Camilla Alberti joins the project «Young Italian Artists. Contemporary Art Stories», ongoing space and archive dedicated to key players in the contemporary art world, who are under 35, conceived by Antonello Tolve, and curated with Elena Giulia Rossi.
I see ruins as key places for exploring new ways of living and new methods of narrating life. Decentralised, borderless spaces whose abandonment has cancelled out any sense of belonging, turning them into spaces of active construction, in which different organisms intervene, creating a dialogue with their own methods of building and inhabiting. My research moves towards these reflections and seeks to define an image that’s ready to welcome the new myths of the future.
An iridescent aura half concealed and half revealed crumbling walls sunk in soft, steeply sloping red soil. Surfaces shone like rubies encrusted with white boulders and tufts of grass, while shady ravines opened, black as pitch. Cradles of defenceless bodies, as yet undigested, slid gradually downwards, losing their shape little by little. The chasms were bottomless; they filtered the remains of spent lives, abandoning them on the earth like dusky beads. They fell from the creases of massive tree trunks which towered upside down, slithering like the coils of serpents among the dunes of a barren land. Sparse forests with petrol-green trees slid ceaselessly, scratching the crust of a noisy world. Fragments of the underlying life were absorbed by a monstrous mass of shape-shifting organisms that advanced, one step at a time, sinking into the ground like the decomposing claws of a gigantic corpse. A conglomerate creature upon whose surface whirled cogs trapped in mycelial webs, plants with green domes and trunks grey as cement scattered over the surface of the red desert. On the soft clay soil, as ancient as the world itself, appeared the tracks of animals fleeing to the shelter of grassy fronds and threads of copper.
Everything was turning, every part of this compound organism bloomed at the summit and slid downwards to scrape and devour the earth, while the earth consumed it in turn. Life unravelled, ruining one against the other.
Camilla Alberti. October, 2020
