The BELLINZONA location of the CACT – Centre of Contemporary Art in Canton Ticino – is opening a personal show dedicated to MARCO VILLANI (I, 1973).

Marco Villani’s work concentrates primarily on his search for identity and on its achievement in contemporary society, using such media as video and photography in the form of installations. The exhibition’s Leitmotiv develops from the work LEXOTAN POEM (2008), a veritable video poem, in which the artist’s infancy and his memory seem to be decisive for his life as a adult. There is an interesting pattern of filters between memory and the questions related to the concept of growth and the awareness of maturity.

While with this work Villani offers himself to a poetic expression and expressiveness, almost as though it were to constitute a moment of conscious gap between his experience past and what he will experience in future, paradoxically it also constitutes the starting point for achieving some decidedly more conceptual works and developing on their themes.
WHO IS MARCO VILLANI? (2007) is the coldly rational quest for everyone all over the world who bears the same name as the artist: Marco Villani. This video is an interview with the many Villanis, in which the more or less conscious actors provide their personal information, reciting their dates and places of birth almost as though they were part of a religious liturgy. In addition to questioning the concept of identity once again, the artist’s ponderings aim to discuss about a concept that we tend to take for granted these days: the concept of the artistic work and product within a system of art. The whole installation will be accompanied by photographic documentation.

His entire work, such DNA DNA PROJECT (2007) – which is also on show in the exhibition – takes on an evident contextual and sociological slant. Once again in this case – as expressed clearly in The Body of Evidence. Imprisonment, CACT, 2008 –, the declaration of identity becomes a subtle social and institutional critique, referring in particular to the notion of legality of the human being and of the world citizen.

The exhibition of Marco Villani (Genoa) will remain open to the public until 2 August 2009.

Mario Casanova, 2009 (translation Pete Kercher)

Cover Image © MACT/CACT.