saturday 28 march – 7 pm
Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna – Aula Magna
Riccardo Benassi (I)
Morestalgia28032020
lecture performance, italian première, production Xing/Live Arts Week
+
book launch
Morestalgia28032020 is a lecture in concertized form that comes from the need to keep alive the text of the project Morestalgia, constantly updating it and geolocating it. At the center of the ‘lesson’ is the video that portrays Alpha1 – a Chinese humanoid robot marketed for the purpose of amusing children and teaching yoga to their mothers – painting the artist’s childhood landscapes on canvas. ‘Morestalgia’ is a neologism created by Riccardo Benassi to update the concept and the feeling of nostalgia, and arises from research on its social implications in an age where the internet is encroaching into our lives. It can be also defined as ‘augmented nostalgia’: a specific kind of homesickness, whose sense of pain is similar to that caused by the feeling of envy, a feeling of lack – self-translated as loss – whose direct reference is experienced by others. Morestalgic human beings are those who have the desire to live an experience they have previously understood as a plausible one but who, instead of recalling it from their own past, supplant it with an immersive navigation experience offered by the Web. This research provided the audiovisual content transmitted by a multimedia LED techno-curtain that welcomed the travelers of the Bologna Centrale Alta Velocità Train Station in January 2020. A presence that was a prologue of this ninth edition of Live Arts Week.
The lecture performance is accompanied by the launch of Morestalgia pocket book published by NERO.
Riccardo Benassi lives and works in Berlin. His work has distinguished itself as a multidisciplinary approach that focuses on the impact of technology in our daily relation to space, mostly reflecting on how technological devices have radically altered the structures for living and organizing the real, from architecture to politics, to cultural production and consumption. Benassi often developed collaborations within the last subcultures of the ’90s and was, in his early years, a key figure in the European underground music scene. Equally active in the visual field, he employed new media with particular focus on the expressive growth of the millennial generation, and has become an authority on both their theory and implementation. His pieces are the result of an articulate assembly of images, texts, sounds, colors, design objects, and various materials which together form large-scale installations, videos, art books, and sculptural elements. In recent years text has taken an increasingly large place in his productions. Best examples are his public work Daily Desiderio (2018> ∞), permanently installed in the ArtLine Sculpture Park within Milan’s City Life district, and Morestalgia (2019>), curated by Xing, winner of the Italian Council V by MIBACT. He has published: Lettere dal sedile del passeggero quando nessuno è al volante (Mousse Publishing 2010), Briefly, Ballare (Danilo Montanari 2012), Attimi Fondamentali (Mousse Publishing 2012), Techno Casa (Errant Bodies 2015) and Morestalgia (NERO Publishing 2020).
video, texts, voice, live mixing Riccardo Benassi
live digital percussions Tiziano Colombi
book NERO
production Xing/Live Arts Week
supported by the Italian Council (5th Edition, 2019) – Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity and Urban Regeneration of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism