The ‘Difference’ is a collaborative site-specific exhibition: the artists work together, they play with their own specific attitudes and with the attitudes of other artists and all together they compare themselves with the space to be created. Every show of this unusual partnership is a gamble with the space and a dialogue between works that take, from time to time, different forms and characteristics. The theme is the liberation of the subject by the mass media cliches and stereotypes, from standardized behaviours, and it stands as a critique of cultural and trendy conformity, with interesting questionings.

The whole project unravels from the video A Hole Can Make A Difference by Roberta Rose Cavallari and Caterina Curzola, that is the core of the exhibition. The authors comment on it:

A hole is a wound, is an opening, a hole lets in and out withheld, censored, hidden flows. A head wears a cloth that covers the senses and censorship the most powerful openings: eyes, mouth, ears.
The senses, bunged up and hidden, retain the words, from outside to inside and from inside out. Words are the instruments people have to communicate. When man denies fundamental surviving elements to people he limits human freedom and becomes an occluded and dehumanised monster.
Communication is the way to establish relationships with the world, composed relationships based on thoughts and words, that translate into actions and when they are thwarted, the body violently rebels, it self-inflicts a wound, a cut that opens a hole, a hole is a hope achieved through violence, from which, with unbearable pain, the truth comes out, a white truth, a geometrical light, that is projection of the time, that is a collective thought hindered by censorship. The violated body, constricted by the cage in which it lives finds in the creation of a hole, a channel across which frees itself, to communicate. When the means of communication are subtracted the body looses its freedom.

The action then stages the gesture of freeing from the constraints, from the pressures that stifle subjectivity, -the person in its physicality-. The veil denies features, hides them, neutralizes them in anonymous, red tape rules of the social conventions. The performer tears the veil, tears the agreement, goes against the norm and its bureaucratic implementation.
It frees the person, the entity, the identity and the body. We see only the mouth, and it has an ambiguous relationship with the scissors. We witness the painful birth of a person who breathes for the first time; his mouth turned up. The mouth is surprised at the feeling of fresh air, at the new flavour. Breathing for the first time causes a violent reaction, liberating the limbs. Once the new identity is released, triangles of light flow from the hole-injury, rush spurt out in the air, fill with new energy.
The body is shaken by uncontrollable spasm and then collapses exhausted. Are we in a debut? Are we at the symbolic birth to which cries of the newborn will follow? We do not know.
Herewith the video ends. It leaves questions that float open on soft clouds of anxiety. A useful and interesting cliff-hanger whose “pedagogy” was done with the “homework” that the conscience of the audience will play more or less consciously.

Silvia Venturini interpretation presents the veil as an uterine container full of new humanity. In the words of the artist:

This is a biomorphic shape (colours and perception of the material force the reading in this direction). The “stocking tight” was used only for the meaning of its material similar to a gut and it does not symbolically allude to any relation with the female world: sock synonymous of femininity, etc. .. My work is never aggressive, no tears, no rebellious lacerations like the video A Hole Can Make A Difference, there is rather a formal melancholic lightness combined with the heaviness of the contents. The staging of something hidden, morbid, inward, binds my work to the others (like the innards, that hide inside the human body as the unconscious or the need for spirituality and reflection). It represents a search for depth, a sinking ... but there is also a desire to talk, to connect the interior with the exterior, the transcendent with the immanent ... and then my bulge spreads and invades the space with the umbilical cord - trunk, to find a way - even if it is still undefined.

Silvia Venturi in the “Difference” creates a movement and then reverses the current aesthetic, formalistic, glamorous trend, which often gets the art close to fashion, the world of fetishes. The artist rediscovers the “deep” as something still fundamental for living things, such as to define the ultimate meaning. The art of communication that originates from the body,-which is meant as a biological process and a system of vital organs-, is a reference to the assertion that seems rather to have lost -over the past decade- all consistency due to its technological change in it. This modification, although intended as effort to construct a new identity or even as an Humanism Sunset, is reduced to a superficial decoration work of unrealistic metamorphosis.
We cannot delegate the construction of an identity to external events. We must free it in the inner search of meaning, in the infinite dialectic between inside and outside, otherwise it becomes pure aestheticism, pure makeup.

Once the tearing of the veil has occurred, Caterina Curzola, with her project web_hole, raises the issue of the difficulty in communication among people within the era of the social network. The result is a series of pictures obtained with the help of a webcam that shows people from around the world caught in the act of shouting.

The hole becomes an open door to communication through web: a mouth that speaks, which tries to communicate with others, which undertakes to convey a message that has to come at all, at all costs, even if the effort is exaggerated. This is the only way to overcome communication to overcome the difficulties we face every day.
The communication nowadays moves mainly along telephone cables, software and mobile phones, enabling contact among the most disparate people.

Once again we face a request of relative sense, this time related to network communication. Thanks to blogs, Facebook account, skype, etc.., relational exchanges have become hypertrophied, but like polyurethane foam it is made of inconsistent matter, porous and float. The social communication network is the exact realization of simulacra. Conformism, triviality, amenities, obviousness, instrumental use of advertising prevent, rather than create, a genuine exchange among people. There is more life and truth in the pictures of Caterina Curzola webcam than in certain applications of Internet communication. Here we see images of real people who play, each according to a peculiar temperament, -silent dissident shout-. A request for change using the social network communication as a megaphone to shout an ethical and political message, that will be able to produce real facts, as it recently happened with the No - B Day.


Roberta Rose Cavallari, develops the content of the video A Hole Can Make A Difference into a series of large drawings, and says:

When the entire world shouts, the silence is a possible final assumption of the difference. A stifled cry will be heard: it is a body that feels its primary functions violated and oppressed. My freedom ends where the sexual, political, religious and media censorship prevent me from acting in society. The media can be a tool that facilitates the processes of communication and knowledge; a single thought tries ironically to iron out all differences, to shape all human types in the same prototype. We can modify our bodies and produce similar shapes, we will all rejuvenate and conform to other bodies. By contrast, “the other” is always more distant, and the diversity disturbs, both politically and sexually. To claim the difference is for me to claim at first a subjectivity free from gender and political and religious stereotypes, it means exercising the freedom to exist, further developing their being in the world.

The artist brings into the drawings the gesture of tearing the veil to the extreme by exposing the body and guts in a simultaneous show, almost a secular and personal Sacred Heart, that shows the truth of the human physiology in its foundations.
The entrails held by a female figure appear like faded and timid theophanies, but in the realistic precision of their description lies a need for concrete and foundation. Overcoming the forced representations that are imposed by homologation and conformism, they lead us to an existential grund that requires facts, memory, justice, ethics.

By contrast, Francesco Di Tillo spreads natural sounds of the wind over the entire mall through loudspeakers. He creates the ideal emotional environment in order to gain psychological distance from compulsive world and than bothers it with wild sounds. Says the artist:

It is not a personal matter, it’s not me, Francesco Di Tillo, who wants to differentiate, it’s my job, it is my research that is constantly moving this way and interprets it as a presumption or something similar. It is a way not to try to understand and not to accept the difference that already exists. My work does not speak of the difference, it tries to be the difference itself, this is the difference.

If homologated life is nourished by consensus, the ‘different’ life can only be inappropriate. And this is not the usual post - post - post - avant-garde sign emptied of meaning. We are not talking about tricks to impress the middle class, the artist is different by definition. He has access to a feeling that enables him, when he wishes, to reveal the tricks (bourgeois) of the standard social living. It is sufficient that he spreads through the loudspeakers of a shopping centre the sounds of nature to which metropolitan ears are no longer accustomed, because they are immersed in the artificial noise of the city. The natural, in an artificial environment, changes sign, it becomes an intruder with unpredictable effects on the perception of the audience.

Stefano Guerrini, offers a pleasant geographic location - the town of Hole, Norway - as a place to start a new and different secular-religious spirituality represented metaphorically by the reworking of a local folk tale staged in a fictional video. This is an installation of cardboard boxes on which he has supported a model of a small Nordic church. The volumes are simple, the materials are humble, and both of them echo the simplicity of the video in which three sequences present moments of a process that metaphorically lead us from the origin of the world to its end. We shift from an Adam of colour to a tropical Eden, the metaphorical journey towards the world rescue, to an ambiguous déjeuner sur l’herbe, where the sanctity of matrimony is mixed with its profane consumption. As the artist states:


The English word hole brought me to a remote Norwegian wilderness, a small town of five thousand inhabitants on the shores of Lake Tyrifjorden, called Hole. I immediately saw in this a foreshadowing of a village far in the future, a fanta-future where this country would play the role of last resort, the last habitable place, after the final collapse of the world as we all know it. My impression is that Nordic people accept reforms often uncompromising in the application of their structures and rules. It seems to me that they have strong propensity to eschatological apocalyptic vision, perhaps due to scan time so bizarre to those places, with the daylight that persists even at night and with almost endless nights, with northern lights and bright celestial phenomena .

Stefano Guerrini notes that religions (at least the monotheistic) have lost credibility especially in the way of their popular spreading and perception. Although residual, and dying or awaiting for a more or less violent transformation process, the spirituality, referred to by the artist, is after all a primary question of a paradigmatic existence on the search for meaning in life. It follows opposite paths compared to that of an entertainment company or that of commercial products and consumers, or compared to that of the thoughts and behaviours imposed by the market - including that of religious fetishes.

In summary Roberta Rose Cavallari, Catherine Curzola, Francesco Di Tillo, Stefano Guerrini, Silvia Venturi, in the context of the current generation of Italian artists, try to break free from the coils of the so called “weak thought”, which had much influenced the artistic production over the past fifteen years. They desire to reaffirm the centrality of the person who, if not stronger, at least is able to break free from the widespread scepticism that actually conceals the existential opportunistic strategies, or in the best cases, focuses on the cataloguing of the province and of the social weak subjects.

These artists seem willing to declare the end of the pullback in private, in the alienating domestic intimacy, in marginal and less evasive forms of winking sarcasm that characterized the post-conceptual in this country and not only in this. With a fair amount of courage our artists choose to do outing and they say stop to ambiguity and uncertain content for staring again, with commitment and more anthological design on the world in search of their authenticity.

The watchword is to demolish the idols through a recovered exercise of their critical capacity. The difference, then, no longer refers to a passive acceptance, to a weakening of the subject, but the abandonment of this perspective to a subject that may once again be master of its own destiny, purposeful, even ethical. This can happen only by reversing the order of ‘values’ now dominant in Italy and the rest of the globalized world. Rethinking the subject without ideological or teleological resurrect scenarios, but rather to its emancipation from the dictates of late capitalism: consumption, subject to the media spectacle, political and economic dissipation of land resources and human resources to which it prevents access to critically appropriate training. Do not stop at simple complaints, propose different ethos, precisely. Different approaches to the existing: human first!