Anna Franceschini at Galeria Vera Cortês

Artist: Anna Franceschini

Exhibition title: TU SEI LA NOTTE

Venue: Galeria Vera Cortês, Lisbon, Portugal

Date: May 15 – June 12, 2019

Photography: Bruno Lopes / images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Galeria Vera Cortês

There is the ghost of a body that wanders in the exhibition space. We don’t know its gender, nor do we know its height or weight. Indeed, we don’t even know if it is the ghost of a human being. But we know that there is. It passes through and animates objects, moves between images, navigates the fleeting apparitions, materializes itself within decorative elements. It seems almost paradoxical that the word “ghost” – from the ancient Greek ϕάντασμ – has its etymological roots in the term ϕαντάζω, “to show”, as if its very nature revealed to us that the space of mise-en-scène is governed by a substantial ambiguity.

Anna Franceschini’s research and artistic practice have always investigated the expressive potential of this ambiguous space, uncovering and exacerbating the paradoxes of being on display. For the exhibition TU SEI LA NOTTE, at Galeria Vera Cortês, this survey takes the shape of a phantasmagoric body that infects and destabilizes the gaze, questioning the ontology of the object and its relationship with the mise-en-scène. Between transparency and opacity, the experience of

TU SEI LA NOTTE suggests that exposure and concealment are not types in opposition, but rather the condition of each staging. After all, being on display fundamentally links the art category – as we know in modern Western society – and the goods category of the late-capitalism. Sure enough, Franceschini’s aesthetics is in intimate dialogue with the anonymous products of unbridled consumption, embraces their forms without an author, shares their sordid and inglorious destiny.

In her screen-cum-video TU SEI LA NOTTE (2019), three wigs of different colours engage a spasmodic and erotic dance on a pole dance intermittently illuminated by a strobe light. The film insists on the texture of the wigs and on the organic residues they retain, through an almost fetishistic mode that intends to instil the doubt that, perhaps, the hypertrophy of goods does not go hand in hand with impoverishment of the sensible experience, but on the contrary amplifies and democratizes it. As Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy have pointed out, what defines the current hyperconsumption capitalism is a kind of trans-aesthetic creativity – no less cynical and aggressive than that of early capitalism – which exploits the aesthetic-imaginary dimensions on a generalized scale for generating profit.

However, even if Franceschini access to the object is the same of the capitalist culture her goods are not shown according to the attributes that the market grants them or according to their use value. In fact, they are de-functionalized and the goal assigned by mass production is contradicted. Indeed, the artist seems to suggest that the life of commodities does not end in the processes of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption, but can evolve in unpredictable ways. She is convinced that objects retain further spaces, secret stories, possibilities that we ignore. And it is precisely in this no man’s land that her practice is placed, it is from this terrain vague that Franceschini’s language emerges. As a matter of fact, her relationship with goods is not misleading, but always playful and erotic – in this we find both the surrealist matrix of her practice and the influence of the “cinema of attractions”. Therefore, this register is the Trojan horse that allows Franceschini to access the object beyond modernist teleology and postmodern eclecticism: the alliance with mass industry is her side entrance to the mysterious realm of things. In this no man’s land the artist animates and unleashes an identity crisis of the commodities, forced to live in a form that no longer responds to a function, forced to live with a soul that no longer has a physical correspondence. The identity crisis reverberates in TU SEI LA NOTTE – inside and outside the moving images – and also invades the decoration of the screen that hosts the film, where three androgynous peeled figures seem to imitate the wigs dance without success.

Franceschini’s objects are no longer objects and images as we know, but display-objects and display-images, whose condition is an eternal being-in-drag. If we pause to think about it, we realize that this is the same condition of the ghost, but also the same condition of the ready-made RHODA DECHORUM, which, almost proudly, continues to rotate in front of our eyes, as if nothing had ever happened.

Vincenzo Di Rosa
May, 2019

Exhibition view: TU SEI LA NOTTE, Anna Franceschini, Galeria Vera Cortês, 2019

Anna Franceschini, Tu sei la notte, 2019, HD video, 9:16 ratio, colour-mute, loop, iron structure, painted and cnc cut aluminium plates, led monitor 32”