Spazio Portici – Videoart — Where the words end

For the third episode of Spazio Portici – Video Arte, co-curated on this occasion with Iole Pellion di Persano in collaboration with the Recontemporary Association, works by international artists of high value and quality have been called upon to interact with the metropolitan fabric, opening up a new mode of experiencing contemporary art.

In this episode, the decision was made to explore the limits and potential of language in relation to both individual and collective existential conditions.

“Spazio Portici is intended as a curatorial format open to the public and capable of building connections with both public and private initiatives, with the aim of fostering an artistic regeneration of metropolitan space,” says Roberto Mastroianni. “The exhibition focuses on textual language as a fundamental element for communication and the perpetuation of culture. It is fascinating to see how art can conceptually and physically connect something as ephemeral and immaterial as video to something seemingly opposite, such as writing,” adds Iole Pellion di Persano.

At Spazio Portici – Video Arte, the exhibition Where The Words End (November–December 2023), realized in collaboration with the Recontemporary Association, takes shape. The show investigates the relationship between bodies, identities, technology, languages, spatiality, temporality, and the limits of communication.

Through the exploration of works by international video artists, a sound and visual landscape emerges, integrated with the spaces of the historic arcades. This landscape reflects on the interaction between people and the boundaries of communication, probing contemporary existential and anthropological conditions in order to restore the social dimension of contemporary cities, along with their collective and individual imaginaries and identities. The everyday life of passersby is thus transformed into a sensory and aesthetic experience, reclaiming a place of transit and converting it into a space charged with meaning—an artistic regeneration of a portion of the metropolitan fabric.

The works of the artists on display—selected among the most significant exponents of international video art while ensuring absolute gender parity—are also in dialogue with the exhibition Where the Words Start on Lawrence Weiner, hosted at the Recontemporary space on Via Gaudenzio Ferrari 12b in Turin.

The Exhibition Path

The exhibition unfolds between public and private space, investigating the ontological and anthropological dimensions of language.

Starting from the works of Weiner, the videos by the participating artists (Allora & Calzadilla, Beltrán, Conlon, Dombis, Fucà, Pong) explore the pitfalls and potential concealed at the limits of language, revealing the complex meanings embedded in communicative codes in relation to spatiality, temporality, and interpersonal relationships. They generate narratives that extend a conceptual inquiry capturing banal objects, everyday actions, images, words, impressions, texts, and graphics.

The aim of the exhibition is to prompt viewers to question the essence and significance of language as a fundamental structure of human relationships, and the mechanisms of understanding and misunderstanding that emerge within the linguistic games shaping our daily experience.

In (Video) Game #5 (2009, 48”), Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker invent and record a series of games that address issues of cooperation, competition, national identity, gender dynamics, and geopolitics. The wood chips and planks salvaged from the ruins of Panama City’s demolished historic neighborhoods testify to a frenzied metamorphosis that has erased the city’s architectural history and devoured its collective memory.

With Endless Ends (2009, CH, video, 6’48”), Elodie Pong links together the final images of classic films—those signaling the transition from narrative to end credits—into an endless loop. This repetition opens an infinite field of possibilities, making it impossible to determine a definitive ending.

Erick Beltrán’s Stock (56”, single-channel video, b&w) poses pressing questions: who selects and organizes images, and how? For what purposes? Which among the many images should be considered true? Which rejected or accepted? Beltrán creates a visual product offering a sharp, interrogative perspective on concepts such as hierarchy, systematization, classification, modification, value, and order—concepts that underlie the images and messages that constantly surround us.

The video Signs Facing the Sky (2005, 2’23”, single-channel video, color, sound) by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla intervenes in the urban topography unfolding beneath an airplane’s wings, seconds before landing at San Diego International Airport. The work incorporates phrases gathered during informal interviews with residents living in buildings along the flight path, creating an inner portrait of the city where voices overlap and intersect. Hopes, desires, and secrets revealed by these phrases were painted onto rooftops, offering airline passengers their first visual contact with San Diego.

With Blue Moon Over (2001, 5’14”, color, sound), Lawrence Weiner extends his text-based practice into the digital realm, presenting aphorisms and epigrammatic phrases that probe language, assimilation, and desire: a seamless sequence of animated drawings and text fragments.

In Didikidim (2020, digital video, 4’08”), Lina Fucà focuses on the word “to eat.” In some parts of the world or within certain social classes, the need to eat has been transformed into a matter of custom rather than a fundamental necessity, without which nothing else makes sense. Through the video, the essential importance of this word takes shape, resonating across different languages like a chant or a poem; emerging from the sea in a succession of iron-written words, advancing with voices pronouncing its sound.

Maria Loboda’s The Messenger (Peril is the absence of any awareness of peril. Like the night before a war) (2012–2015, video/film, one-channel video loop) links language and representation through connections whose content often eludes grasp, frequently overshadowed by ornament. Each letter of the work’s title is individually depicted and subsequently presented before the camera.

The exhibition closes with Pascal Dombis’s Time is Junk (2017), a reflection on the relationship between image and temporality in the digital age. His video installation, algorithmically composed of poetic, philosophical, and literary quotations, unfolds as a collection. This journey through writing and poetic word becomes an exploration of our collective imagination, activating sensations and emotions that connect the viewer’s inner time with the external time of cultural narratives.

In this way, perception, memory, images, and imagination merge into a fragmented collective and individual biography. The images and sounds of the exhibition engage with bodies—virtual and real—technology, and new languages. A portion of the metropolitan fabric thus transforms into a curated Video and Sound Art Gallery: a public space conceived as an integrated device, capable of acting both as an element that interacts with the work and the viewer—becoming part of the artwork itself—and as an exhibition venue that fosters new aesthetic experiences of the urban fabric and a renewed encounter with public art.