SIGNS

“[S]HE LOOKETH IN THE LIVER.”

EZEKIEL 21:21

The guts, as one of the inscrutable elements of the future, repository of feelings and unexplainable truths are at the center of this section. This is a section that challenges the notion that knowledge exists only as and is privilege of patriarchal rationalism. The works of art focus on the emotive unexplainable insight of women that is knowledge even if outside the remits of rational and scientific thought. They bring back from the periphery into the center the primordial forces of emotive and subconscious understandings which are based on uterus and entrails in juxtaposition to the phallic and cerebral constructs of a failing patriarchal future.

Signs is one of ten sections of Lanfranco Aceti’s installation titled Preferring Sinking to Surrender which was conceived by the artist for the Italian Pavilion, Resilient Communities, curated by Alessandro Melis for the Venice Architecture Biennale, 2021. The ten sections are: Tools for Catching Clouds; Preferring Sinking to Surrender, Part I; Preferring Sinking to Surrender, Part II; Sacred Waters; Le Schiavone; Orthós; Seven Veils; Signs; Rehearsal; and The Ending of the End. These sections, singularly and collectively, create a complex narrative that responds to this year’s theme How Will We Live Together? set by Hashim Sarkis, curator of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale. 

The works of art — realized as a series of performances and sculptural, video, and painting contributions — are part of the installation at the Italian Pavilion from May 21, 2021, to November 21, 2021, (the opening and closing dates of the Venice Architecture Biennale).

The notion of the future has become an existential dread. The absence of love towards the creation has left a world bereft of future opportunities. Darkness is cast against the beauty of what remains of the Italian landscape at this particular point in time. The works of art are a record of disattended hopes and mounting fears. The signs exist in a natural order, the flight of a bird, which is both an animal and a mechanical flying object. The trace left in the sky is open to interpretation as much as any other sign in the photographic works of art. Even the works of art become signs pointing to other signs, in the past, in the present, and in the future braiding a possible path of defiance, hopelessness, or silence.

It is in the inevitability of the present that the rebellious will for life surges, in the indefinable choice of not wanting to surrender. Matriarchy exists in the will to live and to continue to give life pathologically passionate about the multiform nature of life. In start contrast to the greed of devouring the world of patriarchalism, the Great Mother and those who dwell by her continue to carve out a path of existence that is alternative and in opposition to the patriarchal will of death manifested as war on everything and everyone.

As we continue to look into signs of possible alternatives in order to architect a different future…