nicola genovese/i’m sure, i’ve heard it before

nicola genovese
i’m sure, i’ve heard it before
funeral cards, 280x210x8 cm, 2011

a passage from the Pierluigi Basso Fossali’s text, appeared on semioticaviva:
[…] The internalization of the earth is a wrinkling, a equilibrium in suspension between dragging and attraction, between expatriation and citizenship. Thus, in Nicola Genovese’s “I’m sure, I’ve heard it before” a carpet of old funeral cards risks to display a simple formal flattening, a rhetoric stretch of mutual condolences, as contiguous as they are self-concluding, through the demarcation of a black border. Only a tsunami, in this expanse of platitudes, can corrugate the surface and rediscover fondness: it is a wave that lifts the cards, that breaks the continuity of the linguistic playground, prefiguring future mourning (it is a wave that travels, and overwhelms) and pointing at past deaths in retrospect. The world paved with death, because it has been reduced to words stacked over each other, can still rise, can still distort the message-coffins into something alive, something that remains in-between time: duration and transit, persistency and punctuality, event and memory. Even word graveyards need mountains, although the “plain” has always been viewed as a proper burial location. The cemeteries are places of silence, because everyone should feel linked to that which doesn’t have a pulse anymore; graveyards full of pictures so non-temporal that everyone chooses for their loved one the picture that ideally represents the moment in which they appeared “memorable” to us. […]


artwork part of
Contractions 
curated by daniele capra 
sass muss, schiara building
17 september – 16 october 2011