The Galleria Umberto Di Marino is delighted to present the next episode of Visto da qui project, started in April 2019, which will continue and alternate with the regular programming throughout the year.
In the wake of the approach developed through the projects of the last twenty years, the gallery feels the need to emphasise its identity as a place for carrying out research and experimentation into artistic processes and the generative possibilities of interpretation as a critical tool of society. Aware of its longstanding role as an intermediary through its exhibitions, situated midway between the art system and the local territory, the gallery is temporarily suspending new projects in order to focus on redefining its new objectives which will, as far as possible, be open to dialogue with the general public.
Based on the experience of its latest exhibitions held in other spaces in Naples, organised in conjunction with local institutions and associations, such as the ten more ten cycle or the more recent solo show by Jota Castro, arranged in sites all around the city, the gallery has decided to focus on greater theoretical exploration and the extension of democratic forms of participation in the wider debate.
The aim of the new events programme is explicitly designed to invite people working in the field of contemporary art to reflect on the evident over-production which the typical processes of cognitive capitalism are generating, partly within the productive models of the art scene. On the contrary, enhancing the potential of a storeroom can be considered as a sign of openness towards one's own context, with the aim of finding more effective forms of interaction, including social and economic forms.
The idea of extending the gradual dematerialisation of production (including art works) in favour of the construction of new languages and new approaches should be viewed as a stance and assumption of responsibility towards the primarily cultural mission that galleries have always adopted towards the places in which they have chosen to operate. The retrieval of works from storage rooms, through their historical reinterpretation, leads to reflections on contemporary art developed in conjunction with curators, collectors, scholars and writers, based on the interdependence of their relations and different viewpoints.
In order to create social knowledge, switching procedures from a computer model to an open source model, each selection of works will act as a source code for sharing critical perspectives. Works by frequent contributors to the gallery, as well as by more distant interlocutors, will be gathered and circulated through the possibility of connection and diffusion offered by technological tools, reflecting on their increasingly important role in defining contemporary aesthetics. The end result will be a co-designed catalogue, based on the corpus of works which will displayed from time to time in the gallery space.
Lastly, the gallery will open its doors, also as a study centre, making its materials available to the general public. Every fifteen days the events and artists will constantly rotate in exhibitions that are accessible from the entrance or through photographic documentation, following the architectural perspective of the three rooms in sequence. By doing away with the episodic aspect of the opening event, the public will be encouraged to consider the overall effect as a starting point and an occasion for more organic and personal access to the contents on display.
By becoming a space marked by porosity, the gallery hopes to reawaken sensibilities, as defined in opposition to the gradual disassociation between intelligence and consciousness by Franco "Bifo" Berardi in a recent editorial in e-flux, Journal #98, (Sensitive) Consciousness and Time: Against the Transhumanist Utopia.
« The transhumanist project is based on the premise that technology is going to enable a perfect simulation of intelligent life. The tacit implication of this project, however, is that intelligent life can be decoupled from sensibility, because from the point of view of the evolutionary economy, sensibility is an unnecessary residual quality, a factor of slowness and inexactness.
The history of social civilization in the last two centuries may be read as an attempt to escape the inflexible law of the survival of the fittest. Social solidarity has been the attempt to transform the world into an anti-natural place of no competition. The autonomy of politics and ethics from the natural law of evolution was based on the conscious limiting of the power of intelligence. When intelligence is not restrained by sensibility, it deploys as brutal force. »