Practices and thematics of the new artistic generation

Place or space
One could depart by making some reflections on the way in which we represent a place which is no longer seen as a definite and stable structure, but rather a situation capable of generating from (or that generates) human intercourse and social relationships. It is for this characteristic that I believe the term "place" must be used instead of "space," which is a word connected above all to the history of art and to the concrete realizations of sculptural objects. "Place" returns us more to an idea of covering or occupying territory, the environment, or, in artistic terms, installation. Many studies have been made on urbanistic, philosophical, economic, and sociological levels which center on the need to create a place (or which reflect on the problems of living in a place), and we might consider many contemporary works as reflections on the relationships that the artist introduces to his or her own environment, not only in ecological terms, but as complex systems with which one interacts and in which one represents oneself. We also must consider that one of the elements characterizing the transformation of actual society is the loss of identity of places. Our own houses, which were first synonymous with places of shelter, or closed spaces, have now become switchboards for exchanges of information and potential global communication (with the telephone, modem and fax).
In this moment of extraordinary change, the representation of places is also being radically rediscussed.2 The impossibility of representation is often mentioned, but this pertains most of the time to an incapability of finding different, adequate forms (somewhat similar to the current difficulty in denominating new forms of art, architecture, etc., by calling them "neo-" or "post-" something else). It would undoubtedly be simplistic to think of representations of territory in terms of the past, to simply note a few new characteristics, because our territory is constituted more and more by a net of communications, and, ironically, the impossibility of communicating. Some of these places are characterized precisely by their anonymity, by being always the same, a kind of impersonality that makes them easily accessible to all, but, for the same reasons, absolutely uninhabitable for everybody. Generally, these non-places are situated where passage is the conclusive element: the train station, the airport, the supermarket or mall, the hotel, the doctor's or dentist's waiting room, and the subway.3 But they are now making their way into factories, offices, and perhaps even our own residences. Anonymous places where one can become an anonymous being. To photograph these non-places or create environments for people's socialization is not to call an old, obsolete society to remake itself; it is an attempt remain among people, to bring the battle back into a territory where relationships between people are the essential thing, and places, or art itself, become a way to facilitate them.4
Thus, "place" comes back to "way" in a tight connection between itself and its surroundings, between individualism and the need to share.

Same places or different places - I've always been fascinated in the vastness of space as represented in the photos of Jeff Wall, or in the capacity for large volumes and scale in so much American art, but I believe that there is a fundamental difference of spatial perception between those who live in Europe and those who live in North America. Anybody who has travelled to the Americas simply can't help but notice the gigantic extensions of territory where there are no cities, only a few houses separated from each other by kilometres of territory. Even their cities, in their conformation and extension, reflect this different perspective, this different "eye."
But I don't want to base my reflection on a comparison of European space and American space; I simply wanted to depart from this point in order to analyze how the depersonalization of places is undoubtedly real and a characteristic of our times, though there is still something pushing us, keeping us in conflict between the local and the universal, between globalization and parcelization. This is also represented in this show: these artists' views of depersonalization are different from Dan Graham's, for instance-they don't share his systematic, almost scientific, analysis (though perhaps we could object that we are dealing with different problems for a different generation). Neither are they working from the same point of view as that already cited of Jeff Wall.
So how does one reconcile our environment's divergencies in order to determine the places that are important and uniquely characterized, or, on the contrary, completely conformist and, in a certain sense, rather unimportant?5 How does one represent a space? How does one represent inside of a space? How does one attempt to navigate in this information flux without losing oneself, annulling oneself completely in a "globalization" that flattens everything to the same Western model? At the same time, how can individuals vindicate their own origins and cultures without reverting to the same chauvinism that is sowing wars in various parts of the world, all in the name of difference?
Even to face the contemporary from this point of view shows many surface contradictions that we cannot ignore, and with which we must necessarily learn to live.
So there is a need to widen the discussion on the loss of a center, on the dematerialization of a communication society in which one no longer needs to be in a precise place in order to act.6 This is merely the flip side of the argument that we must all stay anchored to the cultural (and economic) levels existing in the centers (which evidently are being multiplied).
Cities are becoming increasingly important as centers for the control of any activity, including that of multinationals, which naturally produce their manufactured articles in the logic of globalization (locating their factories in the "third world," the East or any other place where labour is cheap), but maintain their head offices in a principal junction, one of the megalopolises that is coming to characterize these years, from where they direct all communications. 7
We generally privilege a vision of goods (even "information" goods), rather than speak about people, maintaining a mono-dimensionality that keeps us distant from reality.8

Between Self-portrait and Relations with Others - We are no longer concentrating on the future (nor are we focused on the past), in part because the idea of linear progress-that we are part of an evolutionary line carrying us surely toward a better world-has been definitively shattered. The only reality we know is the one we live. This levelling of time might be seized, however, as an opportunity to free ourselves of heavy chains, giving us the chance to reconnect with our bodies, shorten our distances from others, and in some ways re-appropriate the possibility of acting.9
Furthermore, if art, as writing, is above all an affirmation of identity,10 an attempt to survive as oneself with one eye towards immortality, it has now lost a large part of its reasons for existing, and artists (like all people) are showing their "fear" of having to act, of having to relate to the world in a biased way, all that is required to create a "vision of the world." Likewise, they are afraid of reverting to the ideological, the slogan, or a base-level sociology or philosophy which is one of the risks of art in our time. The threshold of inaction is very near, but can be avoided by commencing with everyday relationships; in this way one also avoids the risk of not communicating at all, which happens when one takes refuge entirely within oneself.
A metaphor could be made in psychological terms, affirming that art continues to be a means for the creation of self-portraits, but that artists are no longer satisfied to concentrate on their own face or on their own particular attitudes. Instead, they seek self-description in the lack of identity of places surrounding them, or through explanation of their own demands, they exit (in a society of communication) from their own loneliness in order to re-open a discourse of community, to make their own symbols collective,11 or to realize collective work.12 We have no time (and no place) to be alone with ourselves, but at the same time we have no time (and once again no place) for sociality, which is denied to us in public but also impossible inside of our own space. We are thus in a situation of perennial alienation. The self-portrait, therefore, is not always explicit; at times it is made by inserting oneself into one's work, as one of the operational mechanisms of an installation, a performance, or a picture.

Ways and Places - From this chaotic situation stem many of the representations and works exposed here: from photographs or paintings of real non-places to representations of the same as interfaces for establishing a relationship with the world, or those that create their own social actions, build their own place, their own aesthetic models of expression. Thus, we move from more "traditional" representations, through photos or paintings (in which the artist chooses, rather than invents, the image best lent to representation), to understandings of art as a form of communication and attempts to create a relational place (where the premises for the participation of other people are created), from which images can later emerge.
This show seeks a common "territory" of discussion in which divergent formulations and ideas might emerge from different technical or material experimentations, without losing sight of a single identity.
The work of Luisa Lambri evidences a desire to make one's own existence in the world anonymous, nearly neutral. There seems to be a wish to hide oneself in a vital fusion with one's surroundings. Places that we frequent become completely unrecognizable. It's not a game to test our visual memory, but the representation of continuous absorption in a surrounding place and the society of which we are a part (especially if we live in large urban centers). I am giving an almost Oriental reading of it, but the uniformity of the dominant chromatics stresses a desire to eliminate the dimension of glamour, the emotional and visual bombardment striking us today most of all from advertising, but whose style has invaded all cultural and visual phenomena, not least of all contemporary art. Luisa Lambri's works express a desired immobility that is not the passive acceptance of an already lived experience, but a more intense relationship with the outside, with what adjoins us, with who we are.
More filmic, and more connected to the mystery surrounding our daily lives (I don't mean in an esoteric or religious sense) is the work of Alessandra Tesi. What is the distance between reality and fiction? Is reality simply our way of looking at things and the metaphoric value we invest in them? Alessandra Tesi's photographs are always very ambiguous, burdened as they are of this vague unease that we experience from not being able to govern all the terms of our perception of things and reality. Our rationality is tested against our imaginations, against the different points of view in which we are absorbed. It's not simply a matter of scale (things often expanded far beyond their natural limits), but the spatial situations in which her works engulf us. The extreme anonymity of a hotel room, a corridor, a kitchen or bathroom, becomes the object of analysis. An investigation that is neither scientific nor statistical, but that somehow tickles our Animist vein and inspires our desire to see mystery behind all things. The metaphysical vein of de Chirico or Carrà is mixed with the images of David Lynch or the Coen brothers. The surreal is photographed; the photo is proof of the existence of a different reality, just as these works are the proof of the photo's power to falsify.
An analogous attitude towards representation of our daily living space is found in the work of Luca Pancrazzi, which moves completely across the expressive possibilities offered by various techniques. His works are, according to necessity, paintings, installations, or photos, and are often combined along with other mediums. The non-places of which we have spoken are already the territory of his investigation,13 interiors emptied of all human or external presences, urban outskirts in which it is absolutely impossible to seek origins or originality. Space and time are frozen not to underline the metaphysical dimensions of reality, but because they have been crushed by the lack of memory surrounding them. These images are a continuous journey in search of a different point of view to make us reflect on our world of images (as well as concrete places); this is a time in which it is difficult to find a relationship that is not always one of anguish and consumption.
Similar for their ability to cross different mediums are the works of Deborah Ligorio, who always pushes for direct, immediate communication, rather than dwelling on conceptualisms. Here, the problem of the division between art and life does not exist, or at least it stops being a problem. Her interventions have included the creation of a pleasant, restful space inside of Openspace (for the show "Aria di Sosta," and realized with Alice Bonfanti), real and very short animations, or Web site pieces for which she designs specific images. There is no separation between the artist (who knows what is beautiful-she creates it and shows it) and the spectator; there is always a construction of a common territory (even a virtual one such as the Internet) where they can discuss or simply meet.
Sarah Rossi also looks for contacts with people, to the extent that each of her works are constructed with other people who come to be involved and who animate her work. She has an almost directorial approach to her work: the artist creates the conditions (the territory) upon which a work is realized. The work of art is thus not only the created object but also the relationships interwoven into it from its moment of conception to its exposition. Histories are disentangled from the construction of a territory, histories that in order to live need voices and listeners, for which the artist wears often the clothes of the listener and records the memory of the present.
In one photo series, Stefania Galegati seeks to be utterly absorbed into the background, the environment; she is painted from head to foot in an extraordinary mimetic attempt to become a wall, column, or any other thing behind her. If on a quick reading we might consider such a work the expression of a need for vital fusion (in New Age style) or of a serious form of Zelig's syndrome, I believe that these works are also a dialectical play between the necessity to appear-and to seek a first person dialogue with the world-and the annulment of the artist in order to evade the narcissistic logic of affirmation which governs a large part of contemporary art. Fear of and desire for action find an equilibrium point when she "becomes" the environment, transforming herself and her work in acceptance of the need for interaction. It's thus not surprising that among the works presented on this occasion is a carpet of rubber spheres, which is perfectly stable, although you certainly couldn't tell from its appearance. Here there is another contrast between opposites which govern the work. Stefania Galegati attempts to transform the dialectical play between being and appearance, fictive and real, even in this installation, recalling the ambiguity that fills all the places we live in.
Luca Vitone has a more scientific approach; his point of departure could be language in its capacity to render the meanings of things, but at the same time to reset and annul them.14 Thus, at first sight it might seem a detached and metalinguistic vision, but various elements in the field, apparently neutral, are those that put our certainties into crisis. The names or cartographic representations of things are not the things themselves, and this is a way to underline how much ours is a territory deprived of identity, and above all how superficial and equivocal is the relationship that ties us to our "place." That's why it is necessary to work only on hypotheses: a history of communities, for example; better if it brings us a utopian edge like the anarchic tradition whose traces Luca Vitone is following. A double message of liberty: from conventions and our false consciences.
The way that Premiata Ditta often tries to classify, weigh, and measure things might also seem scientific. But what emerges from all their works is that the result is not important in itself alone, or for its graphic visualization in graphs and charts, as much as for the understanding of the distance between images and their contents. It's a worm that digs deeply, without spectacularity, using simple gestures. Their work could be a graph, or a blackboard full of symbols. It could be a series of sketches or photos. These are our daily obsessions mixed with the consciousness that we live in an alienating society that does not meet our needs for communication and humanity. How many objects do we have in our home? How many advertising texts bombard us along the route from home to work? We don't seem to notice these things anymore because they have become so ingrained in our lives. But how much have these objects, which make up our place and condition our lives, become a part of us?
Wurmkos, founded about ten years ago by Pasquale Campanella, is a group that works with people with psychological problems, not in order to teach something or to try to understand the type of uneasiness with which these people live; they do not aim to cure anybody. Instead, they look to an equal exchange with people who generally don't have this opportunity. They begin to insert people back into societal roles. For Wurmkos, the place really is the way, because the group bears a kind of internal intelligence and collective awareness that creates a true community work in which each vindicates his or her own individual experience (and style). If an ethical dimension has been present in all the works I have discussed up till now, in this case it is especially difficulty to establish the borders between ethics and aesthetics, human value and realized works-paintings, sculptures, installations, videos. Everywhere in this experience is the idea that it is the person who makes the place, indeed, who brings it to life. The ability that Wurmkos has of transmitting this intensely vital position and liberty beyond aesthetic confinements is surprising.
The work of Enzo Umbaca also tries to create a place, to break the habit of not recognizing the other, which is most evidently demonstrated in the negation of difference of the extracomunitario (an immigrant from outside of the European Union). "The history of Europe has been, until recently, a history of efforts to coincide political and ethnic borders."15 This has prevented us, above all in Italy, from any real confrontation of non-Western cultures, which has created as a direct consequence much distrust and hostility towards those who have "invaded" our space-which is inevitably how people are observed after we have deprived them of their culture and, thus, their dignity (which happens often in the West). Enzo Umbaca's challenge is to speak or communicate with them, or to put on their cloths (as in this most recent work), in order to also communicate with other people passing by (who are insulated by their own indifference), to shorten the distances that prevent us from relating as equals.
The place of Cesare Viel is much more intimate, beginning with writing as an emotive vehicle for the transmission of ideas or feelings and arriving, in his latest work, to a more intimate place, the "room of one's own" that Virginia Woolf evoked,16 as the basic element required for the ability to dedicate oneself to writing. It's a kind of progression laid bare in search of a self-definition that seeks to avoid all narcissism or solipsism. Those who open up for knowledge also compromise the less controllable parts of themselves-like the style of their freehand writing and their own thoughts-such as when a song that wanders between memories and feelings is suddenly improvised. But in this room Cesare Viel proposes a slide show, a voyage that recounts how, even in the most intimate of situations, the relationship that we have with the outside is inseverable .

Premise (finally?) - I realize that I have often contrasted and played with terms in the attempt to rediscover a meaning (a complexity) inside a field of research, which often restricts me to claim "I like" or "I dislike." At the same time, my attempt has been to look for the keys to a reading, using all that I have brought to hand to try to respond to the complexity of the proposed stimuli, risking a fall (and perhaps falling) into the abyss of base psychology and sociology. I believe, however, that an exploration of this territory is due, an attempt to put specific language and society into a more general relationship, seeing one thing as a possible reading of the other. Each artist and his or her work becomes a ticket to a mosaic, a station for reflection, in the attempt to read contemporaneity according to different points of view; likewise, aspects of our society can help us discover a side to an artist's work in a continuous play of cross-referents.

If touching ground at Trude I had not read the name of the city written in large letters, I would have believed I'd arrived at the same airport from which I had departed. The suburbs I had to cross were no different from the others, with the same yellowish and greenish houses. Following the same arrows, one moved around the same flowerbeds of the same plazas. The center's streets displayed merchandise packaging signs that did not differ in any way. It was the first time I had come to Trude, but I knew the hotel in which I happened to descend; I had already heard and said my dialogues with buyers and sellers of ironworks; more days the same as those I'd finished staring at the same navels that rippled through the same glasses.
Why come to Trude? I wondered. And I already wanted to leave again.
-You can take the next flight when you want - he told me, - but you will arrive at another Trude, equal point for point, the world is covered by just one Trude which doesn't begin and doesn't end, only the name of the airport changes. - Italo Calvino 17

1 Georges Perec, Specie di spazi, Bollati Boringhieri, Turin, 1989. And. original Espèces d'espaces, éditions Galilée Paris 1974.
2 Cfr. Tiziana Villani, "Il territorio Performance", in Millepiani n.7, Milan 1996, where she writes: "The territory of our daily present appears performative and polymorphous-houses, roads, and buildings are simultaeneously places of segregation and porous places, open to communication, forced like clothes upon bodies. Stimulated, plundered, dematerialized, yet pyrotechnic, desiring, phantasmic, today's territory points out the possibility of giving place a different practice, however subjected to the command and duty to coexist." But cfr. also the whole magazine Millepiani, one of the most interesting centers of debate on individual-territorial relationships and its social implications, as well as aesthetics.
3 Cfr. Marc Augé, Un etnologue dans le métro, Hachette, Paris 1986. By the same author see also Non-lieux, Seuil, Paris, 1992.
4 "It's the look and, we could add, the 'word' of others that constitutes me and delimits the territory where we recognize ourselves and are born, always and each time, together." Michel Maffesoli, Au creux des apparences, Plon, 1990. (p. 233).
5 Cfr. Aldo Bonomi "La società fantasmagorica", Millepiani n°7, Mimesis, Milan 1996. Bonomi writes "(...) Both these styles of contemporaneity individualize the way more than the place, the founding process that causes sense. The difference lies in the way of being nomadic and creating an exodus, moving between the local and the global. Certainly, place no longer causes identity and difference. This other is not a simalcrum of short relationships, face to face, no longer given. The way concretizes in the 'glocal' that is nothing other than the local soaked and crossed by modernity, a place able to establish long relationships with the world, beyond the short relationships of a community that is no more. The 'glocal' becomes a space of crisis, a space of crossing where experiences condense the global society and globalization."
6 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, Basil Blackwell, 1990. "(...) But the collapse of spatial barriers doesn't mean that the importance of space is decreasing (NDA: at least in this phase). (...) Geographical mobility and decentralization are used against a syndical power that was traditionally concentrated in the factories of series production (...) We thus arrive at the central paradox: the less important spatial barriers are, the more sensitive capital is to the variations of place inside space, and better the stimulus is to differentiate places in ways that attract capital."
7 Cfr. Saskia Sassen, Cities in a World Economy, Thousands Oaks, Pine Forge Press, USA-London-New Dehli, 1994. Sassen stresses that: "Whether national markets or global markets, just as all internationally integrated activity, they require central places from where they realize and concretely coordinate globalization. Information industries also require a vast material infrastructure inclusive of strategic junctions equipped with a hyperconcentration of means. Finally, not even the most advanced information industries can doing without a production process." [p. 9).
8 Sassen, op. cit, p. 16: "In prevailing representation the key concepts of globalization, the information economy, and telematics invariably suggest that place no longer has any importance and that the only type of job that still counts is that of the highly qualified professional. This representation privileges the ability of global transmission over the concentration of infrastructures that make it possible; it privileges information as an object over the workers that produce it, from the experts to the secretaries; and it privileges the new culture of transnational firms over the plurality of cultural circles, in which cultures of immigration are transplanted into new territories, inside which they place many 'other' jobs of the global information economy." Cfr. also Ulderico Bernards, La babele possibile, Franco Angeli, Milan 1996, where on p. 89 he writes: "The estrangement of the person from community affiliations must mark the triumph of enlightenment philosophy, with layers opening up to contemporary capitalism, with its exaltation of the market, unique judge in a corporate vision of the world which is the most recent incarnation of the myth of an absolutely rationalist society."
9Cfr.Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, University of Chicago, 1958.
10Cfr. Francesco Remotti, Contro l'identità, ed. Laterza, Rome-Bari 1996. On page 54 Remotti writes: "Identity nutures writing, that is, writing offers identity a particularly effective armor (which it needs). The written text is something that fixes identity, that detaches it from the "flux" and from thewhirlwind of "possible alternatives"; it fixes it in a perennial form (or almost), in a form, however, that is well-armed technologically in order to try to challenge time."
11 [fr]. Bernardi, Op [cit]. p. 15 "But the symbols for living need to be shared, and above all changed. That's why classical places of culture become Geertz-esque in conception, 'the plaza, the courtyard, the market', and their animation, with tensions, conflicts, and the opportunity for relationships that swells from the neighborhood to the world. Open areas that offer occasions for meeting and hybridization, social transmission and cultural relations, both positive and negative. Metaphoric images, however, more truthful than what has held sway for decades in internet relationships: the Melting Pot, crucible where all cultures must melt into one." The book quoted by Bernardi: Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, Basic Book, New York, 1973.
12 Cfr. Pierre Lévy L'Intelligenza collettiva. Per un'antologia del cyberspazio, Feltrinelli, Milan 1996. Original edition published by La découverte, Paris 1994.
13 It seems to me a happy convergence that in the catalogue of Luca Pancrazzi's show at galleria Mazzoli in Modena (October 1996) one of the texts quoted extensively from Marc Augé.
14 Cfr. Luca Vitone, "Il Luogo dell'arte", catalogue of the show at the galleria Paulo Vitolo and Emi Fontana, Milan 1994. Where he writes in the introduction to a show in which they exposed the floor plans of various galleries: "(...) their nominative importance is denied in order to affirm that one place is worth another. In this case, what appears takes the place of what is, a substantial difference between one place and another no longer exists. A nominative container, in this case the space that shows the floorplan, becomes a mental container that exposes the idea of itself takes the role of vehicle of other covers. The place of the art loses its value of finished truth and takes that of a proposal. Its assignment is to offer an hypothesis of truth, being conscious of arriving only to a possible conclusion."
15 Nathan Glazer, Ethnic Dilemmas 1964-1982, Harvard U.P., Cambridge, Massachussets, and London, Great Britain, 1983.
16 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, Quentin Bell and Angelic Garnett, 1929.
17 Italo Calvino La Città Invisibile, p. 135, Einaudi, Turin 1972.