Today Matteo Costanzo, with his work and reflection, 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.
Only in the act do I simultaneously perceive the separation and presence of the body. An act that occurs without waiting. An act of rebellion. Language divides into the body itself and thoughts about the body. Only the body that experiences this condition can try to recreate it. Mastering the fluid part of our awareness requires us to stop thinking of ourselves as an “I”, but rather as a flow alongside and in relation to other flows. So, I become the worker and interpreter of the futile and overstated matter of the act. A go-between. To coincide with the cut, the trauma of language itself, becoming one. In ancient Hebrew the word “milà” indicates both the word (language) and the cut (circumcision), evidence of how the fate of both word and body have always been viewed as interdependent. Both come into being as the result of the incision from which they emerge, there is no pre-existing matter or form – only after an incision can they be spoken and seen. In fact, to circumcise is also to circumscribe; a margin produces a frame that separates, thus making something identifiable, visible, nameable. A scalpel to become the incision. Uncovering the unconscious, not in order to turn it into something else or understand it, but to become aware of it. To co-incide with this incision. Cutting as language in action. Cutting as defence for the rebellion. The incision of the image from the real produces an ideological space, in which the objects of vision are called on to recognise and reevaluate themselves, questioning the act of seeing itself. What reveals the world to us at its highest visible power is nothing other than what blinds us, preventing us from seeing it. Ideology. When you see everything, it is worthless. Resistance against the levelling of the everything-in-image involves the recovery of ways of seeing and the management of the quantity and dissemination of content. Appropriation, overlap, post production, reconversion. Now communication is continuous and global. We are submerged in media, social networks, Big Data, cyber-balcanisation and the videosphere. In order to exist. Not much, but allowing us to be something. We have put an end to debates. Adrift with possibilities, accumulating attempts, in transition without a beginning or an end. This is the message of the device/hybrid, which is also the device/hybrid itself. Tending in the direction of change. A perpetuation of individual/public self-subjectification. To become. The only means to constitute an identity. New totalising narratives, fathers, diviners or gurus are no longer necessary. It is about indulging in your own obsession. Art is a self-regulated non-place and the collection of attempts that force and manifest its evolution. I will continue as I began, for the beauty of the act.
Matteo Costanzo
