Today is the last day to catch the monographic screening program dedicated to the works of Giorgio Andreotta Calò (22–24 November). It is part of NEBULA EXPANDED, a moving image program at @museomaxxi’s videogallery curated by Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi.
Giorgio Andreotta Calò’s practice is an expansive exploration into the condition of the fragment, into the places and architectures that undergo the vulnerability of living matter, being reconfigured as sculptures, installations and videos in which the formal choices are the result of an ongoing negotiation between chronological and emotional time.
Icarus, 2021
In December 2020 in Emmen, Andreotta Calò intervened on the so-called butterfly pavilion, an architecture once dedicated to lepidopterans and part of a larger zoological complex that had been disused for years. Thanks to the collaboration of Enzo Moretto, an expert entomologist, and Bart Coppens, a young self-taught entomologist, a colony of moths is reestablished inside the building, in a final symbolic act that precedes its demolition. In a landscape dominated by the emptiness imposed by the pandemic, the pavilion, in a reverse movement, returns to being animated by thousands of moths. The metamorphosis of the insects, documented through video footage, triggers a parallel change in the environment and the characters who occupy it. The moths, motionless during daylight hours, reactivate as the sun sets—it is in this liminal space, at the threshold of the oneiric, that myth can manifest itself and coincide with reality. The figure of the expert entomologist versed in the secrets of science recalls that of Daedalus, while the apprentice, fascinated by the former’s ability to direct nature, evokes Icarus. Their contingent acts create a parallel with the myth, and the film, from a documentation of a biological transformation, embraces the language of myth where reality and fiction coincide.
Free entry
Image credit: Still from Giorgio Andreotta Calò, ΊΚΑΡΟΣ (Icarus), 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Galleria ZERO…, Milan ...