Simulacra

Roberto Pupi and Pietro Schillaci

9th – 24th January 2024
opening Tuesday 9th January 2024, h 6 pm

On the occasion of the Pitti Immagine Uomo 2024 week, the exhibition project aims to highlight their condition as simulacra with a series of photographic shots of objects that belong to the world of fashion: semblances, images far from actual reality.

According to Fashion-theory, an expression that conceives fashion as a system of meaning within which the cultural and aesthetic representations of the dressed body are produced, the performance of our external identity is achieved. In it, individual and social traits find a way to express themselves which draw on elements such as gender, taste, ethnicity, sexuality, the sense of belonging to a social group or, vice versa, transgression.

The objects that belong to the fashion system are hybrids capable of sliding from one body to another without interruption, but the object of affection always evokes zeal for the one who produced it and the one who wore it.

The aim of the project is not to highlight species or families of objects, or establish hierarchies of values, but to underline the transformative quality of materials, the ultra-made, the artefact, as a combination of gesture and matter. In fact, matter is capable of provoking our imagination if touched in its ultimate fibers, the form that objects take always implies a break-in and a transmutation.

Hence the proposal of photographs that strive to take on the physicality of three-dimensional objects, of images captured in the act of a transmutation into the third dimension. Bubbling on the surface, subjected to centrifugal and centripetal motions, the photographed objects seem sucked into the materiality of the support, and protrude like geographical reliefs.

The works displayed on the wall give life to sequences of recesses and projections, resting on the ground they simulate sculptural pedestals, suspended from the ceiling via nylon threads, they prefigure impossible constellations, but all obstinately pursue an obsessive idea of vacuum that aims at self-reliance. storage. 

A video/catalogue will be produced with critical interventions, which can be downloaded with a QR code by visitors during the exhibition.