Get Rid of Yourself (Ancora Ancora Ancora)

Curated by Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti
in collaboration with ALMARE 

With Dafne Boggeri, Teresa Cos, Ambra Pittoni, Elena Radice, Radna Rumping, Erica van Loon 

On August 23rd 1978, Mina’s face is recorded on camera for the last time while singing “Ancora Ancora Ancora” at the Bussola club in Viareggio. It’s the year of the kidnapping of politician Aldo Moro and the beginning of the “riflusso”, the retreat into private life that marked the end of the season of struggles led by the Italian 1977 Movement. For the next 23 years, the “Tigre di Cremona” (Tiger of Cremona) will refuse all offers to appear in public, thus becoming exclusively a voice to the rest of the world. The singer will never disclose the reasons for her choice.

On September 23rd 2019, at 7.00 PM the Fondazione Baruchello opens the third edition of the Summer Show. Get Rid of Yourself (Ancora Ancora Ancora) is a project conceived by Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti and selected by a committee composed of Edoardo Bonaspetti, Artistic Director of the Fondazione Henraux; Alessandra Mammì, art historian and journalist at L’Espresso; Roberta Tenconi, curator at HangarBicocca; and Gianfranco Baruchello, Honorary President and Artistic Director of the Fondazione Baruchello.

The museum presents a collective sound exhibition that takes shape in the dark. The project investigates the production of imagery in the absence of sight, to reflect on the political possibilities of inhabiting invisibility. Disseminated along a sound path built in collaboration with the ALMARE collective, the artists’ narratives act in the dark, transforming a privative condition into a place for the active sharing of practices.

The building seems empty, yet it is inhabited in every space, corner, and interspace. Turning back a strategy traditionally carried out by institutional critique, the museum hosts a multiplicity of voices, sounds and situations, which impose a presence sometimes intimately whispered, sometimes spooky and sharp, and finally claimed with magnificence. The rooms of the Foundation thus become a bedroom, a majestic nave, and then the streets of a city in revolt; they transform themselves into an anatomy university classroom where a brain is dissected, and then metamorphose into the veins and cavernous bodies of that same brain, where thought and sensation interpenetrate each other until they become indistinguishable from the surrounding environment. The space becomes an incarnation of the personal stories and great political narratives that inhabit it, activating processes of disidentification that reshuffle the notions of individual conscience and collective body in a progressive negotiation of the concepts of linear time, historical individuality, and human reason.

According to Giorgio Agamben, “the ones who can call themselves contemporary are only those who do not allow themselves to be blinded by the lights of the century and so manage to get a glimpse of the shadows in those lights, of their intimate obscurity”. Get Rid of Yourself (Ancora Ancora Ancora) receives in full face the emission of darkness that comes from its time. The duration of the exhibition is the same that the eyes take to get used to the absence of light, in which the limit between awareness and unconsciousness is weakened. As Erica van Loon suggests in the audio work presented in the exhibition: “How long does it take for your brain to realize that you didn’t blink but that I switched off the lights?”.

Installation shots: Alessia Calzecchi

DAILY PROGRAMME:

h 16.00 / 17.15 Ambra Pittoni, Amorevole. Una finzione somatica, 9’45’’
h 16.10 / 17.25 Elena Radice, Cantilena retorica per un futuro luminoso. Canone libero per coro polifonico disfunzionale, 18’ ca.
h 16.28 / 17.43 Radna Rumping, Get Rid of Yourself, Again, 39’
[in loop] Teresa Cos, Archive of Loops,∞ 
[in loop] Erica van Loon, Your Brain Has No Smell, 35’
[in loop] Dafne Boggeri, Starting the rhythm, 1’47’’