© Installation view, 'Bikini Mururoa' by Filippo Minelli at PostmastersRoma, 2022
Last year I had the pleasure of speaking with Filippo Minelli and presenting one of his early works known as "Padania Classics." What intrigues me about his artistic practice is that it is at the crossroads of some research directions that have interested me for some time, namely the landscape, politics, and communication, or rather the visual apparatuses. The landscape is a term on which we can long discuss the meanings, but undoubtedly it is a product of human action, sometimes even conceptual and cultural. That is, we get an idea of the landscape without physically crossing it.
© Installation view, 'Bikini Mururoa' by Filippo Minelli at PostmastersRoma, 2022
Therefore, the construction of the landscape is also an image, a form of representation, or projection of mental and social spaces informed by politics and communication. Communication is political. Let's make it clear even when it comes to soft drinks, a viaduct, or a bikini.
And this is quite clear to Minelli, who therefore makes a laboratory of it. Images then as a construction site, mutant space and experimental field. Images that are no longer images but become "elsewhere," like portals that mediate access to conflicting and unpleasant discoveries. Meta-narratives if you want that slip into the wheels of our comfortable progressing world. Landscapes as manifestations of incongruity and accidental frictions that open cracks of incoherence.
© Installation view, 'Bikini Mururoa' by Filippo Minelli at PostmastersRoma, 2022
© Installation view, 'Bikini Mururoa' by Filippo Minelli at PostmastersRoma, 2022
© Installation view, 'Bikini Mururoa' by Filippo Minelli at PostmastersRoma, 2022
The 'Bikini Rumoroa' exhibition at PostmasterRoma plays with the idyllic representation of oceanic atolls, the rhetoric of sunsets and coconut palms. The Polynesian musical background shatters on the echo of nuclear experiments that have reduced the natives inhabitants to test subjects. These works manifest a submerged trauma, make it politically uncovenient and introspectable.
© Installation view, 'Bikini Mururoa' by Filippo Minelli at PostmastersRoma, 2022
This is how the "Silent Shapes" series also takes shape.Lighting a smoke bomb in unsuspected contexts or declaring decontextualization as an exercise in pragmatism is a way to "place" the protest in the placid and numb waters of fictitious well-being. If they do not make noise, however, hurts the sight. They reveal a disturbing side of globalization, which is the new colonization disguised as financial sanctity and stupid homologation of behavior.
© Installation view, 'Bikini Mururoa' by Filippo Minelli at PostmastersRoma, 2022
Filippo Minelli (website)
Exhibition 'Bikini Mururoa' at PostmastersROMA
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