Untitled Shapeless
Exhibition by Matteo Nasini
Curated by Claudio Zecchi
At the time of the inauguration of Untitled Shapeless by Matteo Nasini, the rooms of Kora – Centro del Contemporaneo host an exhibition (Our land is a sea monster) which has as its main theme the Mediterranean investigated through two directions: a place of contrasts and political contradictions and social on the one hand, proposal for a paradigm shift on the other. Therefore, a place capable of welcoming even what is on the scale of unproductivity – decentralization, fragility, slowness, failure, betrayal of expectations – no longer understood as an element of weakness, on the contrary, as an element of strength.
The Mediterranean is in this sense a space that is both similar and different to itself; a space wider than its geography; a space in which different forces act, even natural ones, mysterious and imponderable like the wind. Or the winds. And the winds, which are a primordial voice whose origin is invisible, have different names, blow unpredictably and have different qualities: weight, volume, emptiness, roar and shape (Predrag Matvejević).
Precisely the wind, or the winds, are at the center of Matteo Nasini’s project, a project in continuity with his research on sound (Neolithic Sunshine, Sparkling Matter, Mediterranean Sonata to name a few), a project which, to use the words of the artist “investigates the changing concept of identity and territory by relating natural, cultural and aesthetic elements”.
Untitled Shapless is thus divided into two interventions that involve the Kora library on one side and the streets of Castrignano de’ Greci on the other.
Some sculptures are located in different places in the library. These try to transform the energy of the winds into sound by modifying the space into a sort of acoustic amplifier and place of continuous waiting in which listening becomes a different way of relating to both space and time. The library thus expands its daily functions, also becoming a place of surprise and betrayal. The resonators, in fact, are aesthetically very attractive sculptural objects that announce by their presence something that may never happen, the propagation of sound, forcing the visitor to wait even a long time or perhaps to give up listening. The resonators manifest themselves as an archipelago of islands and the users as (temporary) islanders, people who have “the mark of their time in waiting” (Predrag Matvejević). Not only. The resonators become bearers of a political message: in the wait there is in fact the choice to adhere not only to a slow but also unproductive time, far from the efficiency of the present.
Furthermore, on one of the shelves you can find a selection of books on topics related to the project such as sound, waiting and the Mediterranean.
The second intervention, which finds a preview in the corridor of the library, spreads mainly through the streets of the town, from the center to Kora, or vice versa, giving life to a path of bas-reliefs in Lecce stone which always have the wind as the protagonist, here agitator of abstract representations, of dishevelments and currents of air.
Untitled Shapeless is finally, as the artist says, a project “formed by the union of original elements of the culture and morphology of the territory, which are transformed into a different expressive dimension, suspended between the visible and the unknown”.
