05 November 2019
Castello del Valentino, Turin
With: Stefano Serretta and Vasco Forconi
moderator: Gail Cochrane, Visual Arts Supervisor, Master in Design for Arts, Politecnico di Torino
The talk starts at 4.45pm
Salone d’onore,
Castello del Valentino,
viale Mattioli 39, 10125 Torino
The Master in Design for Arts of the Politecnico di Torino and ALMANAC INN present Online actions, offline consequences, a public talk between the artist Stefano Serretta (Genova, 1987) and curator Vasco Forconi (Roma, 1991), moderated by Gail Cochrane, Visual Arts Supervisor, Master in Design for Arts, Politecnico di Torino.
The conversation will focus on the analysis of the relationship between online cultures and offline political rhetoric which is the object of a study of Relapse, a bulletin in two issues published by the artist, which was used for the interventions of Shoegaze at the Italian Cultural Institute in Stockholm, designed by Giò Ponti, and of Do not go gentle in that good night, at ALMANAC INN, Turin.
Relapse is a journal, suspended halfway between fiction and verisimilitude, whose pages are populated by monstrous figures portrayed in grotesque poses and extreme laughters, almost crying, as if they were trapped in a sort of collective hallucination. The artist's drawings are accompanied by fragments of texts radically heterogeneous but united by a constant feeling of social and identity anxiety, whose obsessive repetition generates a sort of impossibility of the discourse. Relapse stems from the careful analysis of the complex apparatus of online communication platforms used by communities of young people often grouped under the label of alt-right; yet in the pages of the newspaper, which Serretta installs on the windows of buildings and shops as if to suggest the failure or suspension of the activity carried out within them, this analytical impulse leaves room for the visceral tale of a hallucinated universe. From the peripheries of the internet such imaginaries silently creep into the heart of contemporary political communication, constituting an ideal repertoire of rhetorical forms and practices from which the new (old) populist rights seem to be constantly ready to draw from.
Stefano Serretta (Genoa, 1987) lives and works in Milan. After graduating in Modern and Contemporary History, he attended the two-year specialist course in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies at NABA New Academy of Fine Arts in Milan. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Naked Lunch Money, Spazio Leonardo, Milan (2019), La città di Scambio, Spazio Siena, Siena (2019), Almanac Inn, Turin (2019), Shoegaze, Italian Cultural Institute, Stockholm (2019) Spit or Swallow, UNA, Piacenza (2019), Chi Utopia mangia le mele, ex Dogana di terra, Verona, (2018), That’s IT!, MAMbo, Bologna (2018), Il Paradigma di Kuhn, Galleria FuoriCampo, Siena (2018), The Great Learning, La Triennale di Milano, Milano (2017), Primavera 5, Galerie Papillon, Parigi (2016), Teatrum Botanicum, PAV Parco Arte Vivente, Torino (2016), Rubbles in The Jungle, Placentia Arte, Piacenza (2016).
Vasco Forconi (Rome, 1991) lives and works between Rome and Stockholm. He is currently a curatorial assistant at CuratorLab, the curatorial research program of Konstfack University, Stockholm. Recent projects include: Esposizione di Frutta e Verdura, Matèria, Roma (2019), Festa Franca. Forare il Tubo, Franca, Cannara (2019), Shoegaze, a series of new commissions with Danae Valenza and Lisa Grip, Stefano Serretta, Antonio Della Guardia, Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Stoccolma (2019-20), Italiani brava gente, Fondazione VOLUME!, Roma (2018), A Messy Knot (in motion pictures), The Bioscope Independent Cinema, Johannesburg (2018), Da Franco Senza Appuntamento, Roma (2018), Disrupted Drawings, mhPROJECT, New York (2017).
