Senza Sole

Over three decades, Marie Cool Fabio Balducci have created works that encompass actions, films, photographs and personal conduct. Most of the works make room for everyday objects, repetition and body discipline that relate to the changing conditions of labour and the lack of access to it. The works develop over time: minor elements are added, redefined and modified as the bodies age. These alterations are also reflected in the titles of the works. In this way, the distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ works is deliberately blurred and obscured. Marie Cool Fabio Balducci began making art in 1995. The psycho-geographies of their practice fluctuate between the urban environments of cities like London or Paris and smaller provincial centres such as Umbria/Marche and northern France near the border with Belgium. In Western Europe, the 1990s marked a period of consumerist optimism and new forms of labour oppression. The somatic actions of factories were replaced by smaller gestures in the office life of piccole imprese (small business). Today, the children of the aziende workers have become an army of CEOs in their own companies. Freelancers. The fantasy of office work is enclosed into a single body. The exhibition, which is spread throughout the gallery’s various spaces, pays special attention to surfaces that absorb, hide and emit light. Being without the sun is a material translation as well as a philosophical one. The embracing of surfaces is reminiscent of an Aion temporality that an empty form of time. In an age of overconsumption ‘Senza Sole’ presents scarcity as if it were a sophistic spell or an act of divination. Stripped-down acts of reassessment, such as tracing the movement of the seconds hand on a clock, mirror various shortcomings in everyday life: a sense of defeat and shattered illusions are constantly replaced by new empty vocabularies, often consolatory neologisms. This unease that lives in the body is both ancient and futuristic. The conceptual and physical reassessment of reality becomes a sacred manifestation. This is a work that never ends, like an Eleusinian Mystery. Senza sole.