Object Cast
Beatrice Leanza
"Object Cast" is a project for an in situ installation to be realized inside the unique frame of the B.T.A.P. gallery in Beijing (http://www.tokyo-gallery.com/btap/), a peculiarly evocative place where the conceptual volume of the work calls in the visual language of the industrial architecture of the space in deploying its "poetic device."
This immersive installation chooses the Billiard table as a metaphorical space, a mystical "immobile machine" where the object is place and abode of time, a platform of translated perception and process of identification, around which Andrea Gotti orchestrates an unpredictable theatre of objet trouvé (electric transformers, cables, industrial waste…). Grounding the stage of the installation the billiard becomes the site for the congregation of different and multiple objects, simulacra of interconnected stories and identities, which are presented as a spirited cast from an undetected time, and connected to the central table green by means of light and power circuiting.
The progressive act of work construction aims at reproducing that "intellectual fable" by which art interprets nature, man, things and, ultimately, the universe. Time and place are called into a game where they can reconfigure mutual positioning into hybrid chrono-topological formulas, and where arcane mysticisms are revealed through the sound architecture by fm3.
The aesthetic mechanism reanimating the reality concealed into these everyday objects, life-ware and materials, departs from a conceptual closeness to the Chinese philosophical envisioning of time as a cyclical continuum of patterning and completion–as opposed to a linear one–while rescuing the fragmentary existence of the "10,000 Things" (the manifested world) into a breathing cast of life samples, processes and journeys. The fantastic and demiurgic flight performed by art by always maintaining its sight on a movable horizon, allows this work to go back and forth, between the micro and the macro, and literally mechanizes the hazardous movements and magical presence of chance as an "immobile machine," a mythical silencer harmonizing the continuous changes and clashing of things, that is the sonic creaking and jarring of man-made nature striving for spatial coexistence into the inhabited world. The city, buzzing heart of this portentous energy, is recalled through the material cast around the billiard: by soliciting personal imageries of contemporary scenes from the urban fabrica, it stretches to the extent of turning static presence into the entropic portrayal of life persistence and redundancy. As many uses and performed acts of social aggregation have been phagocytized by the dominance of compelling urbanism, the disappearance of certain objects (and thus their attached rituals) from the stage of everyday human drama, is indicative of a larger transformation affecting people’s perception of their "time and place" within the macro-system.
By encapsulating the audience in a suspended and insulated zone of pause and reflection the sound installation will integrate with the proposed concept, as metaphor and building material in a translated reconstruction of the permanent disappearing of existence, a commentary of/from life and its disarticulated times.
Conceived as an integral part of the project, a unique artist book is produced consisting of three parts: the visual files (three different series of photos, archive material of past journeys with a maximalist recurrence of the billiard table around China, a time-line of the work in progress, together with "pictorial" still-lives), the written files (texts from the curator Beatrice Leanza and from philosopher Gianni Vattimo) and the sound files (a data card planted inside the book with the sonic architecture by fm3).
These can be assembled together as well as enjoyed separately, whereas the logical unfolding of the sequences is to be performed by the reader. Object Cast: The Book, is like a visual theatre script, where actors, costumes, lyrics and sounds are there to be put to life. It is like a nickelodeon imagined as a personal chamber of rediscovery and fantasy, where you are provide files of tools to recollect and restore them in your personal stories, in your bewildered gaze.
The exhibition develops into the main space of the gallery, while a selection of studio works such as small oil on canvases, photos and sketches will be shown inside the entrance space as a recorded journey of this a-temporal process.
The event is supported by the Italian Institute of Culture, Beijing and is part of the celebration year of "Italy in China 2006."
