A kite rises into flight from a field being harvested. Wheeling in the sky, it glides over vast marble deposits, perhaps drawn by the glints of sunlight reflecting off the glass of the excavators. The sound of footsteps on the volcanic soil of Mount Etna dissolves into the echo of sea waves. This sonic amalgamation is sent through amplifiers into the electrical system powering the LED lights of the Sonnenstube space, causing the illumination of the rooms to flicker. Solar panels, connected to speakers, reconvert light impulses into sound, generating an almost synesthetic experience. This work, titled Fuochi Fatui is a collaboration between Dipasquale and Longe, immersing visitors in an atmosphere that subtly weaves the existing connections between their respective artistic practices.
This electroacoustic apparatus is something that Longe has worked with in previous installations , yet for the occasion, he has invited Dipasquale to to inhabit it with th various audio tracks from her 16mm film titled Blossoms and Fruits at Once. Shot in 2019, the film is a journey to places where the materials needed to create a Winogradsky column can be found. From this positivist experiment of the late 19th century, whose purpose was to recreate the early stages of bacterial life on Earth, Dipasquale’s critical reflection begins on humanity’s desire to reach a hypothetical primordial state and a supposed origin of life. This aspiration to a time when nature nourishes humans effortlessly, where flowers and fruits grow simultaneously, disrupting the progression of seasons, has always been a dangerous myth, in which the female gender, along with all marginalized categories associated with a presumed “naturalness,” has had to pay a very high price.
The rooms of Sonnenstube are transported, as if possessed by supernatural phenomena, into an eerie dimension yet capable of conveying a calming and reflective power. One moves among the works in a space marked by the irregular rhythm of the light, as if moving between out-of-sync film frames. Trapped in a strange interplay of dimensions, one can immerse oneself by traversing Longe’s small sculptures into the vastness of geological eras, experiencing a sense of vertigo while looking back in time but subsequently finding the familiarity of forms reminiscent of present-day technological product packaging. Thus triggering visions of a future irreversibly conditioned by human activity.
3.5 billion years ago, before any living creature traversed the skies or walked the soils of this planet, the first cyanobacterial life forms began releasing oxygen into the atmosphere, triggering the oxidation of metals present at the surface of the Earth. This event, called the ”Great Oxidation,” contributed to the formation of approximately 2,500 new mineral species. In his work, Hunter Longe investigates, appropriating apparatuses from the sciences and flirting with the esoteric and folkloric, the geological and biological co-evolution. An example of this is the work Vegetative Art, where a drawing of one of these ancient life forms reproduced in graphite on polystyrene is then applied to an red iron-rich rock, emphasizing their connection.
Turning the corner, where the barely recognizable imprint of thermoformed packaging is glimpsed, a green laser highlights the slight protrusions of the wall, revealing an invisible landscape. The plaster sculpture, like a petrified specter or ectoplasm, evokes limestone karst landscapes, whose irregular and bulging forms are caused by the geological process of dissolution, where the less dense areas of the rock dissolve and erode under the force of water. This work and another at the doorframe are titled Dissolution of the State, hypothesizing that human political organizations may be subject to terrestrial entropic forces. Mimicking geologic processes, these two works were cast directly into sediments on the riverbanks near the artist’s studio in Geneva.
On the cathode-ray tube monitor, hands can be seen pounding on a table, while during a seance, ectoplasm emerges from a woman’s mouth but remains trapped by the screen’s glass. Dipasquale’s work Spirit Talks consists of an ongoing series of silent 16mm films. These videos draw inspiration from the archival material of late 19th-century “spirit photography,” a time when, alongside the invention and dissemination of photographic media, there was great interest in spiritualism. At that time, many mediums attracted the attention of the positivist scientific community, which sought to use photography to prove or disprove magical evocations. For Dipasquale, this event represents the clash between two different systems of signifying existence: on one side, the scientific community of the time that sought to classify and name the real, and on the other, mediumship as a profession, often a livelihood, and with a craft component. It is the need to manufacture “authentic” images of spirit sessions and the consequent experimental technical devices that interests Dipasquale.
As if escaping one of these evocations, a mysterious smoky light spreads from a small fragment of rock in the adjacent room. Immolation is composed of a specimen of rock from a Neolithic to Iron Age place of worship in Goldbichl, Austria. At this site, the bodies of countless goats, cattle, and sheep were sacrificed in fire. The repeated burning of animals on an altar made of soil and rock caused apatite, a mineral present in bones, to fuse with the rock, thus creating, through human action, microscopic crystals of previously nonexistent mineral species.
In Tracer, the trace left by a small being in the sand is immortalized by the cast performed by the artist, as if to find or decrypt a message left over time. Some almost sketch-like features, added in tinted epoxy clay, simulate the wandering among the grains of a crawling creature. In the room,as the footsteps echo incessantly among the Silvestri craters of the Sicilian volcano these words can almost be seen scrolling across the screen scrolling on the screen:
The time of maggots,
the pace of plants and leaves
what if heat would have been the measure,
and distances assessed by the shivering,
the stroking of one with another.
A pounding on the surface, a flickering light being mirrored.
—GG
Curated by
Giacomo Galletti ?and Gabriel Stöckli
at Sonnenstube Offspace at Villa Florida, Lugano
until January 13, 2024