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19/5/2010

Marcello Maloberti

Generali Foundation, Wien

Curated by Sabine Folie

Marcello Maloberti has developed a site-specific performative setting for the Generali Foundation. It bears the eclectic title Die Schmetterlinge essen die Bananen. Equally eclectic is the method of his artistic production. What is this all about? Is it performance, theater, film, happening, installation, photography, painting, collage? There is something of everything: two living sculptures, for example, flanking the entrance to the Generali Foundation like neoclassical columns framing the doorway of some luxury villa, and holding a tray with little trees on it, blaring with trashy run-of-the-mill radio sounds; a child sitting in a corner, cutting out pictures from illustrated magazines; the shattered glass of (drunken) bottles in sailor suits scattered around; a discarded fridge somewhere in the empty exhibition space, from which a cacophony of noises emerges; and, finally, lined up in a row, fairly strong humans holding up porcelain tigers for as long as they can...

Maloberti prepares a space, and the people who become actors in it are equipped with certain paraphernalia: blankets, towels with kitschy leopard and tiger motifs—like those sold by "vu cumprà" vendors on beaches—the red-and-white checkered tablecloths typical of Italian trattorie, cheap mirrors, pencils and markers, postcards, empty medicine bottles, cheap plastic garden chairs: ingredients for a small, sometimes slightly weird world theater, with precarious architectures—a flurry and scurry like in a fairytale, in which big and small, old and young, "indigenous" and immigrant, educated and uneducated, poor and rich—rather poor than rich—each play their role. It is not theater that occurs here, although there are strong theatrical aspects to it; it is more like "theater without a theater": the stage is set, even though the choice seems accidental. The locations are usually unguarded, open to the city’s flâneurs and roamers, who may get involved, who want to participate, who are asked for their opinions.

The "interventions" are temporary, but they make atmospheres change. Maloberti is not a sociologist, rather a natural scientist of sorts, an observer and "enabler"; not so much the director but rather a catalyst for these odd and hilarious simultaneous actions that nonetheless follow a certain aesthetic parameter, bracketed together by a certain rigor, although seen, superficially, it all looks so very light and delicate, teetering on the brink of dissolution, constantly unraveling toward a tragicomic catastrophe. This is the line that Maloberti walks, without ever compromising credibility, and the tender strings of his "tools" weave what is going on here into a tapestry of ambivalent beauty, full of crass realism and ecstatic, fanciful action—surreal action outside time.

Image: Marcello Maloberti, TAgADÀ, 2007, Performance und Installationen. Photo: Ela Bialkowska. Courtesy Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Mailand

Press: Barbara Mahlknecht, +43 1 504 98 80–71114
found.presse@generali.at

Performance May 20, 2010, 7-9 p.m.

Generali Foundation
Wiedner Hauptstrasse 15, Wien

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