Arshake’s banner presents its third special project, Jelly Ghosts, by polyhedric artist Girolamo Marri, who tirelessly experiments with a variety of techniques and supports, following on his philosophical and anthropological interests. His metaphorical creativity and predisposition to verbal – visual narration is expressed through performance as well as video, photography, painting and writing. Words, whether integrated into the work – as in his series of acrylics on canvas presented for his first solo exhibition at Rome’s Café Europe Centre for Contemporary Art in 2011 – or just used for titling, are to be considered in his practice as important as the works’ visual components – regardless of the expressive means used to shape them. Words, as well as paintings, video and photographs, can take on a performative nature and spirit. And performance can become a dynamic externalization of a philosophical approach that revolves around emotion and intuition. On the other hand, technical means can occasionally become an expressive instrument through the distortion of a narration. For example, in his recent installation/performance Nine Gentle Ghosts (2014), it is by editing the video-documentation according to a non linear narrative, that the artist is able to underline the relativity of concepts of «instant», «before» and «after».
As in other previous works, in Jelly Ghosts Marri explores the idea of communication, and the use of conventional signs as well as the concept of time as a human fabrication. The banner is a vehicle through which he penetrates the intimate sphere of the viewer, establishing a contact, a foreword to something that could potentially happen. In his exploration of ritualistic canons that articulate the «beginning» of everything, Marri invites us to become a part of an infinite reformulation of the very same situation – different each time the page is refreshed, according to a random selection made by a software.
Arshake is a project dedicated to art and technology the focus of which extends to a wider cultural context with an interdisciplinary approach. The first two projects which inaugurated the banner’s space – Oltre l’attesa / Beyond the Wait by Cristian Rizzuti and Fourth Dimension Banner by Chiara Passa – brought the creativity of both artists to a space that is an «alternative» to the exhibition space, defining it on the basis of new spatio-temporal coordinates.
In a creative expression very similar to generative and filmed performances, Oltre l’attesa prepared us to look at the banner like a generative canvas upon which images, every day different, took form in real time. The Fourth Dimension Banner by Chiara Passa immersed us in the architecture of that liminal zone known as the interface – of which the banner is part -, thin film or a technological skin that has overcome its role as boundary between the inner and outer worlds, much like natural skin. Jelly Ghosts continues to explore and define the banner’s space. This time, Girolamo Marri will be inhabiting the space for two months, impersonating situations that will appear and disappear to the rhythm of the spectator’s log-on to the website.
