Andrea d’Amore.
Il verme e il ragno

7.4 - 5.5.2024
Villa Aldobrandini Banchieri Rospigliosi, Prato

The Worm and the Spider is artist Andrea d'Amore's solo exhibition focused on the potential of transforming visual and culinary matter through a process of research and praxis devoted to the care and generation of convivial moments. Realized in the spaces of Villa Aldobrandini Banchieri Rospigliosi in Prato, the exhibition evokes a fairy-tale and symbolic aspect that sees in the worm a representation of metamorphosis and masculine action, while in the spider's forms an allegory of the feminine as an archetype of reception. The exhibition project, which brings together works from the past four years and new productions, is displaced in heterogeneous environments, following an initiatory posture based on the processes of solvency and coagulation in an attempt to immerse oneself in an archetypal dimension and sabotage erected social binarisms.
In the first room of Villa Aldobrandini Banchieri Rospigliosi, the artist constructs Pania, a visual and experiential trap-work composed of food dispensers and a vibrator that rings bells, a call for prey. A lemon tree is a reminiscent of camouflage apparatuses built for bird hunting ambushes. In fact, the villa's property includes a forest that extends behind the exhibition rooms and was historically used for bird hunting-a practice now illegal in Italy that employed fixed devices called “uccellande” for the indiscriminate capture of game birds. Hunting presupposes a predatory state that rarely contemplates the possibility of simultaneously becoming prey during a capturing. The artist invites the visitor to ask himself who is observing him and whether he is an active subject or a predated object. This hypothesized reversal of perspective induces d'Amore to adopt a posture prone to metamorphosis and identification with the bodies of other living beings as a privileged attitude in the relationship with the Other.
The second room is dedicated to solvency, that is, the dissolution of the substance encrusted over time that represents the psychological processing of a crystallized past: the intention is to forget what has been learned over a lifetime. This disposition to unlearn is used and verified in the video A World Without a Name in which the artist empathizes with an individual who wakes up in a world of which he is the first human inhabitant, but where all the objects created by human history already exist. The tools and the rest of the world, however, do not yet have names. In the video, he performs symbolic actions around the themes of care, penetration, panic and pleasure. This is the case with the predatory action performed from a hunting shed and from where he plans an attack on a chicken coop and finally ends up shooting down the shed itself. It represents the effort to change perspective and find a coexistence between animal and human in the same space.
The symbols invoked by d'Amore are preparatory to the last chapter of the feast, namely the reorganization of a changed identity in perpetual becoming. The artist presents a table set and laid with terracotta dishes modeled on the cast of his own face. The dishes are cooked in nine earthenware pots produced for the exhibition and representing - along with bas-relief lids painted with scenes from art history and mythology - relational nodes of conflict and family lineage relationships. The convivium dimension is understood as a device for creating relationships around the preparation and consumption of food. It is an affective ecosystem in which each component, human and nonhuman, plays a relational role in building the atmosphere that is shared.
The transformative and performative attitude of the project stages the transmutation of the organic and the metamorphosis of the human, investigations into the construction of the relationship of identity (ego) and otherness (world). || process provides access to a time close to the sensible and becoming flavor rather than to a purely rational and stable knowledge, that is, to symbologies on the border of the ambiguous and to disguises of meaning.

Heartfull thanks to: Claudio Rospigliosi, Paola, Carla, Riccardo, Rita Aduina, Nicoletta Graziano