Trieste is the city of Bobi Bazlen, Leonor Fini, Leo Castelli and Gillo Dorfles, with whom I took a walk in Piazza Unità d’Italia in 2007, turning at Via dell’Orologio and from there headed towards the Revoltella Museum where an important anthological exhibition was taking place at the time (Gillo Dorfles 1935-2007). The recent Neuro_Revolution project, organised by the AiR Trieste association, lays the foundations for a reflection on human civilisation, increasingly entangled in the wake of what Giorgio Griziotti – present, among other things, at an intensive training (and information) meeting organised between 14 and 15 November last year – beautifully defined as neuro-capitalism.
This reflection draws on a series of artistic residencies (I would like to point out that Air Trieste’s elegant artist-in-residence programme was launched in 2016). Starting precisely from the concept of biohypermedia, that is to say from that “sphere in which the body in its entirety connects to network devices in such an intimate way that it enters into a symbiosis in which reciprocal modifications and simulations take place” (Griziotti), Camilla Alberti (Rho, 1994), Marco Antelmi (Bari, 1993), Leonardo Bentini (Rome, 1994), Luca Marcelli (Cagliari, 1995), the duo Orecchie d’Asino formed by Ornella De Carlo (Acquaviva delle Fonti, 1991) and Federica Porro (Como, 1994), and Valerio Veneruso (Naples, 1984), all artists under-35, have alternated each other in residence and have gradually elaborated discussions, projects that, in close contact with neuroscientists and scholars in the field, represent a suggestive analysis of a world that Flusser anticipated as becoming increasingly soft, nebulous, spectral: and that precisely because it is linked to the movements of the immatériaux (I am of course referring to a wide landscape provided by Lyotard and Chaput in the 1985 exhibition at the Centre de Création Industrielle) offer the Babelic state of art of today.
The Intangible Community (2020) by Leonardo Bentini, The Voices (2020) by Luca Marcelli, Quattrocchi (2020) by Orecchie D’Asino, Theories of Mice (2020) by Marco Antelmi, Public void on pointer enter (2020) by Valerio Veneruso and WWW – Worlding Wild Web (2020) by Camilla Alberti are artworks – all visible in the final project exhibition, entitled Neuro_Revolution and edited by Francesca Lazzarini (to read her introductory text, written from the heart and with intelligence) – which invites us to rethink under the ethical and political lens the space of life, this social device of ours, perhaps exploited too much by cognitive capitalism, by a financial machine calibrated on the temporal-spatial dynamics of the non-human.
NEURO_REVOLUTION.pratiche artistiche, neuroscienze e tecnologia nella società in rete
curated by Francesca Lazzarini,MLZ Art Dep, Trieste 04.09 – 29.10.2020
Artists: Camilla Alberti, Marco Antelmi, Leonardo Bentini, Luca Marcelli, Orecchie d’Asino, Valerio Veneruso
images: (cover 1) Valerio Veneruso, extract from VR experience, Public void on pointer enter, 2020, Courtesy l’artista e AiR Trieste – Neuro_Revolution, Per Chi Crea (2) Public void on pointer enter, Valerio Veneruso, Neuro_Revolution, 2020, MLZ Art Dep, Courtesy AiR Trieste – Per Chi Crea, Foto Studio Macovaz (3) Dettaglio, The Intangible Community, Leonardo Bentini, Neuro_Revolution, 2020, MLZ Art Dep, Courtesy AiR Trieste – Per Chi Crea, Foto Studio Macovaz (4) Camilla Alberti, WWW – Worlding Wild Web, 2020, organic sculpture, 45 x 45 x 45 cm, Courtesy the Artist and AiR Trieste – Neuro_Revolution, Per Chi Crea
