The Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation hosts "Here Not Here", the last appointment of the 2018-19 edition of The Institute of Things to Come , an itinerant program, founded in 2017 and curated by Valerio Del Baglivo , which investigates forms of speculative imagination in contemporary practices artistic and curatorial - through a cycle of exhibitions, performances and an educational program. The theme of the current edition, TERRA INCOGNITA , is inspired by the book by sociologist Albert Meister , "Under the Beaubourg" (1976), in which an invented author, Gustave Affeulpin, describes the life of an imaginary museum, a pole of counterculture, at below the Center Pompidou. This reference is the starting point for reflecting on the existence of fictitious territories invented by artists, metaphorical or literary landscapes in which forms of subversion, anti-authoritarianism and utopia come together.
During the year of activity, the six Associates - the artists Josephine Baan , Emily Fitzell , Constantinos Taliotis , Jérôme de Vienne and Stephanie Winter and the curator Emma Brasó - participated in a program of workshops designed to speculate on the fictitious nature of the given reality. - the program is supported by Formech Inspire. "Here Not Here" presents the finds and relics of this process.
Here we encounter a collection of fragments, collected in an unusual space - a non-place with porous borders and unobtainable cardinal points . The ceiling has been lowered, the light is dim. The room is compressed, the sight is compromised, the sound is dispersed. Perception is distorted. Still, some glimpses show the outside world above. However, we do not know where we are.
The common orientation points are lost and it is the works that provide some suggestions. "In Quartet" ( Constantinos Taliotis , 2019), a choreographed video installation on four screens, some images with an ambiguous status, fixed but imperceptibly in motion, portray the thresholds and entrances of some Turin villas. The mysterious slowness of filming requires careful observation, it offers time to meditate on the fiction of space.
"INTERRE | UNEARTHS" ( Emily Fitzell , 2019), remembers and distorts ancient structures for rituals. A circle of 12 cubes reconfigures the form and function of the first places of social gathering - monolithic and immutable stones are replaced by modular compositions and brick materials for construction. In turn, each of these cubes retains traces of terrestrial debris - fragments that resist the singularity and confinement of the reliquaries. Almost architectural miniatures, small temples, each of the elements operates between play and supplication, memory and imagination.
"Versed in the Void" ( Josephine Baan , 2019), articulates the impossibility of designing a future in common. Absence becomes the starting point, the voice, as presence, is the interiority of the body that materializes in space; the mouth is a passage between the inside and the outside. The mighty darkness gives way to the emergence of light. The traces and fragments scattered in the room mean gestures that have already occurred, they indicate whispered words. They also tell of inner worlds - which must be explored, without the desire to find their geographical location.
"The Blue Space Station" ( Stephanie Winter , 2018) presents testimonies of the White Planet, an imagined world, the arrival point of MISS - MY INTERN (ATION) AL SPACE STATION, a research vehicle created by Winter & SALON HYBRID. MISS is also the title of a series of performances that describe the exploration of this planet, the source and memory of all information, a common organ and a projection space for different ideas and projects about the future: a world that has revealed itself to be both internal and external. own observers. Thus, space travel has become a path of self-awareness in one's psyche.
"In Speculare" ( Jérôme de Vienne , 2019), a ray of sunshine - captured by a mirror placed in the garden in front of the building of the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation - enters this other dimension and once again unhinges the distorted space-time perceptions .
"Here Not Here" is a speculated world, made up of subtractions, glimpses, superimpositions, references and unsolved sub-texts, a place of reflection that diverts our attention and resists any image that includes it in a glance.