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HIC IACET CORPUS

Riccardo Caporosso and Alfredo Pirri: installations, artworks, performances
Carlo Bilotti Museum, Villa Borghese Orangery,
Rome, 2011

THE SHOW

An emblematic title, which evokes subtraction, absence, disappearance but at the same time indicates its place; a place which is a home, but the body is no longer there. All that remains are the traces, the imprints, the fragments which the body has left behind: hats, boots, chairs and highchairs, a narrating voice; or blacked out films (hiding the reproduction of postures, gestures, actions), manipulated until they form something akin to a megaphone, or the trumpet of an old megaphone, amplifying invisible waves and old refrains.
These traces communicate that which was the presence of the body – the stories, the thoughts, the conflicts and the reasons which lead to its lying there as well as the need for its re-location in a spatial universe of its belonging.
If every place is a space to be inhabited, a space which awaits to be occupied by the body, then the spectator’s presence here is pivotal to the work, as are the spectator’s actions – of walking, moving around the objects, establishing a point of view, picking up stimuli and connecting them to patterns of thought, observing the details, sitting down, listening.

THE ARTWORKS

The works and the installations in this exhibition shed light on a lack of something and turn that lack into a kind of ‘storytelling’. This is a theme which was already of great importance to Giorgio De Chirico (the artist who most forcefully connotes the permanent collection of the Museum), for whom the body becomes a mannequin, the landscape becomes a flat image, and time is evoked through the presence of shadows.
A programme of live events (performances, conferences etc.) running alongside the exhibition explores its themes and its artistic languages. The initiative is an invitation for an audience already acquainted with the museum to continue to visit its rooms.

To watch the video click here

PHOTOS: GIORGIO BENNI