Extinct revolution in public gravity

2024, performance and installation; Palazzo dei Capitani del Popolo, Ascoli Piceno, Italy

Histological examinations with human tissue containing cancer cells. Banners of a local, near, distant, and unknown civilization. Elliptical walks in the square with artifacts in experimental archaeology.

"Revolution Extinct in Public Gravity" is a work that takes shape in the image of extinction, composed of prostheses of distant and near, microscopic and macroscopic materials. The idea is to abandon the experience of a work that is completed all at once, in a single moment, and at a glance. The goal is to grant plurality the attempt to propose extinction as a hyperobject. In the title, the words are double-faced, with meanings expressed in both forms. One fragment of the work consists of two girls in long black dresses in the square, making revolutions with their bodies. In the main square of the city, they wander, approach, meet, move away, pass through the bystanders, and imitate each other. They wield weapons forged with ancient techniques that simulate the form of ancient local, near, unknown, and distant civilizations. They inhabit the space in a simple elliptical path. The sound of the two girls' breathing comes from the façade of the Palazzo dei Capitani and radiates across the square. The initial breath is disciplined and composed until it evolves into something articulated and amorphous. The gestures and movements evoke surrender and the end. From the windows of the palace, three long black banners display three phrases in ancient Piceni characters: "A valiant warrior," "rests in the middle path," "here lies the image." The text was derived from the few remnants of this civilization, which are mostly funerary steles. The Piceni civilization is among the most unknown and the most contingent. The short circuit resolves in the slow procession of the performers in the square, now close, now distant. The end insinuates itself into other shards of the work. In the installation, a slide projector shows purple organic maps. A public microscope, with an intimacy not only epidermal but muscular, nervous, osseous, and adipose, aims to examine the microscopic metastasis of extinction. Real histological examinations are projected onto the wall, and the cells that may have caused the end are on display. Mourning is composed again with the banners, first public now private, in this new dimension, the ceremony concludes with a disassembled wake into cells.

Performers: Giorgia Fagotto Fiorentini, Beatrice Leonardi
Weapons in experimental archeology granted by the Picenworld Museum

photo credit: Eleonora Cerri Pecorella