We Don't Believe in Fortunes

Baleno International is pleased to present Eleonora Luccarini’s first gallery show. Eleonora Luccarini’s practice is multidisciplinary and centred around the performative possibility of language. By placing writing in interaction with other media, her practice inquires the relationship between word, image and body through fiction, ambiguity and potentiality. We Don’t Believe in Fortunes presents two different alter-egos of the artist that she uses to explore various topics around identity and gender. Leonard Santé is a white cisgender heterosexual man experiencing an identity crisis; he is a poet and part of an articulated project that took various forms and media since 2020. The exhibition presents three portraits of Santé whose image was carefully computer generated and perfected through tools of artificial intelligence. Printed on the sides of his figure are some of his poems. The memorabilia of a T-shirt Santé used to wear is also in the show as a sign of his physical presence and real form, blurring even more the boundaries among fiction, storytelling and reality. In addition, Luccarini is presenting Milkdromeda for the first time. Milkdromeda is an alien from the Pleiades constellation and founding member of D.U.S.K. (Department for the Uncommon Solutions and Kinships), a persecuted feminist-like organisation in her own planet. Due to persecution at home, she fled her native land to reach Earth with other members who are currently missing. She carried a small portion of D.U.S.K.’s archive with her, rescuing it from certain destruction. In the show, Luccarini created a long banner portraying Milkdromeda, shown together with the earrings she wears. Through video, writing, performance and other media, Luccarini deploys and presents the lives of fictional characters and allows us to observe stories and biographies detaching ourselves, in a mood for observation, while at the same time addressing relevant topics regarding our society. Santé is the tool used by the artist to portrait a certain kind of masculinity that struggles to deconstruct itself and its subtle mysoginistic traits, while poetry is the medium through which the alter-ego, thus the artist, tries to understand his complex and contradictory relationship with vulnerability, gender, sexuality, religion, future and family expectations. Milkdromeda is a new encounter, yet to be fully discovered, still mysterious. She has been living in a condition of fragility and newfound loneliness, but resilient to the many adversities she is confronted with. Alien to the rest of the species that currently surround her, without a community to reference with, she is probably misunderstood or idealised, possibly scared, at times perhaps loved, other times instead stigmatised.