Second appointement of the Engagé festival with presentation of the video “Saturday afternoon” (Decalogo) by Aldo Runfola

Saturday 5th of May 2018, 4 p.m.
From 5th of May to 19th of May 2018

As second stage of its annual programme, during the inauguration of the Engagé festival on 5th May, La Fabbrica del Cioccolato Foundation will present “Saturday afternoon” (Decalogo), a video by Aldo Runfola

“Saturday afternoon” (Decalogo) is the audiovisual take of the car journey made by the author from home to his studio. On this itinerary, which resumes and expandst the figure of the artist mapping the space around him, comes to inscribe, with unexpectedly evocative force, the biblical word of a passage of Deuteronomy, the Decalogue, according to the second speech of Moses.

The detection/revelation, which arises from the comparison between the mundane track and the scan of the text that, as the only element of spectacularization, is reproduced ‘live’, as if someone tapped on the keys at that very precise moment, offers a vision perhaps unpublished, certainly not premeditated, of the relationship between word and image, to the full advantage, it would seem, of the first.

Aldo Runfola is born in 1950 in Palermo, lives in Berlin. Studied philosophy at the Università Statale di Milano, and calls himself an anti-humanist on loan to the visual arts. Works in various media including video, texts and large scale embroidery that have been exhibited in various single and group shows since 1984. Because he is both fascinated and suspicious of words and images, he believes that art is a diagnostic on the health of images and words. He is currently working on a new project about what is alive and what is dead in art.

“Engagé”

From the French dictionary: Engagé est aussi qui est engagé dans un endroit et ne peut en être retiré facilement. Qui prend position, en vertu de ses convictions profondes, sur les problèmes sociaux, politiques ou religieux de son temps. (“Engaged” is also who is engaged in a place and cannot be removed easily. Who takes a position, by virtue of his deep convictions, on the social, political or religious problems of his time).

The project Engagé comes from a dialogue between Fosco Valentini and Franco Marinotti about the absence or rarity, in contemporary socially-engaged art (political art, social art. etc.) of those ironic, imagination, subconscious, symbolical, poetic, dream, transcendent, iridescent, spiritual freedoms essential to shed light on and discuss the emergencies of our world, that we live as nightmares bothering us in the chaos of the eternal ground of creation. Nothing distressing us then, to start daydreaming again, re-sexualising ideas and words, finding the mark of Eros again. We need to go beyond pre-set meanings that became stones and find the temporary meaning lying in game, or reciprocal action of light. The space Engagé proposes to develop a synergetic path collateral to the programme of the Fabbrica del cioccolato Foundation, going against those “artistisations” borrowed from the media and aimed to dramatize ecological, social and political emergencies, exacerbating communication masochism. Engagé wants to give space to Contemporary Art’s expressive methodologies, to those worlds of Art, Politics, Ethics and Aesthetics investigating with a “Dionysiac” approach, meaning by that the artistic-aesthetic choices freeing metaphorical excess, ironic exuberance, poetic exhilaration, the aphorism of grotesque and exaggeration, knowing that both in art and in the human nature there is no such a thing as satisfaction, there is no sense of enough, but rather an innate need for excess, twinkle, exaggeration. That’s the reason why we can’t live without imagination, without adorning and exaggerating our own life.