Macerata, the legend of the Flying Dutchman becomes an exhibition: the solo show of Fabrizio Cotognini

Entitled The Flying Dutchman, or “The Flying Dutchman,” Fabrizio Cotognini ’s solo exhibition will occupy the splendid spaces of the Civic Museums of Palazzo Buonaccorsi in Macerata from July 17 to October 30, 2021. The project, curated by Riccardo Tonti Bandini, will lead visitors to move through the rooms of the Civic Museums of Palazzo Buonaccorsi through play, narrative, anthropology, contemporaneity, representation and, of course, the music that sublimates everything: a synaesthesia in pure form that has come to life in the dialogue and work between the artist and the artisan realities of the Macerata area.

The exhibition, with which the Municipality of Macerata in line with the cultural project of the Marche Region intends to give voice to the contemporary, celebrates the 100th anniversary of the first opera performance at the Sferisterio. Indeed, opera is one of the founding identities of the Macerata community, which, over the years, through continuous experimentation and contamination, has helped to promote its dissemination internationally, and the theme chosen for the exhibition (the Flying Dutchman) testifies to this.

Cotognini, an artist born in 1983 and winner of the Cairo Prize in 2018, was born and raised in Macerata, and through this project he also wants to bring to light the skill and mastery of his land’s know-how, redefining the boundaries of a new geo-location of applied arts with a national and international scope, an operation made possible also thanks to the support of the Santoni shoe factory in Corridonia, the main sponsor of the exhibition and an example of “Made in Marche” in Italy and around the world.

The artist offers his vision of the legend of the Flying Dutchman, the archetype par excellence of those who, in order to overcome their limits, challenge themselves and God, with a narrative layout that winds its way through the rooms of the main floor of Palazzo Buonaccorsi, one of the most important testimonies of the late Baroque. The exhibition, through an immersive itinerary consisting of drawings, sculptures and installations, proposes a conceptual transposition of a historical literary work, on the basis of the various representations and interpretations that have been attributed over time to the Flying Dutchman, the legendary ghost ship of Captain Van der Decken forced to travel eternally without peace because of a bet made by Van der Decken himself with the devil.

In the collective imagination it becomes the ghost ship captained by Davy Jones and Will Turner in the film Pirates of the Caribbean, but it is also the drama of August Strindberg, as well as the song by Jethro Tull, which tells of the impetuous fulfillment of the adverse fate of those who will not change their ways: “you’ll be the Dutchman / Floating slowly to the sea / In misty distress.” It is the comic strip Uncle Scrooge and the Ghost Ship, and it is ingrained in the events of Silver Surfer and the famous American cartoon The Simpsons (Frying dutchman). But it will also become the nickname of soccer players Marco van Basten and Robin van Persie, and again, the novel of Joe Lansdale and Enrico Palandri, as we read it in the works of Osvaldo Licini, Willem van de Velde, Anselm Kiefer and Andreas Achenbach. Fabrizio Cotognini gathers all these representations of the Flying Dutchman together and gives them voice within a timeless story.

Fabrizio Cotognini’s The Flying Dutchman is no longer, and is not only, Richard Wagner’s Der Fliegende Hollander, first performed at the Königlich Sächsisches Hoftheater in Dresden on January 2, 1843, but it is a choral work about a social transformation, a radical renewal of society, combining visions, quotations, homages, discoveries and rediscoveries by novelists, poets, playwrights, singers, cartoonists, film directors and artists. Within a conception of cyclical time, where the historical-literary tradition rises from its own ashes in the eternal quest for actuality, Fabrizio Cotognini shapes a unique, inclusive and at the same time imaginative sensory experience where it is possible to recognize oneself in the legendary and archetypal figure of the Flying Dutchman.

Macerata, the legend of the Flying Dutchman becomes an exhibition: the solo show of Fabrizio Cotognini

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