable bodies, the artists channel a generative dormancy, a quietude one could understand as a mode of political action.
‘I LIVE IN CONSTANT FEAR OF THE WESTERN DESCENT INTO –. BUT I DIGRESS. THE CLUB IS BUMPING, THE ALCOHOL IS FLOWING, EVERYBODY LOOKS GOOD. THERE IS MUCH PAIN IN THE WORLD BUT NOT IN THIS ROOM.'