ROOMS

RAM space
Rome, 2013

THE SHOW

After two Promemoria (Memorandum) exhibitions, RAM picks up the Camere (Rooms) series with an all-Roman edition: Alvin Curran, Maurizio Mochetti and Alfredo Pirri are the participants of the 18th appointment. The nature of the exhibition itself, with previously unseen installations, is strengthened not only by the occasional dialogue among the artists, but also by the precise understanding between them in private: they indulge us with their intimate and personal “confrontational field, dialectical field, battlefield” (Riccardo Giagni, Camere 2005). The texts accompanying the exhibition are transcripts of certain extracts from conversations recorded for RAM LIVE: Alvin Curran with Susan Levenstein, Maurizio Mochetti with Gaia Scaramella and Alfredo Pirri with Valentina Valentini. The dialogues can be heard in their entirety on RAM LIVE, http://live.radioartemobile.it/, as of opening day.

DIALOGUE

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Alfredo Pirri and Valentina Valentini

Valentina: In the origin of the world there is this image of God pronouncing the phrase fiat lux – let there be light. Artists have reflected on this fiat lux, considering the relationship between image and word. You are an artist who works with images, yet you also work with words because you write and you have a rather close relationship with sound. How is this relationship translated into your work – as separation, as coincidence, as concurrence?

Alfredo: I take things quite literally. Fiat lux means that in the beginning of everything there was the image. There is a hierarchy between image, word and sound. Image is a generous environment in which both sound and word can be developed. Image is in constant expansion like the universe. For me word and sound are absolutely residual facts in relation to image. This does not mean that they are secondary, but they are nevertheless the remains of image. Neither word nor sound is able to substitute image. Image is the foundation of the world, the foundation of civilisation, of community, of being together, at least in our part of the world.

Valentina: Do you not think instead that people are brought together by hearing words?

Alfredo: But always starting with an image. I too suffer the fascination of the word, but I am conscious that true joy is in the image.

Valentina: Writing is different to the spoken word, which vanishes like sound; writing is creating signs that remain like traces on a background and can as such be assimilated to images, like hieroglyphics, ideographic writing. Writing is a work of composition, a transfixed desire from a concept, an idea, like the composition of a work of art.

Alfredo: I’m not saying that I don’t get pleasure from writing, but I only do when I manage to evoke an image or, better still, narrate an image. Sound too is like writing. I really like sounds that evoke natural ones by synthesising them; sounds that narrate the world, returning it to us amplified.