La festa dei corpi feriti – The Feast of wounded bodies Agnese Spolverini

La Festa dei Corpi Feriti (The Feast of Wounded Bodies) is an exhibition project by Agnese Spolverini (Viterbo,1994); the second of the four artists hosted within A Sud Di Marte, an artistic residency plan curated by Ramdom, realised in collaboration with Fondazione Elpis, and running at the spaces of KORA – Centro del Contemporaneo from April 2022 to February 2023.

The project is part of a broader reflection that Ramdom has been developing for years on the concept of the margin; a reflection through which it attempts to question the notion of the centre. Specifically, A Sud di Marte intends to bring to light the vision of a South understood not only as a place rich in complexity but also as an opportunity for the activation of an oblique gaze capable of soliciting constant questioning. The title of the programme takes its inspiration from the Red Planet, which in the collective imagination has always represented the other place par excellence, a utopia to which one can aspire, the announcement of something that is yet to be accomplished but whose happening is ever closer.

Spolverini’s research, which originated during his residency period in Castrignano de’ Greci at KORA-Centro del Contemporaneo, starts from a contemplative gaze on the natural landscape, a hard landscape in which the stone’s emersions are constant and foundational even in a man-made dimension.

It is precisely from the folds and vulnerabilities of stone that the exhibition project entitled The Feast of Wounded Bodies develops. The stones collected in the countryside, normally associated with the idea of a strong material, through a conjunctive gaze (Bifo) become wounded bodies on which vulnerabilities excavated by time and weathering emerge. These, in the space of the upper room, are laid like tired figures on a soft floor that invites a sensitive contact with space and material. The attempt is to allow those who enter the space to take a slow time to lose themselves in the folds of the material, to explore it with a contemplative gaze, embracing the temporality of lingering, without purpose (Han).

In the lower space, on the other hand, there is a work that takes the form of a negative, becomes a nocturnal suggestion and welcomes people directly into the open wounds of the stone, inviting them to position themselves on a sort of rubber mat made from the negative of the alveolization of Lecce stone, the load-bearing material of human construction in the Salento but at the same time a material that deteriorates and shows itself in all its fragility.

All the spaces are crossed by an immersive sound track resulting from the collaboration with sound designer Mauro Diciocia. This, installed in the room below, propagates into the entrance room, inviting people to come down. The track originates from the direct extraction from the stone of sounds that become abstract over the duration of the piece, inviting people to lose themselves in tactile and melodic sounds.

The work is an exhortation to re-appropriate unproductive and contemplative time as the only time in which it is possible to re-explore a sensual contact with the world and bodies, both of which are increasingly dematerialised and subjected to automatisms and accelerated times that attempt to expel the negative and fragile from existence, preventing us from entering the sensitive folds of the world.

Exhibition curated by Claudio Zecchi, Paolo Mele

photo by Alice Caracciolo