South likes: Invernomuto at ar/ge kunst, Bolzano

South likes: Invernomuto at ar/ge kunst, Bolzano
I-Ration
ar/ge kunst Gallery Museum, Bolzano, Italy
5 April – 31 May, 2014

Formed by Simone Bertuzzi and Simone Trabucchi in 2003, the artist duo Invernomuto presents a solo show named I-Ration after the English-Jamaican term meaning “creation”. The show continues the project Negus, which was initiated in 2011, and considers Rastafarian culture for its power “to focalize and even mediate certain socio-cultural tensions that have developed on a global scale”, as claimed by scholar Carole Yawney. MEDO SET is a banner bearing a text by the seminal musician Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry conceived for a ritual/performance staged by Invenomuto. Elaborating on the process of re-appropriation, Zion, Paesaggio is a reproduction of a monument erected by the Italian army in Addis Ababa, which was converted, after the end of the Italian colonial domination of Ethiopia, into a plinth for the iconic symbol of the Lion of Judah. The transition undergone by the monument, once glorifying fascist colonial policy and afterwards became the plinth for a Rastafarian symbol, echoes throughout the exhibition. Especially in the person of the Haile Selassie I, who is worshipped by the adherents of the Rastafari movement and became Emperor of Ethiopia in 1930, the same year when Rastafarianism began. Thanks to the overlapping of different semantic fields, the figure of Haile Selassie I, old National Geographic covers and foulards from airline companies and tourist clubs create a synergic investigation of historical and socio-cultural issues shared among distant temporalities and geographies.

Michelangelo Corsaro

http://www.argekunst.it/i-ration/