Thomas De Falco – MATERIE

June 29th 2018
START from 7:00 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.
Casa Morra – Archivio d’Arte Contemporanea
Salita San Raffaele 20/c, Napoli

Performance and Textile Installation curated by Lucrezia Longobardi.

“My tree, I speak to you and I tell you my secret thoughts. All my truth, all my rustic desires, you know everything about me and the troubles of the simpler life, the one closest to you.”

Cit. Paul Valery

On the monumental octagonal scale of the Palazzo Cassano Ayerbo D’Aragona, on 29 June 2018 will take shape, after a period of residence held in this same place, the performance and textile installation of the artist Thomas De Falco. A vision played on the dialogue between human and natural forms, in their original reciprocity, will decline through a mixed landscape of sculptural bodies and tapestries, in which the performers become sculptural extension, protuberance of the support through wrapping used as connectors of the two worlds, and their turn, a counter-representation of nature itself, in a dreamlike and all-encompassing scenario.

Materie, an evocative title of the plurality of the supports of life, in an active dialogue with the architecture of the place, tries to anchor itself to the stability of a monument making itself home, where the stability of the moment is precarious and difficult to find. And the woman, and her pain, participate in this narrative as an absolute symbol. The latter is not bound to instability understood with a negative meaning, but as an act of overcoming despite the dismay of affliction. At this point the parallels with the city emerge naturally and make a poetic and delicate vision of this semantic union. The woman, which reflects the genre with which the “sex” of nature is recognized, becomes an emblematic body for this identification between gesture and essence, like the “femmena” city that hosts this work and inspires its main features.

A work is inseparable from its historical and political context.

A contemporary work, therefore, is an accent within a wider discourse, a great symphony of voices and winds that animate it, of reflections that spirally converge in the concept of Zeitgeist.

Naples is a port. A threshold on the Mediterranean. On its waters have sailed ancient myths, the exploits of the Greek heroes, Ulysses, but every age has its epics. And they always surpass the contours of reality to assume a hyper-ethical dimension, epic. Pasolini in 1964, with his “Prophecy”, thought of tracing the contours of a contemporary Mediterranean mythology. We have woven that myth of elements from tragic radicality. Fixing the border warp in the plot of the sea.

It is from here that, for exquisitely historical reasons, the work of Thomas De Falco finds the trigger, crossing the conceptual limit of a symbol that is a point of separation and union at the same time. The border, in his work, shows, therefore, all its structural consistency of ligatures, seams. And in this sense it reverses its sense with respect to the common vision. The border becomes suture, bone callosity, welding.

The refined design made by the cotton that wraps, tightens the natural material, recalls a deeper meaning on the border, shifts its meaning from the contemporary to the original meaning, returning to the language its own complexity and thus its intelligence. In this way, the true freedom of the observer is re-established in comparison with the integrity of the symbol.

In a game made of warps and knots, woven ties and anchored to the support, natural elements that become epicenter and equilibrium, an exercise of relationships is consummated which is a completely physical, all-physical metaphor of the most atrocious of today’s shortcomings. In their constant dialogue, the materials of Thomas De Falco act together without being able to do one without the other, in an alchemy of the material that goes far beyond the object and intertwines the roots of their different origins, their symbolic stratigraphy.

The city itself, for a work that is born site-specific, becomes matter that, at contact, declines its resonance. Of Naples is the female dimension that the artist can not avoid to face. Her pity of exhausted shore, lapped by a sea in pain, finds in the feminine attribute the power to inflate an ancestral and regenerating energy that from the port rises and unravels through the alleys, blood vessels, nervous system of a human community that he has learned to overcome the lacerations through practice, evolving until it exists, in the condition in which the most excruciating pain coincides with the state of normality. Because of this devotion to the natural absolute, Naples refuses the differences, its children are all the same. The distinction passes through a system of seams, balances, stitches, which have crossed the flesh not without pain.

De Falco then draws, in space, an anthropo-rama composed of performers of different ethnic groups, evoking an idea of ​​a natural human family made indissoluble by visible ties, interweaving of roots, contacts, articulations composed in a maternal embrace, in a pity that of the feminine has everything and of the city the color.

1. Le jardin noir, wrapping on canvas with iron leaf and branch of ficus. 50x70m

2. Untitled, leaves with visible stitching in plastic with wrapping and branch. 125 x110m

3. Untitled, leaves with visible stitching on canvas with wrapping. 2x2m

4. Untitled, leaves with visible stitching in plastic with wrapping. 1,90×1,30m

The performer:
Amie Zuore
Traore Ladifa
Traore Mariam
Ketcha Wandji Tracy Jonen
Karim Tintore
Noemi Perlingieri
Vlad Marchese
Alessandra Aliberti
Jem Perrucchini

I musician:
Giuseppe Vietri
Pietro Santangelo
Valentina Ciniglio
Giulio De Asmundis
Giuseppe di Taranto
Sara Piccegna
Viviana Ulisse
Giusi Arvonio

The assistants of the artist:
Elisabetta Genoni
Fabiola Skraqi
Beatrice Schivo