It starts with the firing

It starts with the firing is the new project of Elisabetta Benassi, specifically designed to Maramotti Collection.

 

Start point of the exhibition is the controversy arose about a work of 1966 the American artist Carl Andre, entitled Equivalent VIII, consisting of 120 bricks placed on two overlapping rows to form a rectangle. The work was bought by the Tate Gallery in London in 1972 to several thousand pounds. The English attacked the press of the purchase ridiculing the decision of the museum with articles and cartoons. Elisabetta Benassi is back on the trail of these materials, now preserved in the Tate (curiously, gathered by Carl Andre himself and donated to the museum), to reopen the debate and put it in motion, pulling out a few sentences from the original newspaper clippings, meeting in an artist's book and turned into posters posted in Reggio Emilia.

From the outside to the inside, from the city to Maramotti Collection, the posters accompany us in the exhibition space. The works of Elisabetta Benassi linking "objects" that belong to the history of the place - the first of Max Mara factory, now houses the collection - with other presences that bind to a broader story, not only Italian, creating a series of "stages" in a path that can be freely composed by the viewer. Each room has a work survived the disappearance of the context that originally housed it. Some "objects" are presented with their "names": Prosperity, Empire (which incorporates another work of Andre), are trademarks but especially metaphors, oracles which ironically turning us some questions. They seem at once familiar and incongruous. A stretcher Industrial steam, carpets that are wedged into a brick wall, a slanting pillar exhibiting his proud trademark: devices that sum in an ironic form the contradictions of history, slipping, sometimes the actual collapse of the way it has imposed to the names and things. But the instability, the puzzles that offer these works have nothing vague; Instead link to something that is all too familiar: the loss of confidence in the technique promises, the posthumous world that comes after the failures of both the ideologies of their alleged remedies, the abandonment to the forces that disperse, rinselvatichendole, memories and communities .