FS-17 Fabulous Bodies by Emanuele Gatto
Curated by Cosimo Caroppo
March 30th - April 6th
CASETTA STUDIO is the agricultural building within an olive grove, where in 2018 construction of a new residence began. Following the death of the olive trees because of the xylella pandemic and the impending desolation of the landscape, the design energy of the house under construction transformed into the concrete potential of the space, and Casetta emerged as a solid cube in its own right. We approached the outer walls to conceive, exhibit, and observe new works. Canvases and fabrics took on the musty and lichen-like characteristics of the surrounding stones. The olive trees no longer live. The ruins and stones remain; they have developed a lymphatic system that has made them warm and alive. CASETTA STUDIO is the virgin place of creation, where a constant sense of possibility coexists with the patina of ancestral agricultural memory.
We wondered if art alone could animate this place and redeem it from abandonment. If it were possible to graft queer lives onto these stones, expressing the diverse possibilities that they evoke.
The project aims to adopt a non-conformist perspective and engage in dialogue with non-academic and non-school art, with other disciplines, and with life in the rural environment. CASETTA STUDIO therefore promotes queer art and research and embodies the perspective of the local and global South.
FS-17 FABULOUS BODIES pierces a diaphragm, crosses it, and by experiencing penetration, announces its existence. It is the diaphragm of norms codified by hegemonic culture, a cloth that lulls us into comfort zones and authorizes judgment. FS-17 takes us by the hand and then lets us go in the direction of self-discovery, bodies without training wheels learning a terrifying and exciting balance. The freedom to scream at ourselves that perhaps speed and trust in the unknown enrich our souls so deeply that we can no longer turn back.
The body in all its figurative representations, in all its movements and poses, plays a central role. It is through performative bodies that non-binary spaces devoid of definition are intended to be created and reclaimed.
FABULOUS BODIES that echo the steps, their own steps.
If the idea of not turning back was the impulse of the new, fast and imminent escape; if a run without touch, a step that glides, alien to the boundary, took our bodies elsewhere, that elsewhere killed us. We were no longer the same.
Often returning is comforting. Sometimes it's a storm. Returning and staying is a continuous repositioning in a game of tiles too square, ancient, known, obeyed. So with all this social and ethnographic material, all these tiles, a work of delegitimization begins, listening to a past that resurfaces, but for the first time speaks freely.
What would a body with the gift of freedom be like in an environment devoid of definitions? In digging with arms and lies, we went to question the interior. Often dazed, we sought physiological anxieties and exhaustion, inhabited the limit, and danced in the limit. What is this rhythm if not an inner voice, our biological code? What is this ancestral information that traverses History? What are these voices and songs, these movements and gestures, this common feeling, not transmitted in words and concepts?
We were no longer the same to what? To an arrogant envelope of flesh and power?
Like water, we will infiltrate; like sap, we will ascend matter. Filaments to cross. Fissures to unstitch.
From the earth, a chatter with multiple voices resonates, grabs our feet, pushes us, and bewitches us.