The IOèTE project starts on the streets to become temporarily part of the urban landscape of various cities. It is a theme exhibition, a series of works of art, agreed upon with the participating artists who, by showing on the street recuperate the common and necessary imaginary. Portraits, icons, secondary personages, but fundamentally an exhibition about becoming the other, an exhibition about themselves but thought of as mutant identities, a research on relationships that seeks to characterize this moment of time. An exhibition of works that, once they are attached to the walls, seem to become part of them. And, naturally, the decomposition process of the posters with these ephemeral works will influence the project. The project begins with posters on the street, reproductions of art work are put on the walls like a manifesto; the works will encounter both aware and distracted passers-by and will stay there until time and atmospheric agents remove them, leaving space for the walls. Usually, what remains is some tattered pieces of the posters that are nothing more than residues of the artwork.
In Martin Heidegger’s famous “The principle of identity”, he indicates the opportunity of “detaching oneself from the attitude of representative thought”, making a “leap” outside the principle of identity and metaphysics on which it is founded in order to hurl oneself into the abyss of the Event, in which individual and being co-belong.
A step back, a place and an occasion to scatter here and there a seed, a grain, which eventually in its way, may open and bear fruit.
A theme that does not present itself as a single word but rather as a conceptual couple: rather than with a category, whose confines would be statically definable, we are dealing with a field of tension. Thus, we find ourselves facing diverse constellations of thematic elements that vary with the variation of the tension that individuates the field of the two terms.
Conceptual constellations organize themselves around problems like being, self and the other, unity and division, plurality, multi-being, dis-identity.
It is necessary to be clandestine, outside of, under, to try to dissolve the Ego in You, the centre on the margins, in order to reach understanding. An allegory. A reflection that slowly drapes itself over the world. A relationship that has nothing more to do with “subject”, something extraneous, repelling, irredeemable for anything one wishes to call “oneself”.
A collection of unforgettable images. The suggestion is to choose one’s own image, not the one the mirror “sends back’, but to choose one’s own image starting from what one is, not from what one represents. To try to immerse oneself in one’s own image without drowning. No identity for the subject, only the act through which the subject believes each time to constitute him or herself. And each time is never the last.
An extremely strange pneumatic emptiness, a remainder that shines in the emptiness, an image one encounters on the street, on the sidewalk, perhaps beauty manifests itself in this way. An unexpected beauty indifferent to anything else. The movement is purely mental, sparks produced by the eyes while finding outside of oneself the image of one’s own opening.
The attempt is to maintain the narration suspended in that unique and non-reproducible situation in which one absorbs an event, an experience without knowing how? To explain its effects, without establishing and quantifying the change, without perceiving the starting point and thus without being able to account for the point of arrival: art encountered on the street because of curiosity, in the turmoil of illusions that fall before one notices their weight, in the announcement of life, in the desire still to be discovered.
A rising tension leads to imagining a city full of love, desperation and a night for disappearing. So then, art as horizon, as companion, as a chance meeting. Until one it moved away, leaves one’s field of vision, left to indifference. Art like bodies that become an integral part of the wall, art that takes to the streets and escapes from the isolated cages of museums and galleries. Art that observes the spectators, that ‘harasses’ the passers-by, that decorates life.
A breaking event, an intervention into reality, an aesthetic expedient. In an attempt to recover innocence, poetry of the ‘stupefying’ that becomes alienation and calls one to look at the walls on the street. The possibility of ‘inventing’ an again, an elsewhere, testimony of the sincere immodesty due to which life and art cannot be distinguished one from the other, just as the innocence of a gaze can only be an expedient. It is recounting, as a dreamer would, before any return.
One theme only: being together, the changeable nature of identity in relationship to the other. A game between resemblance and difference, individuals, time and experience interweave with images, investigating the theme of the double, of identity, of the elusive nature of events. Couples of people, animals, objects. Identity, unique and at the same time multiple, changes according to the variation of emotional conditions. An obligatory passage that redesigns relationships. A complex relation between the observer and the art work, a dimension of multiplicity, a process of becoming, a way to become in the encounter other than oneself, The chance encounter on an operating table between an umbrella and a sewing machine ….
Francesca Alfano Miglietti