MOMENTING THE MEMENTO
We need a post[mode]rn [Flo]re:science, a Renai[chance] for our city, actually looking like an [ego]nomically H&Mized Louis Vuit[town] tuned on a dead Chan[n]el n.5
A curatorial project starts when something sick has to be cured [or curated]. From George Bush’s shocking-and-astonishing Baghdad bombing night-time TV show, continuing on with liquid heavens of digital non-places, we don’t live real moments of ours to be [im]pressed forever, we just typify time and space posting impressive third party pictures and, as a consequence, all what we do is rattle off a sequence of ‘sort-ofs’.
The real moment is a nomad monad, a situation in which time and space ultimately overlap, in which the relative becomes absolute, and the transient event becomes an emotional memory. Memories are not to be the dusty folders of our brain, they have to stay settled only for a while, because they are asked to produce new actions that potentially become absolute, new emotions, new nomads in search for monads.
Moreover, there is on one side the attraction for a photography’s fastness because its speed makes it immediate. While architecture’s timing and placing is usually measured in years, an image can be captured in a fraction of a second. On the other hand, photography is more pressing as it is based on capturing a transient absolute that, after that fraction of a second, would be only relative.
The real moment is not the moment for real, or the modernist present-become past-become future, it’s rather a continuously constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed composition of time and space bindings. It’s not the historical straightforwardness but a self-referential presence [or lack of absence]. It’s not the dualism between good and bad, clean and dirty, innocent and guilty, but a conscious lost innocence, good and dirty [or bad and clean]. The real moment is not a photographed memorial of time and space, archived and posted. It’s not an H&Mized-Renaissance tour-operated city. Nor a fashion fossil exposed in a museum. The real moment is authentic, literally self-standing and capable of further actions. It’s Re:naissance and authenti[city].
Purchased experiences don’t count and shopping is not creating. Florence needs a conversational project to heal from the small-city-syndrome, to become once again “Truth is no more than a variety of error” Friedrich Nietzsche a city on the move, a large collage of interconnected activities, of parallel universes, minds and streets. It needs to become an urban laboratory gathering visual and plastic art, fashion, architecture, writing and poetry, and theatre, as well as science. It needs new blood, a contamination of heterogeneous points of view, an injection of thoughtful creativeness. It needs a production-of-reality educational moment where the city is not exhibited but is the exhibition itself, a per-formative milieu with an augmented metabolism able to investigate non-applicable models. It needs a non-target-oriented educational moment where unpredictability, failure and error are allowed to happen. Only through these highly non-linear diagrams of psycho-geography we are able to not for-get, to produce memorable non-commercial memories, a protest in the sense of pro-test, an anti-authoritative moment that doesn’t necessarily mean oppositional, but simply authentic.
Let’s do it. Florence lives magic and fear, like every city today. It’s not Las Vegas [the city without errors], or Disneyland [the adventure without risk], its nicest place is not McDonald’s [as Andy Warhol once sarcastically said], and education is not instruction, it’s not the object of study, but the work to make it. Routine is the worst enemy, so let’s start with some international and interdisciplinary conversation to convert [and converse] Florence into what it is.
Momenting the Memento means to give life to archi[textures], new memories of habitus meeting the habitat, instead of archiving and celebrating the previous ones. Quit recycling the past and start up-cycling the future. So, let’s take fashion out from its reliquaries, let its Renaissance shine again out of the current multi-clustered, conflictual [but also convergent] spirit of time. Let education be writing instead of only be reading. Let the statues come out from the colourful postcards and walk like living human beings, let’s give Florence a Renai[chance] before the posthuman is reduced to the postman, and our so modernisms become obsolete wasms.
Danilo Venturi – Researcher, Head Of Department International Masters Polimoda , & lecturer – March 2012
SOURCES
Amendola G., “La Città Postmoderna”, Editori Laterza, Bari, 2003
Coupland D., “Generation X”, Hachette, London, 1991
Jencks C., “The Post-Modern Reader”, John Wiley and Sons Ltd, London, 2011
Lemoine-Luccioni E., “Psicoanalisi della Moda”, Bruno Mondadori, Milano, 2002
Obrist H.U., “Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Curating”, Sternberg Press,NY/Berlin, 2006
Venturi D., “Luxury Hackers”, Lindau, Torino, 2011
MAURO GRIFONI – Exhibition 17 – 22 April
