Spelonca
video installation
video on loop 4’56”, granite stones
performer : Voin de Voin
2019
Structura's Vetrine, Sofia
SAW - Sofia Art Week
15-21 July 2019 / from 22pm-2 am each night of the week
more info: https://aether-artspace.com/?p=206
(…)This precarious freedom of the contemporary era, becomes an embodied way of perceiving
reality, leaving the individual in a state of stasis, virtual limbo, anticipating a change, but rather
creating a negative liminal space both in mental and physical spheres. The play and power of the
past century and into the current social, economic and geo-political reality, have created a shift in
the mind of the citizens, doubtless making the mark more visible of the split worlds – the privileged
and the suffering.
The face of this era, has displayed itself with a new one the one of reoccurring past, unwanted and
yet producing possible scenarios for society, that is trapped in totalitarian frames and under new
age unspoken slavery(...).
(from SAW's Introduction text)
(...) We all live in a spelonca (in italian is a wide and deep cave, closed place, horrid and dark, such as to cause fear, shelter, shelter for people and dishonest works, shabby house)
The first background is foreseen by the contemporary urban condition, faced starting from the reflections of Lefebvre in The right to the city; a work that can define seminal in drawing the contours of the urban crisis
at the end of the 1960s. In this research, the experience was carried out to the industrialization and development of the capitalist economy, traceable to the basis of the work of many scholars of the contemporary city. We shall see the urban crisis as the representation of a drama in three acts:
the space of urban consciousness, the end of the city as a work of art, the urban space transformed into an exchange value.
How to regain the sense of the art-work, restore the urban conscience, rediscover the sense of community in the dispersed and liquid space of the cities?
Cities have within them useful elements for this purpose: resilience, social and human capital, but also physical space. Lefebvre, for his part, helps to understand how in this direction emerges the importance of some metaphors and spaces of cultural resilience to revive the fortunes of the city, bring it back to its being an art work.
For Lefebvre these metaphors are represented by « partyies or fiestas », by art and by emptiness: the fiesta is the ritual of creativity, of community building, of socio-spatial transformation to react to a state of crisis and drama.
The void is the place of the possible, the space of the party, where the “transformative performance that reveals important classifications, categories and contradictions of the [urban] cultural processes” is staged.
The third theme – art - represents practices as arts to prepare the “fascinating structures” of transformation / regeneration rituals. These arguments arrive at the concept of liminal as a reading frame for a category of residual and potential urban spaces, places of the fiesta, where art in the form of practices stages transformation.
Valentina Sciarra