Vis à Vis
Künstler/in
Aldo Giosia Giannotti
(geb. in 1977 in Genua, Italien)
Date2008
ClassificationsDruck
MediumOCE Light-Jet Druck auf Dibond
Paper Support2-teilig
Dimensionsje: 130 × 170 cm; Rahmen je: 134 × 174 cm
Credit LineArtothek des Bundes
Object number27249
DescriptionRealization: may-august 2008Places: Rome, St. Peter's Square, Vatican City & Moscow, Christ the Saviour square
Persons: Aldo Giannotti & Stefano Giuriati
Photographer: Gianmaria Gava.
Vis a Vis
The project is based on the decontextualisation of two specific cultural symbols in order to question their functionality and their significance.
Their symbolic value is not limited to a simple formal function (as in this specific project), rather it refers to specific political and cultural entities with which we have lived and live together.
Giannotti & Giuriati demystify both, the sacred and the profane, turning one's peculiar connotation into the other. The artists are themselves actors in the parallel reality they illustrate: that is what the project is about, not fiction, but another reality.
Vis a Vis is the result of a logic transformation of sense, despite the conceptual evidence of inversion, the latter's exact mirror image questions the very same object of the action. This elicits a strong ambiguity between the referent and its meaning (also a symbolic one). We face the very same sense of the expression "lost in translation".
When have the Swiss Guards ever been deployed to guard the St. Basil's Cathedral? Are they maybe serving at the Kremlin? And why are the Soviets on Vatican ground? This is the point when our historical knowledge steps in. The conditions under which we could hypothetically locate the realisation of this scenario abound, but all are strangely unlikely. Still, connections are not missing, but we hardly find any convincing. It is easy to confuse historical truth, the acknowledged reality, with the denied, unspoken different version of the same events. The theoretical possibility that the event actually occurred might exist. But that is not enough to state that, in favourable conditions, it certainly would have occurred for real. Our hesitation does not originate from the possibility of the event's occurrence, but from the very same doubt about it. We perceive a slight substantial restlessness, a frivolous curiosity that leads us towards paranoid questions about the world of the media. Therefore Aldo Giannotti & Stefano Giuriati are at the same time actors in a fiction and interpreters of an alternative reality. The use of the uniform in this work - as in the former, Carabinieri - stazione mobile, not only decontextualises the bulk of ideological meanings implied, but it also takes the legitimacy away from the role to which it refers, downgrading the power the institution exerts. It is a slightly Dadaist humour, never vulgar or ignorant. This work, despite it's freshness and immediacy implicates an erudite Duchamp-like pun. By confronting political with religious power it becomes difficult to claim what their nature is and how fuzzy the boundary between the two is. The guards, like the vertices and the buildings representing them, confront each other, swap places with each other, observe each other… maybe challenge each other. In between, Vis a Vis we find ourselves smiling at the idea to see the guards swaping. Maybe they are passing by by chance. Like Voltaire's Candide, we wonder optimistically whether this is not the best possible world and find ourselves developing fantastic ideas on the most absurd possibility: …what if?
Anais Prebel Nuicci
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Light Exposure Warning
1992
