Artists
Felix Tschurtschenthaler (IT), Der Abgrund ist nicht tief sonder hohl, 2006, 1'24''
Driant Zeneli (AL), Prova d'orchestra (Orchestra Rehearsal), 2010, 7'25''
Hiwa K (IQ), SEESAW, 2008, 9'26''

Curator: Denis Isaia
Three stories of balance on the threshold of fiction

I have always been struck by the possible guilt between the white sheet on which I am writing, and the untrimmed walls of contemporary art museums and art galleries. For this reason today, here in the bunker, I can not let the poetry of concepts free to float. I will only tell you the truth.

Felix Tschurtschenthaler is a young South Tyrolean. He studied wood sculpture according to the tradition of the Gardena Valley, he then moved to Munich to attend the academy. His video “Der Abgrund is nicht tief sondern hohl” opens the present review with a programmatic gesture. Before cutting the board on which he is sitting, Felix stands still for a moment, he then looks down, he finally proceeds. The scene draws back to a well known gag by Buster Keaton. But what is left of the irony of which the camera was a fully engaged accomplice? And again, where is the audience? In the case of Felix Tschurtschenthaler, he is the same and only spectator of his gesture and the camera is the object that produces and solves the fact. Driant Zenelli can explain well. In the winter of 2010 during a residency in Trento he asked the director of the J. Futura Orchestra to invite his musicians for dinner. No one, director excluded, knew he was part of a performance. They all knew that the topic of the evening would have been the discussion of a documovie – already previously planned by another director – dedicated to the Orchestra. “Orchestra Rehearsal,” the title draws back to the homonymous title by Federico Fellini, is the tale of that evening, cut in a backward chronology.If by Felix Tschurtschenthaler the camera is the artist’s body, to be found is the request of a direct complicity between the audience and the artist’s eyes. It is the artist who, from inside the scene, calls the audience to explore the threshold of the real through the case and the camera. Equally known, even if different, is the position Hiwa K takes in the video “SEESAW.” Through an elementary physical proof, Hiwa K hints at the difference between two opposed models. On one side there is the background noise of the cars that pass and of other working machines. They are the audience that the artist carries inside the scene and leaves to the backdrop. On the other side, and simultaneously, there is the hypothesis that the group of friends led by Hiwa are trying to validate. The challenge, ironically inspired by a classical duel by Sergio Leone, is not between Hiwa and Matthias, but between Hiwa + Matthias and those who surround them. The spectator will enter the video only later, and never as the audience. It is not casual that the work was published by the same artist on the web: the tool that instead of taking a sight to many (like the cinema or television) takes many things to the sight of those who wish to look for them. Complicity has been moved, by now definitively, from the camera to the spectator, from reality to daily life.