The site-specific installation is located at MudaC, the arts museum of Carrara which is housed in a splendid seventeenth-century complex. Finding yourself among the stars of the Antonello Ghezzia duo of artists from Bologna composed of Nadia Antonello (Cittadella, 1985) e Paolo Ghezzi (Bologna, 1980), who have been working together since 2009. Open until 2 June 2024, promoted by the Municipality of Carrara and curated by the director Cinzia Compalati, the work sees these artists return for the third time to work in a UNESCO creative city, after Braga in Portugal and Hamamatsu in Japan.
Antonello Ghezzi’s intervention arises from a reflection on the present and, in particular, on always being connected and in relationship with others, despite being, today, more and more often disconnected from one’s own interiority and from the deepest meaning of life.
«We are one with the Universe – they tell exibart – we are not here to buy things and unconsciously take away contents, but to commit ourselves to being better, for ourselves and for the community, because everything has to do with us, even the most distant questions.”
Finding yourself among the stars it is a poetic work in the profound and ancient sense of the meaning of ποιεω, createwhich refers to the feeling of individual, very personal connection with the world, with our daily experience of the connection with “the other”.
But does this connection exist? Are we aware of it or does all the noise in which we are immersed distract us from the truth of things, distorting every perception? It is about the awareness of our being here and nowon the reflection of what place we occupy in the world that immerses us Finding yourself among the stars. A space in which to listen to ourselves and move in the silence of a room whose floor of marble chips changes and resonates under our steps until we reach two solitary blue periscopes. One that comes down from above and the other that comes from the ground. Observing what happens and then looking outside, experiencing a connection experience that alternates internal and external.
Inside the two blue periscopes there are two images from the European Southern Observatory and NASA which portray the very distant Earth, a dot in infinity, and the stars of the Milky Way. In a gestalt feeling that brings us back to the primordial sensation of feeling very small but close and close to someone who, when we raise our eyes, we feel is looking at the same moment from the other side of the periscope. Another presence whose gaze we sense from a very short distance away. There is no possibility of mediation in this communication, no possible distraction given that before entering the installation the visitor is invited to leave his cell phone outside, at the request of the artists.
Antonello Ghezzi’s poetics are essential and put us deeply in touch with ourselves. The installation is immersed in silence broken only by the sound of our steps that move the surface on which we walk, marking it like the first explorers on the Moon, in the encounter with our finiteness, with the feeling of the breathing of the Other who lives next to us the same experience and of which we can grasp the depth of the gaze, in that exact moment. Paul Watzlawick wrote that «children, madmen and animals have always been attributed with a particular intuition regarding the sincerity or insincerity of human communication skills because it is easy to declare something verbally, but it is difficult to sustain a lie in the realm of ‘analog”. It is exactly in this realm of truth, of experience and of returning to listen to ourselves and to listen to the value of the poetics of the work exhibited at MudaC in Carrara. Managing to make us return to children for a moment and to the poignant amazement of feeleven if for a moment, true and present.
