Commissioned by Fondazione Prada for its Milan location, Whether Line, the large-scale multimedia installation by Lizzie Fitch (USA, 1981) and Ryan Trecartin (USA, 1981), is on view from April 6 to August 5, 2019.The work represents the first result of a creative process, undertaken since late 2016, through which the two artists investigate the concept of a “new” promised land and the instability inherent in territorial appropriation.
Starting from the idealization of the rural condition, borrowed from “back to the land” ideologies, the project narrates both a return and an escape. After relocating their studio’s operations to theOhio countryside for this work, Fitch and Trecartin conceived the structure of a new film as a “haunted” map: a place endowed with its own will and a constellation of permanent constructions that include a vast rural building, a man-made river defined as a “lazy river,” and a watchtower in the middle of a forest, occupied by a cast of characters who are both active and passive subjects of the map. The artists modify these spaces through dislocations of time and memory to explore notions of the existential, psycho-sociological and physical frontier and limit.
Conceived for the Podium, the Depot and the outdoor spaces of Fondazione Prada’s Milan headquarters, the exhibition is presented as an immersive intervention in which visitors are free to move among constructions that suggest both action and containment, an active state of limbo. Sound and visual echoes of nature and everyday life combine with distortions of familiar spaces such as amusement parks, farms and fortifications, expanding the narrative content of the film. Fitch and Trecartin’s new work explores the desire for escape and the pervasiveness of the systems and technologies that interconnect us. The exhibition is complemented by a retrospective of the artists’ films shown at the Foundation Cinema.
The project is accompanied by a volume published by Fondazione Prada that explores the intense collaboration between Fitch and Trecartin that began in 2000.
For all information you can visit the foundation’s website.
Source: release
