Davide D'Elia

2016

Beatrice Bertini, Horizontal Casa italia, exhibition catalogue

Barbara Picci, Le opposizioni dialettiche di Davide D'Elia, Fermomag n. 10, pag.62-67

B. Leing, Sentimentally attached to the time, Vision Magazine (China), pag.22-23

Massimo Mattioli, Due gallerie per la prima milanese di Davide D'Elia, Artribune

Nina Azzarello, Davide D'Elia creates a blue horizon line through Casa Italia at Rio 2016 Olympics, Design Boom

Giulia Zamperini, L'immobilità del tempo all Ex Elettrofonica, Art Noise

2015

Andrea Bizzarro / Matteo Boetti, Alberto Burri | Davide D'Elia. Cretti, fuochi, muffe, exhibition catalogue

Antivegetativa, Victionary - Monotone (China), pag.152-153

Raffaella Guidobono, Moleskine - Detour, the Moleskine notebook Experience, pag.352

The art bazar, Time Out (Turkey), cover

Now, D Repubblica, pag.102

Chiara Pagani, Burri e D'Elia faccia a faccia, La Lettura, pag.21

2014

Carmen Stolfi, Untitled Association - édra, flyer

Raffaele Gavarro, Due o tre cose che so di loro, Exibart n.87, pag.59

Daniela Trincia, Davide D'Elia, la memoria oltre la vita, Arte e Critica n.77, pag.97

2013

Claudio Libero Pisano / Lea Mattarella, Nell'Acqua Capisco, Acqua, exhibition catalogue, pag.17

Fabio De Chirico / Massimo Mattioli, Artsiders, exhibition catalogue, pag.96-99

D. Speranza, La realta' del mondo filtrata dai contrasti, La città, pag.36

Abigail Lewis, Antivegetativa - Q&A with Davide D'Elia, Nero Magazine

2011

Giulia Ferracci, Davide D'Elia######1, Cura, pag.101-105

C. Prada, Funghi rigenerati, buoni & cattivi…, Velvet, pag.42

Eleonora Capretti, Ieri distrattamente mi volsi a …, Sguardo contemporaneo

2010

A. Aquilanti / A. Inzana / F. Pizzuto, Ieri distrattamente mi volsi a considerar altrui memorie ( dalle quali mi ritrovai rinvigorito), exhibition catalogue

Flavia Montecchi, Sperimentazione dello spazio…, Art Apart of Culture

2008

M. Arsanios, Drawmusicdraw, exhibition catalogue

S. Wroe, The cosmic invaders make some Spiritual Promises, The Knowledge (The Times), pag.97

2007

O. Spatola, Orizzonte degli eventi, exhibition catalogue

M. Di Tursi, A Ceglie le arti giocano col tempo, Corriere del Mezzogiorno.

___________________

The perfect shelter

Pietro Gaglianò

“When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all possible books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness.”

Jorge Luis Borges

One of the key factors underlying the erection of libraries, museums and archives by a state or an institution is the conscious and programmatic urge towards the construction of an identity. In Europe and North America, the creation of public setups for the preservation and classification of works, artefacts, books and documents is related to the definition of an unequivocal narration that either confirms or expands established borders and at the same time grants authority (and inescapability) to the existing supremacy. According to a mechanistic version of history, things went the way they had to go, and it would be insane to imagine a different set of things, opposing the authority. The places of preservation take shape in time and public space, through a specious use of history where “among all the possible interpretations, a single version of the past is represented as the past”¹.

All this happens in compliance with two coherent lines of action. The first aiming at assimilating: the tampering of time allows the appropriation of places and of different forms of experience and description of the same. The second tending to exclusion, outlining the passage between what is included in this form of contrived self-recognition and what is rejected, forced to silence for being inappropriate, unsuitable to the prevailing narration. As highlighted by Jacques Deridda, the creation of an archive (and consequently of libraries and museums) intentionally consigns to oblivion anything that is excluded for being unjustified². The deliberately pursued result of this strategy is the identification of subjectivities within the boundaries of a solid representation, capable of persuading its addressees about the necessity of “being inside and not outside the system, what gives them a right to citizenship (with the exclusion and to the detriment of those who do not have it)”³. The resulting effect is the rejection of anything laying outside the boundaries, which is stigmatized as irrelevant and is responsible for any lack of certainty, prosperity, prominence, happiness.

Such structure usually recurs in historical constructions, particularly in the case of the birth of art history in modern times. In 1550 Giorgio Vasari publishes the first issue of Le vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori (Lives of the most illustrious painters, sculptors and architects), delivering to the entire world a manifesto where aesthetic primacy (the supremacy of Renaissance in Central Italy, Tuscany and in particular in Florence, resembling a new Athens under the rule of the De Medici family, with a genealogy starting with Giotto and Cimabue and leading up to the unparalleled figure of Leonardo da Vinci, Raffaello Sanzio and finally, above all, the genius of Michelangelo Buonarroti) combines with a precise geopolitical project – that of Cosimo I’s dynasty, that gave to history a French queen⁴ (and a second one a few decades later⁵) and two popes⁶. After two centuries, in 1753, with the publishing of The History of Art in Antiquity, Johann Joachim Winckelmann declares the supremacy of classic arts and lays the foundations of the modern historical concept, founded on a science-based positivist dissertation⁷. This method moves from the origins of the western culture and in the centuries between XVII and XIX, it applies to the European colonial wars, thus anticipating some optical instruments later adopted by anthropologists: the definition of a standard (born out of a synthesis between art’s aesthetic models and history’s causal-temporal model) and the assumption that it could be applied to all the expressions of human intelligence, creativity and sociability⁸.

Referred to the cultural structure of museums and libraries, all this can be considered as the creation of a fortress, a sort of citadel of identity: institutions for future memory, or rather solid shelters for the future of memory. And the more critical the conditions around this moral space of identity, as history accelerates its course and constricts the certainties related to such construction (due to physiologic social changes, transfers of large masses of people, effects of the environmental crisis), the harsher becomes the defensive vocation of the fortress, increasingly taking on the aspect of a shelter.

In The library of Babel, Jorge Luis Borges narrates“when it was proclaimed that the Library contained all possible books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. Every man had the feeling to be the master of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or global problem whose solution would not exist in some hexagon. The universe was now justified, the universe abruptly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope”⁹. And it is precisely to this universe made up of exactitudes, of binary categories, with no room left to ambiguity and open questions, it is precisely to this mindset of absolute control on what we are and on the borders that keep the different outside, that the majority of people living in the north-Atlantic part of the world are striving: a space where the guarantee of certitude and of well-defined categories drives any possible different definitions away along with the hope, the imagination and the impulse towards the other.

As the opposition against the power is nourished by knowledge but most of all by imagination, by the free look beyond the reality and the undistinguished way it is governed, to make a move in the direction of subversion.

On the other hand, in the vast territory of removed things, not only hope is cut away, but the concept of shelter shows it antithetical meaning, characterized by fortuity, hybridation, a form of generative spontaneity that leaves no room to exclusion. It is on the outskirts of the world, where data, memories, debris are confusedly but not casually stacked up, that culture regenerates thanks to the various contaminations, to weak control and loose rules. As Iosif Brodskij puts it, the outskirts of the world “is not where the world comes to an end – on the contrary, it is exactly where the world praises itself, through language and through sight as well”¹⁰. Beyond the official versions, the shelter adopts rejected solutions, secondary material, and all the unsaid that can reveal the true substance of spaces and of their time.This can be experienced in the real world as well as in the symbolic space where art happens, in its capacity to inspire and sometimes even modify the reality. By merging the two different interpretations of the word “shelter”, art is able to critically revise the Euro-American cultural construction and places authentic invention in those “spaces of cultural improvisation”¹¹ that in David Graeber’s idea are made to accommodate the democratic innovation, whenever the power “allows new conditions out of the global network: spaces outside state control, that host cultural elaborations contravening the power itself”¹². The artists involved in the imagination process that coincides with resistance are those who collect the debris and stage either the remains or the assembly work that do not represent the disintegration of civilization, but give a hint to the possible developments of civilization and to the stratification of collective moral constructions.

According to Hal Foster the artists inspired by what he calls an “Archival Impulse” “are trying to recall historical information gone lost or removed”¹³. By acting according to the methods of scientific analysis, these artists re-write those methods, when they subvert hierarchic orders through the uneven and often provisional collection and connection of apparently incommensurable elements. Still they preserve the generating capacity of the archive, “in such a way that the very nature of the materials contained in the archive is highlighted as if they were found and yet constructed, factual and yet artificial, public and yet private”¹⁴.

Davide D’Elia’s research develops like a ritual of human time, pointing out its relentlessness and the tendency towards imperfection and bewilderment. Furniture, fabrics, pictures and other antiques are partially covered with a layer of colour (antifouling paint, normally used to protect ships hulls). The consequences of this action produce a reduction in the author’s sphere of control and appear in the continuous transformation of unpainted surfaces: like in Gilles Clément’s description of urban forms, it is “a third landscape” emerging when human activities fade away, standing in the interstices between manufactured world and spontaneous nature²¹. The role of antifouling painting is that of a metaphor of the conservative will that animates any defensive action in favour of the supposed unity of cultural and national nature inherent to all the institutions of identity memory: “the third landscape recalls the Third Estate (and not the Third World). It is a space where neither power nor submission to power are expressed”²². History is indifferent to the obstructions exercised by the dominating power. It has always been moving forward through retractions, sudden deviations and unexpected returns. It acts as unscrupulous nemesis when it recalls the past that we imagine to be organized and permanently reconciled²³. Like in historiographic dissertation carried out through the practice of exclusions and sustained by it, the contrast between the two parts in D’Elia’s works reveals an obvious fact: the unpainted substance keeps on flowing with time, biologically degenerating, ageing and deteriorating, through a vital motion of inert substances and organisms. The other part is blocked in a grotesque imitation of nature (the artificial blue is meant to represent the colour of water) in the attempt to attain an artificial immutability: a condition of permanent sterility which has little in common with natural and historical cycles.

D’Elia’s works flank George Bataille’s concept, theorized through heterology, which can be simplified as follows: “anything opposing a homogeneous representation of the world”²⁴, something germinating outside – and in contrast to – any system, either philosophical, social or moral. Under this point of view, D’Elia’s work unveils an anti-heroic view of history, where time blooms (exactly the way the moulds on the artist’s work do) in those areas in which control and systemic construction are less pressing and pervading. Even the choice of the assembling work hasa precise meaning inside this metaphor: nearly all his works are made of different objects, being assembled as if they were formally coherent, although the result is a further artifice that deceives the sight and announces the impossibility to create permanent categories.

All this contains a hushed pedagogic ambition, an invitation to divert from the traditional mis-en-scène to “learn anew the feeling of time and regain the awareness of history”²⁵, in accordance with Marc Augé’s belief regarding what should occur in front of the ruins, experiencing “pure time”, with no sentimentalism.

The idea of cultural identity and its metamorphosis through history define the core of Justin Randolph Thompson’s work, who retraces some historical events and their origins placing them within the framework of intersections, parallelisms, inserts and dissenting declarations. Tryin' to get ready, the performance specifically realized for Shelters and Libraries, proposes a re-enactment of the ceremony that took place on 31^st May 1945, when the United States of America returned Cristopher Columbus’s ashes to the city of Genoa. Thompson’s interpretation is focused on an aspect of primary importance: The Infantry Division Buffalo Soldier that entered Genoa at the end of April to celebrate and welcome the remains, was made of Afro-American soldiers. In his performance the artist marches through Via XX Settembre, like the original parade, singing some spirituals (slaves vocals in the plantations) with Leon Jones, and in particular the one sung on the ceremony day by the choir Wings Over Jordan. In this way, he emphasises quite a few problematic aspects of this geopolitically overturned situation

All the works of Shelters and Libraries are in a transitionary position, a new semantic existence, approaching the expository balance of a museum. The similarity with museums-displays plays an antagonistic role as it illogically reveals its transitional character. The displayed works are inviolable but in a peculiar way, momentarily suspended, still conveying information and divergent narrations and causing short-circuits. In this perspective, they represent a perfect shelter, as art often does.