Stefano Serretta
Do not go gentle in that good night20—27 September 2019
Turin
Opening: 20 September, 7pm
groud floor
Almanac Inn presents Do not go gentle in that good night, a solo show by Italian artist Stefano Serretta and project part of the public programme.
The site specific installation conceived by the artist shifts the viewer’s perspective by closing the exhibition space at the street level and covering its windows with newspapers. The action of closing up evokes a failure, in the first instance economic, a condition that became familiar in the years following the financial crisis.
The lights inside are on and transform the two shop windows into bright lightboxes through which a visual cycle is developed, operating simultaneously on several levels.
Images and words, intersecting each other, pursue those narratives of insecurity that twist between the digital and analogical dimensions, investigating the unsolvable contradiction inherent in the relationship between online actions and offline consequences.
Relapse, whose second number covers the glass windows of Almanac, is a bulletin in the making designed and drawn in the middle of a political shit storm, whose origins are as clear as they are elusive.
Anxiety, insecurity, social pressure, fueled by the gap between growing expectations and declining opportunities, have completely overturned the public discourse. Identity resentment seems to have replaced social solidarity, leading to the explosion of a reactionary online culture, whose metastases developed unpredictably from Norway to New Zealand, from Italy to the United States. A return in the form of a very serious farce of the totalitarian experiences of the twentieth century.
The title, Do not go gentle in that good night, is the first verse of one of the most famous compositions of the poet Dylan Thomas. Traditionally read as an exhortation to make the most of the world and its pleasures, even in the twilight years of an individual's life, it can easily be interpreted as a powerful expression of the relentless commitment of a socialist activist and writer who, although unorthodox, he never gave up his search for a new expressive synthesis.
First swallowed up by the website 4chan - an imageboard in which images and comments can be posted anonymously - then memetically transported to the more underground 8chan, we find the quote completely distorted from its original meaning, in the manifesto of hate The Great Replacement, written in 2019 by Brenton Tarrant, a white supremacist who killed 51 people and injurded 48 in two terroristic shooting attacks at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. To discuss the actual effects of this digital flood, Serretta will organize a public outdoor meeting, in order to discuss tactics and strategies for reversing everyday experiences, and defusing the identitarian panic of this new age of hate. More info about the meeting will be released soon.
The same evening, Dancing, a solo show by Cleo Fariselli will open at the first floor.
