MATERIAPRIMA
SOLO EXIBITHION, spazioSERRA, 2021
Materiaprima reflects the tensions that run through the material: power and action, formlessness and form.
But what determines a form and when does one decide that it is time to define it and identify it with a name? It is a decision, a choice made at a precise moment in time. A decision that accustoms us to name it and to recognise it in such signs. Form, then, is the expression of the phenomenon. Sometimes it is present, sometimes it is not. Sometimes the symptoms are only glimpsed. Form is the consequence of chemical and physical reactions that bind atoms and elements together.
The world thus appears to us as a long series of chemical reactions and coincidences that will end at its very point of origin: dust.
In this place of places, the temporal concept is defective and a short-circuit of the temporal planes is manifested, which are instead co-temporal, contemporary and co-present. This place is defined in an antecedent future of the physicality of the present.
*Dust is the seat of our identity, the place where the world settles and interacts with the deposits and debris of human. In the dust are hidden stories and traces of what we do. There are no hierarchies in dust. The interactions within it occur through the compatibility of atoms and molecules and the simultaneity of paths. Reactions that create elements and new life. Dust is an invisible microcosm, present but ruthless. Dust is not an annoying accumulation, but the fundamental element for the balance of the world. Without it, the world would be unbalanced because it contains various elements of life, such as pollen. New studies claim that without dust particles it would not even be possible to form clouds. So there would be no rain and therefore no plants, no animals, no life.
It is, and it has an energy that expands in concentric circles and takes concrete form and originates at a point. The point, the grain, which is its most basic constituent. The first part of the whole. The ancient Greeks associated the dot with the first whole number 1, the principle of all things. The dot is the constitutive element that gives rise to multiple transformations and that creates space and time. The first result occurs with the sequence and orderly approach of a series of points that give life to the line, followed by the creation of surfaces and solids, named and represented by numbers: 2,3, 4. That is, the line, the surface and the solid.
What does mutable mean? It means to be conditioned by a disappointing inconstancy. Mutability is the first principle. Perhaps what has changed is the state of consciousness and acceptance of the fluidity of events, not only physical but also abstract. Strong ideologies have also come to an end, leading to a change in symbolic forms. This short-circuit is not new. Man, identity, language, forms and matter have always been deciphered within a gap between the present and the past. A gap in which the perception of the individual and the present pass through. The gap is the place where mutation takes place. There is certainly a change of sign and language between the forms of the past and the present, but the principle of action or mutation remains.
The magnetic force of the individual’s perception reconstructs things and determines them in the present. To realise a work that is changing today means to be aware that its being will infinitely move away from the present until it is lost in another form and dimension, more symbolic-referential, compared to its primary meaning, that of active narration of its first identification in a given form. We create witnesses of a present-past.
A secondary element present in the works is sugar and glucose, which serve to bind dust particles.
It is a fundamental element, but also perishable and subject to change over time. The choice of sugar may seem at odds with transformation, since it acts as a temporary glue that unites and stabilises all the dust particles that would otherwise move freely in space. Sugar was chosen not only for its crystallisation capacity, but also for another characteristic. Glucose is a ubiquitous source of energy in biology, and it’s here, on energy and on being in power, that we have focused. Dust is not a dead place where everything that comes loose falls to oblivion. Dust is an active environment, inhabited by active elements that have and produce energy and effects in a quiet, disinterested life.
We don’t like clichés, but the name and the concept of dust are. We wanted to fight against this cliché in a way, and explore the possibilities of the world. But the fragments of the world are not remains, they are materials that have a corporeality and an architecture that the world has decided to deprive of its potential. The fragment follows the forgetting and oblivion of the same. Dust is an incessant interchange of relations between the inside and the outside. It is precisely in this passage that chemical and physical transformations of matter take place. Mites, bacteria and all the microspecies contained in dust eat, regurgitate and produce excrement, creating a continuous exchange and transformation.
Dust is a cliché, a collective name
Is dust a parallel world or a continuation of the same? In any case, dust today is a false perceptual classification. It’s a cliché, a collective and diminutive name.
