KU_the empty body, or the place where to operate informations and transformations

“It is by the straight line and the circle that the first and most simple example and representation of all things may be demonstrated, whether such things be either non-existent or merely hidden under Nature's veils”.

John Dee Monas hieroglyphica - Theorem I (1564)

KU_The empty body, or the place where to operate informations and transformations is part of a project about the contemporary relationship with bodiliness.

Our experience of bodiliness is enduring a deep twisting, intensified by the actual pandemic context of social distancing and frantic multiplication of remote activities.

The project was born as a visual transposition of a series of questions that I felt as necessary to be brought up in this context: what is body without its bodily dimension? Does the subject have a “matrix” resisting to the “dematerialization” of the body? Can we emancipate ourselves from the flesh, from the object, from matter itself?

The project is made of installations and visual pieces meant to investigate modification in the sense of bodiliness in social relationships, in our idea of subject, in the relationship with the art piece and the exhibiting and performative space.

The reflection the proposed work comes from specifically calls upon the materiality of the art piece, that goes through the same ‘dematerialization’ phenomenon.

The installation, conceived as a utopic place of symbolic reconstruction of bodiliness of the artwork and the artist, it moves searching for an origin which is found in the concept of Monad.

In the title the concept of vacuity – in Japanese: Ku – meets the concept of void coming from quantum physics, seen as a “place” where all possibilities coexist in a never ending exchange of information and transformations.

KU_The empty body, is thougth as a “philosophical space” where heterogeneous elements with a strong symbolic value meet, recalling the original and ancestral essence of human being, the mathematical and esoteric culture of the Renaissance, and the current means of optical dispersion technology and VRI (Variable Resonance Imaging, that analyses the behaviour of vibrational fields in the examined subjects).

The visitors are invited to enter an exhibition space where the exhibited is no more perceivable in its material shape, but only in a “reconstruction” that is synthesized and projected inside a lightbox.

The de-materialized work is a corpus of 28 Formemute / Muteshapes, works on paper that are visible in the light, inspired by human fetuses methaforically becoming blind and ignorant monads in the womb of the universe.

The visitor will be able to see only the trace of their vibrational field, in the shape of video images, an artistic re-elaborated version of the frames obtained with a Mira Multispectral camera, a type of video camera that can catch the smallest vibrations coming from the dispersion of light in a filmed subject and bring them back in areas of colour that change depending on the different vibration modes.

The image of the artist while introducing a performance is present but deprived of its bodily dimension, its figure is de-materialized and reconstructed following the same process applied to the exhibited work.

The artist’s body, deprived of its physical dimension, hovers in space in the shape of an oleographic video, a sort of “imprint of its soul”.

The ground is mapped by a luminescent image representing the hieroglyphic Monad of John Dee, hermetic and mathematical symbol of the unity of the universe, synthesis of the main aspects in different esoteric cultures.

In the meeting point of the two straight lines, one vertical and the other horizontal (symbols that respectively describe what transcends and what exists), is placed the lightbox where we can see the video of the dematerialized work.

At the center of the monad of Dee we find a docking rope (a symbol of the umbilical cord and original bond with the Mother). Filling the space, a sound design built with some of the most ancestral sounds, such as heart beat and noises of moving organs transposed in a “other” dimension by the bulky presence of synthetic sounds.

The exhibition space of an absence, KU_The empty body is a poetical (re)construction of the dematerialized body through the transformation of the exhibition space in a post-human “laboratory”, where organic entities are de-structured in the search for their original essence.

In-situ installation mix media 4 x 4 x 4 m variable dimensions. Video mapping, 1 lightbox, 1 tablet, 1 video projector, audio track, 1 mooring rope 24mm.

The installation adapts to non-dark spaces using video mapping on the available walls.

The presentation video is a video project. We recommend listening with headphones with low frequency amplification.