16/02/2023 - 18/02/2023
Event on the occasion of AnthroDay2023, Milan
Scalo Lambrate, Milan IT.
Curated by Sara Verde, Giulia Bianchi, Alessia D’introno, Irene Follador, Diego Giannettoni, Collettivo N410.
With Francesca Talia Adami, Edoardo Bonacina, Elisabetta Bottura, Francesca Bullo, Elisa Ceneri, Alessia D’Introno, Xizi Du, Marie Nicole Gianfrate, Arianna Maria Leva, Giulia Piatti, C. Sidonie Pellegrino, Yuming Zhou.
Ph: Veronica Pirovano.
Next to how many other people's moments am I resting my feet?
How many stories am I dodging along my path?
Alienating oneself from one's identity. Alienating oneself. Peeling off one's body in the illusion of wearing a different one. The thrill of a single day.
Rome, January 16, 2018.
Artist Camilla Gurgone walks slowly through the streets of the capital. Backpack on her shoulders, head slightly bowed and looking down. It is certainly not the first time she has walked through the African neighborhood, and yet, it is only in that instant that her eyes pay attention to the amount of receipts abandoned along the city streets. That day, unlike all the others, he instinctively decides to stop, pick up a receipt and read the text. From that moment on, for two years he lets his life and spending be conducted by the receipts of strangers who unknowingly choose food, items, perfume, shopping lists and clothes, instead of him. Two different lives, with no connection to each other, meet in that instant and cease to be unknown.
Through Non-Intentional Actions, the figure of Camilla Gurgone is annihilated along with her decision-making power, in the willingness to carry out a relational quest. The work is the first in a series of publications that take up its methodology of actions but, which were developed through the aid of a different scheme. The search for receipts, in fact, is not devoid of logic rather, the artist voluntarily decided to focus on a specific area: the Isola neighborhood of Milan, where he currently lives. The collection was limited to five receipts, completely assembled during the same day: August 21, 2022. The resulting activities were turned into the list of what would be his routine the following day. August 22, 2022 represents for the artist a day dictated by unintentional commands, where his commitments and needs were shaped to prioritize actions.
What might seem to be an obsessive and insistent search for temporal mimesis is instead a demonstration of the impossibility of duplicating a memory and reliving the same moment twice, as each moment is filtered by time and the personality of the person experiencing it.
It is in this context that thermal paper becomes a metaphor for memory, daily life, time, and social relations. Metaphor of evanescence. In the same way that what is printed vanishes within a couple of years, memories, gestures and encounters are also archived from our minds, especially those trivialized and implied moments experienced during a day. As such, even the receipts concerning them are not preserved but, are thrown away along the asphalt shortly after we beat them. Camilla Gurgone approaches a type of material and its cold and formal language in order to juxtapose it with a warm and spontaneous one, that of emotions, with the intention of: "Attempting to control the uncontrollable." Non-Intentional Actions aims at the inclusion and absorption of different habits, traditions and cultures within the artist's daily life. The work brings closer and breaks down the distance between different individuals living in the same city or, even, in the same neighborhood. To the question "What would my life have been like if to this day I had made another decision?" Camilla Gurgone answers through the evolutionary inquiry of Non-Intentional Actions.
-Sara Verde
Non-Intentional Actions,2022.
Performative actions.
Various objects, glass, iPad video.
Variable dimensions.
