Little is left to tell. Calvino after Calvino

Dates: 20.06.17 – 29.10.17

Location:
Blueproject Foundation – Il Salotto

Curators:
Aurélien Le Genissel
Renato Della Poeta

Artists:
Sophie Calle
Xavier Veilhan
Elmgreen & Dragset
Dora García
Gianni Motti
Laurent Grasso
Ignasi Aballí
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
Michael Sailstorfer
Ryan Mcginley
Daniel Firman
Sam Taylor-Wood

Texts (click to read):
“Pese a todo”
“Abúrrete, si puedes”
“La eternidad… y un día”
“Entre Edipo y Orfeo”
“Homenaje a Perec”
“Reversibilidad”
“Herr Warum”

The catalog of the exhibition “Little is left to tell. Calvino after Calvino” has six different brochures, one for each concept imagined by the Italian writer. Six patterns were designed for each one, all based on the hexagon, a shape that is also revealed by placing the six brochures together, as a symbol of the complementarity of these six concepts. In each of the booklets the artists were invited to publish an interview with the curators and they are also completed with a curatorial text written by me.

“These six concepts are nothing more than specific cases of a deeper cultural paradigm. You might call it postmodernity, the end of the great stories, forgetting the self, merchandizing, the end of modernity, weak thought, the end of history, late capitalism, or any other name that may occur to you, but, in the end, the question that remains to be answered is: what attitude must we adopt faced with the disappearance of the ultimate meaning (narrative, existential, ideological, historical…) that structured the modern tale? (…)

More than deciding between two extremes, we must remain in the heart of the questioning, defend the question as if it were our home. Instead of trying to resolve the irreconcilable of two opposing extremes, we must better understand their interdependence. Perhaps Maurice Blanchot explains it best in L’Espace Littéraire: “the work is the intimate confrontation with itself of an opposition between contraries, neither of which, though they are irreconcilable, has coherence except in the contest that opposes them on to the other. This torn intimacy is the work”. True lightness has experienced gravity, quickness is no use without the sense of time that slowness gives us, the visible can only be sustained in the blind spot of the invisible… This rereading of the classic antinomies is the focus of my texts ”

(Extract from “Reversibility”, text of the catálogo “Little is left to tell. Calvino after Calvino”)

Read texts in English below (all from Little is left to tell (Calvino after Calvino, 2016)

“Pese a todo”
“Abúrrete, si puedes”
“La eternidad… y un día”
“Entre Edipo y Orfeo”
“Homenaje a Perec”
“Reversibilidad”
“Herr Warum”