The conversation with Angelo di Bello at the NONE’s studio continues. The group of architects, this time, describes itself through its relationship with matter and its search for a balance between storytelling and the means with which it is realised. The conversation focuses on the creation process behind The Mirror of Our Nature (Lo Specchio della Nostra Natura), a work created for the Italian Pavilion in Cannes (2017) with which they brought together cinema and visual arts.
Angelo di Bello: Lights, sound and substance are the essentials for you; how do you experience the relationship between lights, sound, substance and technology?
NONE: We’re definitely not tech fetishists who absolutely have to work at the limits of technology or its errors; that’s for sure. We use technology, but in a freer way; in fact we undoubtedly do things that are highly futuristic but using really old technology. In effect, we always feel the need to have something physical: we’d never just do a projection, for example; but this research into form that moves towards physicality is not obligatory, it comes fairly naturally to us in our combination of the more material part with the technology…
…We try and find a balance between what we want to say and the ways of seeing it. And what are the means? The human senses; so this is what we focus on as we seek to stimulate new perceptions. The fact is that we place ourselves in an environment (the category of immersive art) which is technology and art, where artwork is used to stimulate experiences. Experience is a word that has been swallowed up by marketing, which associates experience closely with consumption. What we do is an attempt to create environments in which the perceptions are stimulated in order to produce a subjective experience. And this can have a very different meaning for me and for someone else…
…a reflection, or rather a video or a material, is closely liked to the perception we seek to convey…
…up to there it’s pretty universal, and perhaps also similar to marketing; but the point is to give these experiences a meaning that’s a bit more profound and critical, to try and create a connection between my aesthetic experience at that moment and the kinaesthetic experience I have every day at home or walking down the street. What we try and avoid is the risk of recreating the perceptual moment through special effect: people see and admire special effects but the effect doesn’t satisfy us because it has no connection with real, concrete content.
But you don’t have any works that are linked only to special effects. I really don’t think so.
I’ll give you an example. For many years we did the Italian Pavilion at Cannes: in the 2017 edition last year, The Mirror of our Nature was acclaimed as a piece of art; it even gained international recognition and was featured on the cover of Frame…
…articles in all the online magazines…
…it’s one of those trusty old reasons why we get invited to do these things; that special effect. We concluded the installation by talking about cinema but also about our work, finishing with the sentence “After all, it’s just a trick”, in the voice of…
…Jep Gambardella…
…the point is the awe you feel anyway when faced with an installation. I’d add that as a spectator you always recognise something, be it a reflected surface, a sheet of mylar, the screens or the sound, but everything evokes something else in you. Our relationship with an artwork really begins there, with that experience and with a memory that we might have had. We emphasise this, we enhance it to the point that you become disoriented by your perception, indeed the space is no longer recognisable, in it you no longer understand where you are; it’s a place but it’s also a non-place. And when that happens, visitors find themselves in a situation that makes them go “Wow! That’s amazing!”.
This establishes a limit, a limit within which the aesthetic power of the space very often overtakes – unfortunately – the expressive power of the concept and the message you want it to convey; this lack of harmony means that the installation can become the latest in an endless series of selfie mechanisms: the visitor, the spectator is no longer focusing on what the installation might have to say, what the message might be, but rather exclaiming “Wow! That’s amazing!”. At Cannes we worked very hard to find a form of expression that wasn’t linked just to the show; not only about the special effect. Our starting point was another process, a process of research, linked in fact to the social aspect, to politics, to the current state of humankind. Only when this works, in other words when you succeed in creating an object or an element that fits within a space and that really enters into a dialogue with the spectator, that enables a decoding, a participation or a bond, when you establish a link with the object, only then can it be a successful project…
…we could say that our installation in Cannes was really useful in that it allowed us to experiment as imaginatively as possible with new techniques. It was a great learning environment for techniques, for production, and led us to an understanding of various things…
…and not only in technical terms. What we were able to focus on was the relationship between the artistic journey and the professional journey, which often overlap. Ultimately we need a little more awareness of this relationship, awareness we didn’t have before. We actually intuited this when we called ourselves NONE, wanting to avoid “none of your business”.
It’s true that The Mirror of our Nature is not merely an effect. Seeing the magnification of gestures from Italian film provoked several reflections for me: about looking, about communication, about the body and consequently about identity too. I’d say it’s not just an extraordinary and spectacular piece of work; the political element is clearly present.
I’m happy to hear that, because we’re terribly critical of ourselves. Our aim was to speak about the essence of being Italian as seen from the outside, about the ability to express feelings with the language of the body, and at the same time also to express an internal criticism, which is why it ends with “It’s just a trick”. We also wanted to convey the vanity of the spectacle: a deliberate selfie machine!
… to be continued…
(the conversation between Angelo di Bello and NONE will continue on Tuesday February 12, 2019)
NONE is an Italian collective of multi-talented architects interested in exploring identity boundaries, the relationship between man and machine, between cinema and art and anything that history and progress offers to their attentive gaze. NONE’s work covers a wide range of fields, from immersive installations to the organisation of symposia with diverse professionals, critics, artists, producers, organisers and thinkers. Guided by the spirit of research and experimentation, the identity of the collective reveals itself as the work develops and its creativity is called on to intervene in different fields and disciplines. Angelo Di Bello has interviewed the members of NONE in their studio. Their conversation is published on Arshake in four parts, and this is the second. As a start (A chat in NONE’s House.Part I), the collective described its working methods and introduced two important projects, Hybrid Space, created for Toyota, and No Strata, realised for Farlo Santander in Sao Paulo (Brazil).
images: (cover 1,2,4,5,6) NONE, «Lo specchio della nostra natura», 2017, preview studio visit (3,7) NONE – Italian Pavilion, «Lo Specchio della nostra natura», installazione site-specific, Cannes 2017, credits NONE collective
