LIGHT YEAR 91: Inhabiting Zenobia
Thursday, November 3rd, 2022
ONLINE: 2-10pm EST
LIVE: Dusk - 10pm @ Pearl Street Triangle; DUMBO, Brooklyn
Berlin Premiere:
SCOPE BLN
Lübecker Straße 43, 10559, Berlin
Thursday, November 3rd, 8:45-10pm CET
Canada Premiere:
THE DREY
Woodbine Ave, East York, ON M4C 4E1, Canada
Thursday, November 3rd, 6-10 PM EST
Zenobia is the name Italo Calvino had given to the vertical city in his book Invisible Cities. Composed of stilts on dry land and bamboo and zinc houses, with many galleries and balconies, placed at different heights, on stilts that climb over each other, connected by ladders and hanging sidewalks ... Different ways of inhabiting it.
This exhibition of video art shows some of the forms of "vertical world-cities”: scattered, suspended, nameless like the people who live in them, hidden in megalopolises and cities everywhere, seen through the outlook of Italian Mediterranean culture.
The condition of being on the step of a staircase, waiting, with eyes fixed on a horizon from which nothing comes, means that a temporariness can become permanent, as happens to the inhabitants of the fortress of Dino Buzzati’s Tartar Steppe: he keeps repeating the same story: I am here provisionally, from one day to the next I'm waiting ... It is the condition of nameless inhabitants, invisible like their Zenobias. Attempting dialogue with closed windows and balconies from below, from the streets, walking in a Zenobia that carries a stigma stamped in the shape of the city. The music gives rhythm to the fragmented orthogonality of the original map, while the visual narration changes the vertical face of the city as it rises through cuts and glimpses, windows now left ajar. Algorithms allow us to pick up the maps of intimate Zenobias generated by desire, pulsating with systolic and diastolic rhythms, revealing in the ebb and flow of the slow breathing of the city the existence of the invisible inhabitants, behind window panes or simple pocket frames, as part of electronic wanderings. Which galaxy does the white star appearing in a square of sky belong to? The square, a geometric figure, symbol of the earth, delimited space in opposition to the unlimited sky. The circle in it symbolize time. From which place, in the vertical city, does the electronic eye, seize the day of the internal contractions and dilations of light? The invisible city can be seen here from above. As in a Zen tale, a motorcyclist riding on a stretch of road suddenly becomes the top step of a staircase winding into the abyss. The motorcyclist tries to cross a space that is now empty: Zenobia opens up below him, shaking the belief in horizontal continuity to its core.Where is the place of utopia? Does it belong to the same lands of the Invisible Cities?It is set between hidden cores, invisible metamorphosis, times of seeds and stars. Are poems inhabiting the sky above Zenobia?
The day that rises vertically on everybody, even for the nameless inhabitants of Zenobias. You reproach me because each of my stories transports you to the downtown of a city without telling you about the space that is extended between one city and another: seas cover it ... Italo Calvino Invisible Cities. A sea that is the bearer of desires and lives. People who have left their hometowns to populate future Zenobias.
Not all of them succeed to it, but the sun continues to rise on lovers and on bodies in the sand.
Featuring work by: Jamila Campagna & Alektron, Raffaella Valsecchi, Francesca Manca di Villahermosa, Miltos Manetas, Alessio Liberati, Dimitri Porcu & Lionel Martin
Curated by Costanza Ferrini