Installation Views FIELDS OF ARES @ Salzburger Kunstverein 2018
FIELDS OF ARES is an installation based on the idea of the construction and decay of idealized relationships caught in photographs facing a meta-modern digital reality. It exposes a fragmented archive of intimacy. Referring to an archeological practice trying to recreate history through a set of fragmented statues, this work tries to reconstruct emotions and physicality through its digital fragments, generating emotional monuments aside body and gender norms.
I’m quoting the quest for human aesthetic perfection in Greek antiquity, which can be rediscovered in virtualized form in a post-internet society: The creation and sharing of digitally optimized self-portraits, the over-aestheticized everyday life and the reaction of digital communities displaces the fallibility and banality of the individual. The pursuit of perfection leaks from the rudimentary need of being loved. This phenomenon also witnesses the construction of love, whose endeavor is not reality but idealization – an ancient view of the world. The decay, the breaking up of that constructed utopia, is the end of antiquity; the end of a relationship between ideal and reality.
Two columns in the exhibition space, facing each other, vaporize the body scent of 2 lovers to mark their absent presence and therefore create an ephemeral moment of their intimacy.
The installation is accompanied by a publication with the same title. In 9 chapters, I post-factually enter the battlefield at the end of a relationship and reconstruct archaeological and retrospective fragments of visual remains. In texts, and body fragments, photographic memories oppose the vitality and data fragility of today’s culture of remembrance.
Installation Views FIELDS OF ARES @ Salzburger Kunstverein 2018