The exhibition project intends to investigate the structures of “mise-en-scene”, namely devices supporting the concept of “showing”: from the stage to the archive, from the pictorial image to the idea of the module, up to the exhibition itself, conceived with the aim of activating the gallery space as a subject, and emphasising the perspective points of its architectural features. Farewell to the Stage. Tools for reassembly suggests the idea of a desertion from the stage, of a reduction of the platform as a supporting structure: a machine of the world and history seen through a lens capable of highlighting each of its individual gears.

 

Opening the exhibition in its two entrances are, on the one hand, Ludovico Orombelli’s wall-painting, a stage emptied of its subjects and intended as a phantasmal reappearance of pictorial images, and on the other hand, Giuseppe Lo Cascio’s monumental archives, composed in such a way as to contain themselves, by means of folders emptied of all information. At the same time, Alice Peach’s modular practice exasperates certain formats to the point of recomposing new languages of image display, recalling the module underlying the composition of the gallery spaces. In the room behind, the skylight illuminates Ornella Cardillo’s puppet theatre, built through architectural subjects always open to movement, like theatres of time that are never fixed, while in the space above, the idea of a miniaturisation of architecture for Matteo Pizzolante determines the passage of scale as a methodology for focusing memory.

 

When crossing the threshold of the exhibition through the gallery’s two large windows, one is confronted with disassembled and reassembled tools, stripped of all their original function through artistic practices capable of deconstructing any narrative. These apparatuses have the characteristic of dealing with regimes of visibility, and therefore of never being neutral. The works of the artists in the exhibition are thus revealed in their ability to rethink the properties manifest in the structures  examined, thus re-proposing their unexpressed potential.

 

Indeed, the apparatuses of staging have the capacity to release a potential and to present themselves as the place where contradictions are revealed: they allow us to hear the unspoken and the desired, but also to visualise the not yet manifest, the hidden, the forgotten, or to perceive the invisible, the unwanted, the dormant. These structures are not the form of things, but the principles underlying how things appear to us1, and thus how a system of relations operates according to a more or less thorough understanding of a given element. The belief is that these manifestations have their own intrinsic simobology, expressed through a series of cross-references, contaminations, exchanges and projections, fictitious or real.