WITHIN YOU WITHOUT YOU
Objects, drawings, photographs, paintings, collages and their interaction with the space conform the multi-disciplinary show Within You Without You, site-specific project to be developed in Rome by artists Santiago Taccetti and Susana Laborde. As a leitmotif, the substratum of archeology in visual culture reenacted from the subjectivity of the authors, impregnated in references that belong to the collective imagination, to the intangible heritage of social matter, injected through sources such consumerism and advertising, aesthetics and history, the vertigo of the technology race or the proliferation of multiples in the day to day life in urban areas.
Life, architecture and imaginary of the global periphery, those that make up the outskirts and suburbs around the world, heirs to the American tradition of metropolitan expansion, have been a source of inspiration for Santiago Taccetti on a permanent basis, always in tune with local inputs and insights. Similarly, the sharp record of minimal elements of situations in ethereal circumstances, makes the work of Susana Laborde an advanced proposal, heir to the tradition of graphic chronicler, but consecrated to the review and phenomenological symptomatic of the generic and endless readings symbolic and semantic, from the subjective projection of the spectator.
The own and the alien, the common and the peculiar, are intertwined in the collision that both authors impose in their personal approach to the Roman context, taking into account its historical, aesthetic, cultural and ideological particularities, with a heavy emphasis on the profusion of readings through turns, fragmentation, transplants and reassembly that blur the boundaries of the local / universal, traditional / new, individual / collective.
Using dialectic bridges of presences and absences and gambling on a promiscuous reworking of the artistic conventions, the vacuum and the accumulation serve equally as text, proposing an expansive view of the dialogue artifice - reality so secretly individual as clearly anchored to codes and elements of the consensually recognizable.
The ability of cultural artifacts to influence in terms of historical moments or geographic positions, the inevitable clashes between worlds of migratory movements and corporate and media globalization, and the models of urban development or expansion of the social structure, share a scenario in which the obvious and the habitual are proposed as an excuse and a tool to generate new readings and rationing from the insertion of a difference.
A new place so alien as shared, so ethereal and intangible, where the sum of selected items reflect at the same time spaces of exclusion, making the arbitrary never something free, much less capricious. There, where loneliness, entertainment, intellect and irony coexist, Santiago Taccetti and Susan Laborde remind us that it is at the margins, the interstices and objectively residual, perhaps best where we find traces and traits of instinct, of the yet essentially alive of the human condition. It is probably one of the true engines of social development of our non-innocent and hyper-structured civilization.
Alex Brahim