10/06 - 15/07/ 2021
KHLAB, Rome.
curated by KHLAB
Critical text: Mattia Cuccurullo
Ph: Tommaso Schirru.
Accidents, failures, sudden ruptures of pipes and water leaks. It’s not about fortuitous accidents nor symptomatic explosions of the repressed (who said that the rupture of a pipe is not also a badly restrained libidinal explosion?); instead, it is more about systematic events that destabilize our daily routines, which alter the reassuring synopsis of our homes. We are not masters in our house, just as we are not masters of our body: the "impersonal" owner of these organisms is an intricate architecture of pipes and veins, cerebral and electrical circuits, the triumph of a resurgent and irritating structuralism, a drip for all those control freaks with a hydrophobic and hypertrophic ego.
In Problemi di idraulica, faced with this complexity, made up of petty things that subtly become enormous, Camilla Gurgone improvises herself as a resolute worker, she throws herself into the chaos, but to do so what she creates is an extended field of problems, with an installation that transforms the white cube of the KHLAB into a plant engineering delirium. In her artistic research, impersonating "respectable" and "useful" professions, Gurgone, as a true enfant terrible, adopts the consolidated practice of assimilation, deforming through the transgressive use of this (un)possession, the bourgeois and official statute of professions, a heritage that is common to the same subjects with ego problems. Against the cliché that being an artist is not serious stuff, this sprawling and mimetic proliferation takes on a playful and at the same time corrosive aspect, like acid to unclog a pipe. In this fictional game, where problems are flipped, the viewer - entering a carousel - is invited to participate, to experience the aesthetics of this dysfunctionality, here explored formally and conceptually.
This creates a short circuit that complicates the relationship between reality and fiction, creating a terrain of relational exchange that, through a wide range of implications, turns from the lightness of the boutade to the most lucid criticism - the individual, meta-artistic claim - which captures in the trap of a clogged sink the fatty and spurious layer of stereotypes and prejudices, banality and vulgarity.
A serious game that, in the space of a masquerade, makes the artificiality of form and the spontaneity of intent a weapon against the mental (and not just metaphorical) clogging resulting from these small domestic problems.
- Mattia Cuccurullo
Problemi di idraulica, 2021.
Wood, microfiber mats, glass, painted plaster, plastic, ceramic, various objects.
Environmental dimension.
Ph.Tommaso Schirru, Sofia Sotto Corona.
