Language: Signs and Styles of Expressiveness
Posted on June 10 2021
+The exhibition “Language”, arranged at Spazio Millepiani in Rome and open to the public from May 21 to June 15, 2021, revolves around this and much more. It opens onto various techniques that include photography and video, passing through visual design. And it also shows a wide range of possibilities, limits and themes embracing scattered contexts and places. These images talk about people, their faces and gazes and they even represent the stories hiding behind them, telling us that communication is a matter of inclusion or exclusion with respect to the society they are referring to. They affirm language is not just a long list of words to memorize, but also something going beyond some printed pages. It is something worming its way to ourselves, our culture and deepest identity.
Other pieces, though, distance themselves from these socio-anthropological aspects, approaching the language as an interactive system going beyond words and sounds as we know them. At this point, we will be drawn into nature scenes populated by animals communicating their comfort/ discomfort or pointing out an imminent danger through instinctive actions and plain sounds. Both the semantic and content shift are rather evident here, passing from words to calls, from a slow and complex communication to a more immediate one.
Even more convoluted than the previous one is the body language that conveys messages based on gestures and the unsaid. In order to understand it, one needs to guess, establishing an instinct-based relationship rather than a more explicit and conventional one.
At this point, another dimension awaits: the one inhabited by language as a visual and artistic expression. In this section, all the artworks and videos somehow drag and materialize words and poems into the art pieces, leading to a place on the verge between poetry and visual arts. A broad variety of standards like multiple registers, contrasting elements, discontinuous messages and different media are the features shown by some of the works here exhibited. Formal and informal, hot and cold are conveyed through poems and paintings, embroideries and digital techniques, collage as well as ready-mades, without exceptions.
In conclusion, the language lets us establish connections between different systems through diversified, sometimes opposite, styles. It can be written, oral, painted, reproduced, fragmented. Or even erased, destroyed, eroded.
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