South likes: Idea of Fracture at Francesca Minini, Milan

South likes: Idea of Fracture at Francesca Minini, Milan
Idea of Fracture. Opinione Latina | 2
Francesca Minini, Milan, Italy
8 May – 18 July, 2014

Text by Michelangelo Corsaro

The Idea of Fracture, to which the title of this show alludes, is a transversal one, or rather tangent to notions of violence, colonisation, exploitation, and class divide. It is in fact a relevant idea this one of fracture, as orchestrated by curator Jacopo Crivelli Visconti, to take look on Latin American contemporary art production. Introduced by the mural painting of Laercio Raondo, the figure of Athos Bulcão functions as an inspiration to device an open and liberal face of modernism—and to expose its less generous one. Working as the collaborator of Oscar Niemeyer, Bulcão designed many of the tiles that adorn many of Brasilia’s public buildings. His methodology for creating the overall composition of many differently designed tiles, was to leave the workers free to juxtapose them as they liked, with the only instruction to avoid (“too obvious”) compositions. Analogously, Felipe Mujica creates curtains together with the workers who materially produce them. The latter are entrusted with important choices such as the colours of the abstract geometrical shapes. An interview by Clara Ianni to Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa completes the picture presenting the two architects as they deny the suppression of workers’ strike during the construction of Brasília. Another work by Clara Ianni suggests that the idea of fracture, a notion of civil divide and social inequality, is rooted in the many forms that violence takes: her work War II resort to the structure of a board game to allude at the idea of total domination that is inherent to the concept of war. On the background a wall paper by Runo Lagomarsino mentions another fracture that refers to a similar asymmetric division of power and access to natural resources. The artist reproduced the signature of the conquistador Francisco Pizarro, who, being illiterate, would sign with a scribble, a sign as arbitrary as his power of coloniser. The signature repeated all over the pinkish wall is a remainder of  the fracture or divide that in a continent like Latin America is all but mended.

http://www.francescaminini.it/exhibition