Manifesto

About

The term “MANIFESTO” is used here in its widest meaning and encompasses a combination of various of posters, billboards and metropolitan aphorisms, merged and superimposed as scattered pieces of memories: the familiar remains of the incessant and disconnected visual bombardment, that we are constantly exposed to.

Here the snap-shots and memories from the daily life cross over and juxtapose themselves on an impersonal collective imagination; shreds of various chronicles, fragments of political propaganda or simple advertising campaigns are decomposed and put back together in a memorial cage in continuous movement and transformation.
Through a process of aesthetic demolition, the assembled, recovered, not-mediated images witness the constant flow of infectious information and media contamination.

Through a close and lucid examination, Abbate and Consiglio deal with the topic of the power of the images: they show celebrities and icons of the contemporary age, encompassing international chronicles to national interferences, to take us to a personal non-place, full of memories of domestic moments, that will never come back again. These images are not assimilated, but stolen, manipulated and given back without a narrative order. The driving force is the aesthetic curiosity and the power of the images, understood as visual notes made of memories and feelings, but without any formal constraints or value hierarchies.

The exhibited works reflect the waste, the excess, the commodities and visual stimulants that charge our minds with tensions, energies and synergies with virtually no real value.
“Manifesto” is a complex of inputs and surrounding impulses that inexorably combine with our inner states; this complex of media input becomes set in our memories and undoubtedly changes our behaviors and perceptions, our reactions, what we are and will be. This container of non-personal memory is destined to come out when we describe and represent ourselves.

In its adjectival significance, “manifesto” (= obvious, evident) clarifies the deepest meaning of the exhibition: a contemplation of behavior through the accumulation of visual annotations, which are suggested in an illusory chaos but carefully reorganized to demonstrate how apparently innocuous images are active in the political and social context: for this reason, these images require investigation in the contemporary era.