Made as part of Pompeii Commitment. Archaeological Materials.
Wednesday, September 13 at 18.00:XNUMX p.m. Free admission until all seats are taken.
On Wednesday, September 13, at 18.00:XNUMX p.m., the Madre, the museum of contemporary art of the Campania Region, will host the presentation of the vinyl by artist Anri Sala, entitled Body Double, created as part of Pompeii Commitment. Archaeological matters – the first long-term contemporary art program established by the Archaeological Park of Pompeii. After institutional greetings from Angela Tecce, President of the Donnaregina Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Eva Fabbris, Director of the Madre museum, and Gabriel Zuchtriegel, Director of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, the artist will be joined by Andrea Viliani, Director of the Museum of Civilizations and co-curator of Pompeii Commitment, Marcella Beccaria, Chief Curator and Curator of the Collections of the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Rivoli-Turin, Vice President of AMACI-Association of Italian Contemporary Art Museums, guest curator of the project.
The vinyl Body Double by the artist Anri Sala (Tirana, 1974) was created with the curation of Marcella Beccaria and Andrea Viliani, and produced thanks to the kind support of Gianfranco D'Amato.
The presentation of this work at the Madre museum takes on particular importance in the perspective of a constructive synergy between the institutions, which have already had the opportunity to collaborate on the occasion of the Pompei@Madre exhibition, curated by Andrea Viliani and inaugurated at the end of 2017.
Anri Sala is the inaugural artist of Pompeii Commitment. Archaeological Materials – Digital Fellowship, a new annual program that promotes artistic and curatorial research within the trans-temporal, multi-species, and deeply stratified context of Pompeii. Curated by Marcella Beccaria, the Digital Fellowship presents Body Double, a new sound work conceived by Sala that connects artifacts found in Pompeii in recent years with others from excavations carried out in past centuries. The work is divided into two parts – Side A and Side A Too –, published on pompeiicommitment.org on September 1 and October 6, 2022, and now presented in a limited edition disc.
Anri Sala’s works are devices that provoke the “present moment,” becoming co-producers of that enigmatic fragment of time and space that separates the before from the after and the past from the memory that tries to remember it. Sala looked at the plaster casts of two victims, produced following the discovery of human remains in 2020 during the excavations of Civita Giuliana. At the same time, the artist was inspired by an ancient wind instrument, similar to a double flute, known as aulos in ancient Greek and tibia in Latin. In the extraordinary heritage returned from Pompeii, this instrument is present thanks to finds excavated in 2018 and others already found around 1800. By making the victims’ last breath ideally perceptible and making an instrument that has been silent for millennia resonate, Sala’s work establishes a poetic equivalence between the duration of the sound composition and the volume of air left by the bodies in the ash, a space that the plaster casts make tangible. Played with a reconstruction of the ancient tibia and accompanied by two new drawings specially created by the artist, the work Body Double is an elegy dedicated to the ancient inhabitants of Pompeii, a place that continues to return from the past to the present, projecting itself towards the future and making space and time porous entities, folded in on themselves. Body Double is performed by the scholar Stefan Hagel, who plays the ancient instrument using a reconstruction he himself designed using digital technologies.
The sequence of contents, which formed part of Anri Sala's Digital Fellowship, was developed in relation to the concepts of double, similar, equivalent, stratigraphic and circular that are part of the artist's work. The curator's text delves into the project, providing a story that includes the numerous artistic, technical, scientific and, above all, human connections that made it possible.
Article published on 7 September 2023 - 18:40
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