Per il terzo
appuntamento espositivo di Spazio Cordis abbiamo scelto un giovane artista di
origine polacca, Michal Martychowiec, che attualmente è di base a Berlino e che
dimostra una straordinaria versatilità nell’utilizzo di numerosi media (dalla
fotografia al video, dall’installazione al disegno, dal neon alla parola come
significato e significante) oltre a un’acuta capacità di analisi rispetto alla
storia, alla letteratura, alle problematiche socio-politiche contemporanee con
un’apertura al contesto internazionale che include sia il “Vecchio continente”
(a cui vanno sicuramente ricondotti i riferimenti alla tradizione classica e in
particolare ai poemi omerici e ai miti greci, ma anche le riflessioni sulle
rivoluzioni in Francia dal 1848 a oggi), sia i Paesi oltreoceano raggiungendo
per esempio il Giappone con l’opera The
shrine to summon the souls.
La mostra raccoglie una selezione di lavori realizzati dall’artista
ragionando sui concetti di violenza, libertà e bellezza in rapporto a
cambiamenti storici e sociali nell’ambito della comunicazione e dell’esercizio
del potere. In particolare, Martychowiec propone due nuclei tematici che si
intrecciano: il reiterarsi nella storia di episodi di violenza legati ad
affermazioni di libertà e le distorsioni nel rapporto con l’altro vissute
dall’uomo contemporaneo nell’epoca di Internet e della tecnologia digitale. A
questi si sovrappone la riflessione sull’esercizio del potere, non solo nell’accezione
di “potere costituito”
e manipolazione dell’informazione, ma anche a livello di relazioni personali, sociali, private e comunitarie. A fare da filo conduttore, la memoria e le modalità attraverso le quali l’arte e la poesia diventano strumenti per preservarla unendo il passato più remoto al futuro futuribile. Il titolo della mostra, Empty Room, la camera vuota, incrocia questi temi singolarmente e in maniera trasversale laddove si configura come luogo fisico in cui le dinamiche percettive sono state alterate, come spazio virtuale in cui si attuano relazioni distorte e come assenza figurata per sottrazione o trasformazione dei significati. L’espressione nasce in relazione al mondo dellechat room e quindi si lega al tema della comunicazione e dei rapporti interpersonali dopo l’avvento di internet. Le chat room sono spazi virtuali dove è possibile instaurare una conversazione, scambiarsi idee, avviare dibattiti, ma in cui l’assenza di contatto visivo e di relazione fisica abbatte ogni possibile reticenza, sottrae i soggetti dal confronto con le urgenze, gli imbarazzi, i desideri inespressi. Le dinamiche del potere in un mondo di interazioni a-corporee si modificano e cambiano prendendo strade inaspettate e trasformando la natura stessa dell’uomo contemporaneo. Il confronto con il reale viene meno e così la percezione dei fatti, dei gesti, delle intenzioni. Così se la chat room si presenta come un non luogo, uno spazio in cui domina l’assenza, l’empty room è un’assenza alla seconda: è la sottrazione
improvvisa e irreversibile dell’interlocutore, l’interruzione repentina del dialogo, la censura arbitraria su una conversazione. È il silenzio di uno spazio vuoto, la cancellazione di una storia, un atto violento quanto un pugno nello stomaco. Nel mondo digitale si sono sviluppati nuovi e inaspettati modi di esercitare il potere e la violenza: internet nasce per liberare l’informazione e aprire il mondo a infinite possibilità di scambio e conoscenza, ma si trasforma ben presto in un subdolo strumento di controllo e manipolazione dell’informazione. Tutto iniziò in un giorno di violenza è in questo senso un’opera manifesto: l’opera riproduce una frase tratta da Alessandro Baricco, più precisamente dalla sua riscrittura in chiave contemporanea dell’Iliade. La prima testimonianza della storia della letteratura occidentale non esordisce con un gesto d’amore, ma con un atto di violenza, con l’infuriare della guerra, una guerra significativamente tesa a un riscatto - quello di Elena rapita dai troiani -[1] e condotta in nome della libertà. Lo stesso accade nel caso delle guerre e rivoluzioni contemporanee: violenza e libertà, controllo e potere legano la storia antica al mondo di oggi. Ripercorrendo i cicli e i ricicli della storia, ogni grido di libertà è stato accompagnato da un atto di violenza incontrollata, di cui l’arte e la poesia conservano memoria sottoponendo ogni evento a un filtro estetizzante: La libertà che guida il popolo di Delacroix ricorda le “Tre Gloriose Giornate” del luglio 1830
con una figura allegorica che calpesta un cumulo di corpi e
macerie imbracciando un fucile; delle movimentazioni studentesche del ’68 si
ricordano i motti e gli slogan (“Sous les pavés, la plage!” per esempio viene
utilizzato da Martychowiec per un
intero ciclo di opere); il Mouvement des Gilets Jaunes, già soggetto al filtro
della storia pur appartenendo al nostro presente, diventa il protagonista
dell’installazione Empty Room, in cui
una sedia scagliata a terra insieme a un gilet giallo simboleggia l’irruenza di
un atto di rabbia quasi domestico e quotidiano riportandolo contemporaneamente
al tema delle barricate. In fondo tutto è storia, All is history: grandi avvenimenti e piccoli fatti entrano nel
flusso della storia nel momento stesso in cui stanno accadendo, è di essi cosa resta?What remains the poets provide,
ricorda un’altra delle opere in mostra, mentre in The shrine to summon the souls il lento cadere dei petali rosa nel
Santuario Yasukuni a Tokyo (dedicato alle anime di soldati e civili che
morirono combattendo al servizio dell’Imperatore durante la Seconda guerra
mondiale) si accompagna a testi e musiche del film La rabbia di Pasolini: “Del terrificante mondo del passato, e del
terrificante mondo del futuro, non resta che la bellezza”.
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Michal Martychowiec Empty Room
by Jessica Bianchera
For the third Spazio Cordis exhibition, we have chosen
a young artist of Polish origin, Michal Martychowiec, who is currently based in
Berlin. Martychowiec’s work displays an extraordinary versatility in the use of
various media (from photography to video, from installation to design, from
neon to the word as both signified and signifier). The artist also has an acute
analytical capacity with respect to history, literature, and contemporary socio-political
issues, with an openness to the international context that stretches from the
so-called Old Continent (with references to the classical tradition and, in
particular, to the Homeric poems, the Greek myths, and reflections on the
revolutions in France from 1848 to the present) to the Far East, for example
Japan, with his piece The Shrine to Summon the Souls.
The exhibition brings together a selection of works in
which the artist explores the concepts of violence, freedom and beauty in
relation to historical and social changes in the field of communication and the
exercise of power. In particular, Martychowiec proposes two intertwined
thematic nuclei: the repetition in history of episodes of violence linked to
affirmations of freedom, and the distortions in the relationship with the other
experienced by contemporary human beings in the age of the Internet and digital
technology. These are overlaid with a reflection on the exercise of power, not
only in the sense of "constituted power"
and the manipulation of
information, but also in terms of personal, social, private and community
relations. Acting as a common thread is memory, and the ways in which art and
poetry become tools for its preservation by combining the remotest past with
the futurist future.
The
exhibition title, Empty Room, intersects these themes
both individually and transversally, appearing as a physical place in which the
dynamics of perception have been altered, as a virtual space in which distorted
relationships arise, and as a figurative absence generated by the subtraction
or transformation of meanings. The title refers to the world of chat rooms, and
is therefore linked to the theme of communication and interpersonal
relationships after the advent of the Internet. Chat rooms are virtual spaces
in which people engage in conversation, exchange ideas, initiate debates, but
in which the lack of visual contact and physical relationship eliminates all
reticence, allowing the subjects to eschew confrontation with urges,
embarrassments, unspoken desires. The dynamics of power in a world of
a-corporeal interactions change by taking unexpected paths, transforming the
very nature of contemporary human beings. The comparison with reality is
lacking, as is the perception of actions, gestures, intentions.
So if the chat
room appears as a non-place, a space in which absence dominates, the empty room
is absence squared: the sudden and irreversible subtraction of the
interlocutor, the abrupt interruption
of dialogue, the arbitrary censoring of a
conversation. It is the silence of an empty space, the erasure of a story, a
gesture as violent as a punch in the stomach. In the digital world, new and
unexpected ways of exercising power and violence have been developed: the
Internet was born to free up information and open the world to endless
possibilities of exchange and knowledge, but soon turned into a devious
instrument of control and manipulation of information.
In this sense, Everything Began on a
Day of Violence is a manifesto: the work reproduces a phrase taken from Alessandro
Baricco, and more precisely from his rewriting of the Iliad in a contemporary
key. The
first testament to the history of Western literature begins not with a gesture
of love but with an act of violence: the outbreak of a war, one significantly
aimed at a ransom - that of Helen kidnapped by the Trojans - and fought in the
name of freedom. The same happens in the case of contemporary wars and
revolutions: violence and freedom, control and power link ancient history to
today's world. Retracing the cycles and re-cycles of history, every cry of
freedom has been accompanied by an act of uncontrolled violence, of which art
and poetry preserve a memory by subjecting each event to an aesthetic filter:
Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People recalls the “Three Glorious Days”
of July 1830 with an allegorical figure trampling a pile of bodies and rubble,
holding a rifle; of the student movements of ‘68 we recall the mottoes and
slogans
of dialogue, the arbitrary censoring of a
conversation. It is the silence of an empty space, the erasure of a story, a
gesture as violent as a punch in the stomach. In the digital world, new and
unexpected ways of exercising power and violence have been developed: the
Internet was born to free up information and open the world to endless
possibilities of exchange and knowledge, but soon turned into a devious
instrument of control and manipulation of information.
In this sense, Everything Began on a
Day of Violence is a manifesto: the work reproduces a phrase taken from Alessandro
Baricco, and more precisely from his rewriting of the Iliad in a contemporary
key. The
first testament to the history of Western literature begins not with a gesture
of love but with an act of violence: the outbreak of a war, one significantly
aimed at a ransom - that of Helen kidnapped by the Trojans - and fought in the
name of freedom. The same happens in the case of contemporary wars and
revolutions: violence and freedom, control and power link ancient history to
today's world. Retracing the cycles and re-cycles of history, every cry of
freedom has been accompanied by an act of uncontrolled violence, of which art
and poetry preserve a memory by subjecting each event to an aesthetic filter:
Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People recalls the “Three Glorious Days”
of July 1830 with an allegorical figure trampling a pile of bodies and rubble,
holding a rifle; of the student movements of ‘68 we recall the mottoes and
slogans
(“Sous les pavés, la plage!” “Under the pavement lies the beach” for
example is used by Martychowiec for an entire series of works); the Yellow
Vests Movement, which is already subject to the filter of history even while
still belonging to our present, becomes the protagonist of Empty Room: an
installation in which a chair being thrown to the ground along with a yellow
vest symbolize the impetuosity of an almost domestic and daily act of anger,
while at the same time eliciting the theme of the barricades. Ultimately, All
is History: great events and small incidents enter the flow of history at
the very moment in which they happen, and what remains of them? What Remains
the Poets Provide, recalls another of the works on display; while in The
Shrine to Summon the Souls the slow falling of the rose petals in the Yasukuni
Shrine in Tokyo (dedicated to the souls of soldiers and civilians who died
fighting in the service of the Emperor during the Second World War) is
accompanied by texts and music from Pasolini’s film La Rabbia (Anger): “Of
the terrifying world of the past, and of the terrifying world of the future,
all that remains is beauty”.
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(“Sous les pavés, la plage!” “Under the pavement lies the beach” for
example is used by Martychowiec for an entire series of works); the Yellow
Vests Movement, which is already subject to the filter of history even while
still belonging to our present, becomes the protagonist of Empty Room: an
installation in which a chair being thrown to the ground along with a yellow
vest symbolize the impetuosity of an almost domestic and daily act of anger,
while at the same time eliciting the theme of the barricades. Ultimately, All
is History: great events and small incidents enter the flow of history at
the very moment in which they happen, and what remains of them? What Remains
the Poets Provide, recalls another of the works on display; while in The
Shrine to Summon the Souls the slow falling of the rose petals in the Yasukuni
Shrine in Tokyo (dedicated to the souls of soldiers and civilians who died
fighting in the service of the Emperor during the Second World War) is
accompanied by texts and music from Pasolini’s film La Rabbia (Anger): “Of
the terrifying world of the past, and of the terrifying world of the future,
all that remains is beauty”.
![]()
