Antonio Della Guardia
For a forthcoming reality
10.31.2020 – 12.25.2020
Antonio Della Guardia
For a forthcoming reality
10.31.2020 – 12.25.2020
Per un prossimo reale [For a forthcoming reality], the video artwork created by Antonio Della Guardia for exscenario, opens up a reflection on the body and its various functioning practices, devoting to the concept of seeing a two-folded focus. On the one hand, by adopting a tutorial approach, the work reveals an analytical orientation and includes some visual re-education exercises known as “Bates method” (a series of techniques theorised by William Horatio Bates in the early 1900s, that are supposedly able to heal eye defects). On the other hand, the work tries to make us focus on a critical gaze, with the aim of re-appropriating our own perceptive systems. The artist defines this as a useful technique to evade from a world paralysed by the economic fluxes based on hyper-connectivity.
Our eyes function on the basis of the experience that they gain from the movement of the body in space. The latter is – now more than ever – strongly conditioned by limits that negatively influence our perception. In discussing these limits, Jonathan Crary has formulated the hypothesis of a full-fledged suspension of perception. This phenomenon is triggered by a crisis of attention and worsened by the new technologies that favour a sedentary lifestyle and hinder more and more the relation between mind and body. We are confronted with a reality that we can no longer decode, as Antonio Della Guardia explains. By directing our attention towards the self as a political act, Della Guardia invites us to start a process of evasion, in an attempt to overturn a viewpoint that is taken for granted and conquer again a lost attention. Overall, the exercises – that include the exploration of peripheral vision, the suspension of central gaze, as well as palming, which can bring back lost concentration – gain for the artist the value of a manifest. While this process allows us to regain ourselves, we recover the imagination that was on strike and we free ourselves from the unceasing flux of data that we receive every day.
- consciousness can only exist where there’s change
- change can only exist where there’s movement
- attention is essentially a process of distinction
- the centre is immobilised
- on the fringes, the sparkles of thinking
- to imagine in order to oppose
- to see in order to take stance
Per un prossimo reale follows an alchemical narrative process made of organic and inorganic figures. A path consisting of strong assonances in which the veins of the marble remind both the veins of the eyeball and the lines of the hand. Hands as tactile organs remind us that the reading of the world is never the sole prerogative of the eye, but that it physically involves the relation with the outside world also through the haptic perception. The exercises that generate the wider oscillations are directed towards the index finger, that is iconographically present in the work In loco parentis (2017) by Antonio Della Guardia. Yet, in the present artwork the finger becomes the object of gaze and invites us to recover that lost attention, observing our own inner reality, reinstating the sight with a therapeutical method.