Loredana Longo
PIEDEDIPORCO
text by Irene Biolchini
from November 22 until February 3, 2018
“ The expiatory power of violence is not visible to men”
Walter Benjamin, Towards the Critique of Violence, 1921
Loredana Longo’s work has been based, for almost two decades, on the aesthetic of violence. Her representation of it is never lateral, nor pedagogical, but rather through a visual language which she uses with great liberty. Performance, video, installations, carpets, tapestry, sculptures, all coexist to reflect on ruin, remains, on that which violence leaves in all of our lives. The representation is always opulent (from the interiors of rich, Bourgeois salons to the destruction of precious, Persian carpets) without ever being too extravagant.
The crevices of this project, which provide a place for richness, cleanliness, and ruin to coexist, add Crowbar to the collection. The bricks, covered in gold, live with the brutality of industrialized ceramic. Loredana Longo’s fascination with ceramics is not because of it’s archaic and muddy qualities, but because of an authentic understanding of it’s structural potential. The works in this show make evident how the artist chose to work with the possibilities ceramic presents and, more specifically, on the ability to establish the eternal fragility of the material. Both in the case of the golden bricks, and in the army of hands that stare at the viewer from the wall, the intervention occurs when the material is still raw and full of water: the violence transforms the significance (both in the crests of the bricks and in the frayed hands) and is eternally fixed via the firing of the clay. A violence that becomes even more Freudian and perturbing as it is associated with familiar and everyday materials.
This attention to the everyday, to the tools (the hands are pierced onto hoes in Fist), allows Loredana Longo to succeed in returning to the origins of the material, to its original use. We know that ceramic was in fact born to create small, domestic objects, to preserve food, to thicken the structure of a house, and later – precisely through industrial bricks – to build. The wall that bars the entrance to the gallery is based on that origin story, which is told without nostalgia. On the contrary, the crowbar is the means through which the story of civilizing violence returns with force and clarity. It is in the golden brick that the entire critical force of a civil society, in particular the Italian one, is founded. Thus, the crowbar becomes the corner stone, the foundation of living that is corrupted with violence and gambles.
In the exact days in which the artist created these pieces (and when we were discussing together how to install the debris found in the second room), a community of earthquake victims presented themselves in Rome to throw, at the feet of the government, the remains of their very own destroyed houses. Unexpectedly, Loredana Longo’s message – which in no way is connected to that specific case – became a political one.
If violence is in fact the way, even aesthetically, that the artist builds her own works (recalling the elegant, brass-knuckle jewelry on display), the message is inevitably political. The brick, the brutality of economic gambles, finds its counterpart in the hoes on the wall, the primary weapon in the story of Cain and Abel. The hands, which retain in their lacerations the violence of explosion, represent the ambivalent connection between victim and oppressor. Their features, skin-color alternated with an opaque, gunmetal grey, recall skin and the explosive dust that made them blow up. The extended and dilated sound of the explosion greets the spectator and accompanies the videos – in slow motion – which dominate the second room in dialogue with the ruins.
Gunpowder, blunt objects, brass-knuckles: tools to understand our present. Similarly, the rubble that populates the second room is not a history, but a reflection of feeling, and in the same way the explosion of the hands reminds us of the explosion of bodies which, sadly, populate our daily lives. The freedom of artistic creativity is the only response, the only internal space to react, without proposing solutions, but permitting the observer to reflect with new eyes. The explosions are not just about the kamikaze, because even the Capaci bombing lives not just in our memory but also in our present-day. Three weeks after the brutal car bombing of a Maltese journalist, a free woman who, through her practice, denounced the corruption of her own country, another woman, free in practice and never subjected to her medium, accompanies us on a violent course. The same violence that, undefinable, dominates our lives in all our relations.