Another aspect of imagination arises from relations created by visual or other affinities. One day, Picasso realised that the chassis of a small toy car seen from the front looked like a monkey’s face. So, he started to make a sculpture of a monkey whose face was a toy car but you see it as a face and only with some mental effort you realise it is the chassis of the toy car. […] This particular case of imagination makes us consider that anything can be seen also in different ways.
Bruno Munari, Fantasia
There are several examples of urban landscapes in contemporary art history: Marco Sironi’s are among the most famous ones. The plumbeous, dark atmosphere of the city seen by night and from its most degraded and desolated suburbs refers to an idea of the metropolis as a disquieting and depersonalising machine where men have renounced their social role by succumbing to alienation resulting from modern industrialised society.
The cinema has sourced such urban settings from the pool of images of memory to create nightmarish sceneries for stories of replicants or men-zombies surviving metropolitan apocalypses. In Blade Runner an Escape from New York, a jumbo city moves under the skin of the story with its heavy body of ruins, dark corners and offcuts of post-humanity.
Alessio Privitera’s works of the series called Personal City evoke such atmosphere of cities abandoned to a fate of decline where humans no longer protect urban daily life.
This is what my eyes see: empty buildings and streets, enormous robot-men moving forward and leaving a trail of destruction; planes flying over dark suburbs since the look of the contaminated city is possible only from a safe distance of 2,000 feet.
However, the eye is misled by the true nature of what Privitera puts together. With the clear aim to set a trap to make us think about the power of images, the author uses photography, a technical means which ensures top true-to-life fidelity, and adds drawing to change its meaning. He takes macroscopic pictures of the inside of a PC: circuits, chipsets, Ethernet and USB ports, RAM connections and microprocessors are investigated by the artist’s sight from perspectives which distort their vision and produce an alienating effect. The use of macro photography, of extreme close-ups, turns an Ethernet port into a building gutted by violent explosions or by a disastrous earthquake; connections for RAM and other boards look like the barracks of a dormitory block. To reinforce this deception, Privitera modifies photos by drawing elements which revoke the abovesaid masterpieces of science fiction. Replicants and shreds of humanity pop out from street corners, cranes and scaffoldings cling to the buildings of unending construction sites.
This is how the artist’s sight establishes new relations between things: the change in size is sufficient to deceive observers. It is not by chance that Privitera uses photography, a hi-fi medium ensuring creative interpretation which allows deceptive effects like no other means.
At the basis of Privitera’s experiments is a consideration about the ambiguity of human perception determined by his education as a psychologist and by his cooperation with an artist such as Gabriele Devecchi. At Il Mercurdo: biennale dell’assurdo (Castelvetro di Modena, 2009) Privitera and Devecchi set a Pathway along uncertain perceptions, a room installation which, through a sequence of ambiguous perceptive situations, summarised the principles of a form of interactive art that requires the participation of users to stimulate their sensory conscience.
In the works of Personal City we can find, although in a two-dimensional form, the same will to disorient observers’ perceptive certainties by pushing them to adopt an active approach to image decoding. Privitera said: “It is fundamental to make clear what observers are watching. The meaning of their perception built on that image will be completely turned upside-down and radically changed after their meeting with reality”.
Bruno Munari, the author of Speaking forks (1958) and Unreadable books (1949), in his work Fantasia examines the mechanisms of creativity and imagination, which are not peculiar traits of geniuses, but of anyone who can connect things in a different way through changes in size, colour, position and function, such as in the abovesaid Picasso’s work. Munari has been a fundamental man for Gabriele Devecchi’s artistic production, especially as for the ironic and playful aspects that a work of art should have to stimulate an active access to it going beyond the mere contemplation of an aesthetically enjoyable result. I believe that Privitera absorbed, almost unconsciously, the same humus and came to consider the most ambiguous aspects of representation. Just like Munari and others, he acknowledges “fantasy” the power to activate unusual relations between things to create new ones.
Alice De Vecchi
Alice De Vecchi has a PhD in Design and she is a researcher in Contemporary Art History. She is a teacher at the School of Conservation and Restoration at the University of Urbino and carries out interdisciplinary research.
