Bic pen on paper, series of 23 drawings, 40×34 cm each
Phelan Foundation, New York
Absence, silence, the ongoing metamorphosis of things. The passage from life to what is not life. Using the biological model as context and pretext, Giuseppe Stampone adds another portion to a project, Global Education, that never ceases to surprise us. After the step of the Stella Cadente (Falling Star, organized for Artissima#18 –Turin), a work based on the concept of planetary responsibility, Stampone investigates time and its various guises today to create a new, striking visual program that calls collective thinking into play to lay the groundwork for a new, unprecedented freedom of communication.
‘Greetings from New Orleans’, 23 modules made with Bic pens on paper, and the mailing of 10,000 postcards all over the world, constitute a project on time that shifts from the real toward the neodimensional (with the creation of an interactive platform). A time that crosses not only art – its procedure, its becoming, unraveling and reformulation – but also the world of everyday life and its thousands of different meanings. Through packed symbols and metaphors, Stampone evokes the memory of the disaster that swept across New Orleans on August 29th, 2005, constructing a discourse on the genius loci and the unpredictable workings of history.
Damien Hirst (letter H) associated with the chemical composition of H2O, the self-portrait of Cattelan (letter L) that emerges from the floor, or the image of Nelson Mandela (letter B) whose forehead bears the message ‘Global Education’. These are just a few of the modules of the installation on the wall. The installation has tags (which allow viewers to link to a series of interviews conducted by the artist with a local resident) through which to listen to the history of things and houses, whose only remaining traces are an address. While in the project Saluti da L’Aquila (2010) the artist revealed institutional immobility and neglect in the wake of an earthquake that devastated an area of Abruzzo in Italy, Greetings from New Orleans shows (after the fury of Hurricane Katrina) the brutal absence, absolute separation and silent abandonment of a territory. Reclaiming history, Giuseppe Stampone underlines – through precise, very elegant artistic actions – the urgent need to conserve awareness of the course of events, to sweep away the noise and uncivilized apathy of the world, creating room for reflection, a way of rethinking and reshaping the world and its ongoing condition of change.
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