Degrees of Freedom at Contemporary Cluster
Title: “Degrees Of Freedom”
Artist: Luca Pozzi
Curated by: Francesca Campana & Giacomo Guidi
Place: Contemporary Cluster // Palazzo Cavallerini, Via Barbieri, 7, ROME.
Date: March 21st / May 2nd 2019
Time: 10.00 // 20.00
Free admission
Info: +39 06 6830 8388
On March 21st, to celebrate the spring solstice, a moment of magical astral alignment in which the sun is at the zenith of the equator, opens in Rome at the Contemporary Cluster “Degrees of Freedom” Luca Pozzi’s latest site-specific project, visible until May 2nd.
Inspired by visionary conjectures of the latest theoretical physics’s generation, the exhibition activates an experimental cross-disciplinary scenario, designed to probe the chameleonic process of information beyond the usual limits of space and time. Relating to the pictorial illusionism of the frescoed ceilings of Palazzo Cavallerini, the Milanese artist (born in 1983), transfers the transcendent attitude of architectural limits from the vertical to the horizontal coordinates, concentrating his attention on the pavement. Through the use of a special print on an industrial carpet from a digital collage, the deep space opens up under the feet of the spectators. A starry sky, nebulae, black holes replace the reassuring solidity of the soil, teleporting the exhibition visitors to an immersive floating environment. The spatial path, which winds like a river in the four large halls of the top floor of the building, creates a relationship between worlds and parallel times, on the one hand the seventeenth-century naturalistic allegories, on the other the space missions of NASA, ESA (European Space Agency) and INFN (National Institute of Nuclear Physics).
In fact, besides looking upwards at the rosy bodies circling in the blue skies, looking down, in a strange upside-down game of dizziness, you can find out the Rosetta probe, the Fermi Telescope, the Laser Intereferometer Space Antenna (LISA), the Euclid Space Aircraft, the Planck Cruising to L2, the asteroid oumuamua and the legendary Sleeping Muse by Costintin Brancusi. The floor fresco, as the artist himself says, called “The Grandfather Platform” is intended as an aggregator of possible stories and multiplier of degrees of freedom (hence the name of the entire project).
Other following elements are offere to the public as experiential device: 1) a disguise kit “This is my favorite moment in human history” (2017) which offers the visitor the chance to walk the lunar environments of the exhibition by bartering their personality with that one of Griffin, an Arcanian alien appeared in the POP movie MEN IN BLACK III (2012), capable of simultaneously seeing past-present-future. 2) “Eternal Love” a sonicated tennis table that materializes, through the active play of the spectators, the violent dialogue between Black Holes and Gibbons. 3) “Dragon’s Egg” (2018) a bronze sculpture representing a tennis ball ovalized by speed, equipped with a real particle detector capable of emitting bright flashes whenever it is touched by cosmic muons coming from the stratosphere. 4) “SU7 Detector”; “CC Detector”; “SU Detector”; “Fingers Crossed Purple 5” and “Fingers Crossed Silver 3” (2016-2018) both of them Wall pieces made of anodized aluminum with ping pong balls in magnetic attraction, capable of materializing probability clouds of possible paths of a whole ping-pong match, superimposed in a single instant, inspired by particle physics experiments at CERN in Geneva and by Roger Penrose and Carlo Rovelli’s space-time diagrams.
In conclusion, two photographic art-works: “Wilson Tour Carracci” (2017), displaying the real launch of a tennis ball, in front of the fresco “battle between Sabini and Romans” (Carracci 1590) taken by Luca Pozzi on the occasion of the first spatial organization of “The Grandfather Platform” at the Quadreria di Palazzo Magnani in Bologna curated by Maura Pozzati (2018), and two copies of “Supersymmetric Partner”, an emblematic work in the artist’s research, conducted between 2007 and 2014, jumping in front of Paolo Veronese’s majestic Renaissance paintings exhibited all over the world.