Productions 6

 

 

21 July – 15 September 02

 

Gianni Motti opens the exhibition series Productions to the concept of territory. His works follow a strategy of de-territorialisation, disintegrating the territorial categories through the systematical disregard of their borders. At the same time, the exhibition continues and further develops "the economy of images" explored in the previous exhibitions of the Productions-series.

Territories are areas which are defined by natural or artificial boarders. The term territory as a material reality is juxtaposed to its metaphorical use, describing non-physical areas of influence. While classical territories become increasingly obsolete through the globalization and the crisis of the national states, the global areas of influence based on social and mainly immaterial and invisible borders become more and more evident. These areas of influence and their mechanism of drawing the boundaries are moving increasingly into the foreground.

Gianni Mottis series Collateral Damage consists of 10 landscape photographs that are showing columns of smoke between houses and flowering fruit trees. These photographs are presented without any explanation or narrative. They are photographs, the artist bought from an agency. What they depict are the columns of bomb smoke. Shot in the Kosovo, Macedonia and Palestine wars, they were considered inappropriate for press purposes and thus remained unused. Gianni Motti is juxtaposing the territorial conflicts documented in the photographs with the war of images, which is always also a rhetorical war led with words. Through the lack of explanation the photographs fall into an aesthetic space, thus missing the tragedy of the conflicts represented. The images of the wars are therefore becoming recognizable as rethoric gestures, which the artist has freed from their medial context. Dealing with "unsuitable" material, Gianni Motti is investigating the message of these photographs in a dual sense: firstly, the convention of the politics of images of the media is identified as a territory in its own right, which boundaries are clearly visible. Secondly, the silence of these photographs points to the necessity of a previously defined de-codation code.

The second work Tranquillity Base is an original replica of the American flag on the moon. Here too, a territorial claim has been put in relation to a medial-rhetoric statement. The ready-made manifests a symbolic political gesture; the acutal taking place of the event becomes unimportant. Thanks to the medial construction of the gesture, it becomes reality in the sense of standing for a realizable territorial claim.

The work Big Crunch Clock introduces the dimension of time into these scenarios. The clock shows the countdown of about 5 billion years, counting towards the end of the Universe and hence to the end of any territory.

The exhibition series Productions is supported by Arte Fiera Bologna