Out of the Aeons, Cosimo Veneziano's participatory installation rereads the history of the 21st century

Opening on January 31, at the Salaborsa Library in Bologna, is the installation Out of the Aeons, a project that Cosimo Veneziano (Moncalieri, 1983) created together with the library’s patrons, and which will run until February 11, 2019. It is a site-specific installation, presented by the cultural association CRUDO (which has been organizing cultural events concerning visual arts and design since 2011, fostering the creativity of young artists) and placed in the Library’s Covered Square.

Cosimo Veneziano’s artistic research is broad both in terms of the topics covered and the techniques used. His works focus on the themes of community,identity,image, nature and the role of monuments in public space through the creation of drawings on canvas, ceramic sculptures and silk-screen prints(to learn more you can read Finestre sull’Arte’s interview with Cosimo Veneziano).

The exhibition project conceived for the Salaborsa Library draws its origin and inspiration from flashbulb memories, or those photographic memories characterized by the interaction between cognitive and emotional aspects; persistent and particularly vivid memories related to a striking public event that retain in the individual a trace not only of the episode itself, but also of the personal context at the time the news was learned. Cosimo Veneziano asked forty frequent visitors to the Salaborsa Library to indicate a historical event of the 21st century, of their choice, of which they retained a good ’photographic memory’ and to describe some of its details by answering a questionnaire drawn up from studies conducted by Professor Antonietta Curci (Associate Professor of the Department Di Scienze Della Formazione, Psicologia, Comunicazione of the University of Bari). Subsequently, she collected from the headlines of major national newspapers the images related to these events and, through manual comparison, identified twenty-four recurring details in these shots. These fragments, as the last part of the creative process, were digitally enlarged, printed with screen printing technique and installed on different media along a ’timeline’. The viewer is thus offered, in chronological succession, the representation of events concerning contemporary history such as: 9/11, the Piazza Fontana massacre, and the death of Diana Spencer.

In Cosimo Veneziano’s work, both the archive of information and the collated archive images lose the nostalgic and rhetorical aspect in favor of that of testimony, functional to the realization of the work of art. The goal of the installation is to bring out fragments of collective memory and describe how images affect memories, especially in our age so strongly conditioned, in the perception of reality, by theuse of photography in social networks. The work’s very title, Out of the Aeons, taken from Howard Phillips Lovercraft’s short story of the same name, was chosen because it is suggestive of this ability to resurrect buried memories, which is both the object and end of the installation.

The exhibition project opens on Thursday, January 31, 2019, and is part of the ART CITY Bologna program promoted by the Municipality of Bologna in collaboration with BolognaFiere on the occasion of Arte Fiera.

Out of the Aeons, Cosimo Veneziano's participatory installation rereads the history of the 21st century

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