Marco Poloni
dal 15/9/2013 al 1/11/2013
Segnalato da
15/9/2013
Marco Poloni
Galerie Campagne Premiere, Berlin
Displacement Island. Part of "Archaeologies of the Future", an exhibition series that features works, which deal productively with historical material. Poloni's work consists of 64 pictures, visual knots between which a loose net is stretched, a porous narrative of the island Lampedusa.
With Archaeologies of the Future Galerie Campagne Première starts an exhibition series that features works, which deal productively with historical material. The series (curated by Heike Fuhlbrügge and Nina Koidl) encompasses artistic practices which shape and shift historical facts, build new realities and create projections into the future.
As an opening to this series Campagne Première shows Displacement Island by Marco Poloni. The work consists of 64 pictures, visual knots between which a loose net is stretched, a porous narrative of the island Lampedusa. Poloni exposes Lampedusa as a place of transit, a place of promise and illusion – an island intersecting the seasonal flows of migration and tourism.
The pictures – press agency photographs, film stills, family album snapshots, reproductions, space imagery and Poloni's own photographs – exist in contiguity. They connect through similarities and differences and unfold fields of meaning. This constellation of pictures is not an indexical chain – the stories and events rather oscillate, digress and sink, float and strand.
The paradisiacal tourist island famous for the beauty of its beaches is confronted with a reminder of its geopolitical role. The gulf between two figures of the displaced, the tourist and the illegal migrant, is articulated in a loose narrative matrix. The Summer refuge of the northern European "included" is confronted with the experience of the excluded of Schengen, who are constantly scanned by control satellites and checked by border police patrols.
For the tourist, as for the migrant, the beach is promised land. For the former, the beach is the site of the illusory oblivion of his utilitarian existence. Attracted by the exceptional transparency of the waters, he generates an economy that supplements that of fishing. For the latter, the beach is the end of a dangerous journey on a fortune boat from the coast of North Africa to Italy. It is the materialisation of the dream of an economically better life within the European Union.
Poloni uses the term "constellation" to qualify his work with photographic dispositifs. The spatial organisation of the photographs on the wall – which he thinks of as an extended book – follows montage strategies derived from cinema, through colour, form and structure. The graphical envelope of the work has the shape of a wave.
Campagne Première GmbH
Chausseestrasse 116 D-10115 Berlin
Hours: Tue - Sat 11am - 6pm