Red October: Nanni Balestrini revisits the Russian avant-garde in Milan on the centenary of the revolution

A short but very interesting exhibition that, from Oct. 25 until Nov. 10, 2017, at the Mudima Foundation in Milan, features the works of Nanni Balestrini (Milan, Italy, 1935) on the theme of revolution. The exhibition, titled Nanni Balestrini. Red October and curated by Gianluca Ranzi, arrives on the centenary of the Russian Revolution: the artist intends to evoke the art of the avant-gardists of that period in order to initiate not a historical discourse, but rather an ideal revisitation, just as ideal was the Soviet art made between 1907 and 1917. Art, then, was understood as an action of rupture: Nanni Balestrini wants to emphasize this aspect of certain artistic practice. How to achieve this goal? Nanni Balestrini has revisited some masterpieces of the greats of the time, such as Kandinsky, Lisickij, Rodchenko, contaminating them with the visual writing that is a peculiar feature of his style.

Balestrini’s works, but also those of the Russian avant-garde, thus stand beyond history, because, writes the curator, “a common demon inhabits them both: the continuous mobility of expressive platforms with their constant interaction, which then means the banishment of immutable tradition, of the extremist defense of the past and its legacies. For Balestrini, work is actually a labor, continuous and mestizo, and it is on this terrain of a multilingual tendency that the prodigy by which the phoenix resurrects today takes place. But what resurrects? Beyond any process of mythicization or historical demythicization here a kind of category of the political re-emerges, a profound intention, as Karl Mannheim puts it, that beyond historical communism regroups around the particular and distinctive genetic code of the left: egalitarianism, the values of emancipation and human freedom, and it is enough to read the fragments inserted by Balestrini between the images to realize this.” Nanni Balestrini’s Red October, he concludes, “brings ideas back to the forefront, no longer winking at the utopia of a society in which everyone is equal in everything, but claiming that irrepressible need to make the unequal more equal.”

The exhibition is open Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 3 to 7 p.m. Free admission. Information and contacts can be found on the exhibition page on the Mudima Foundation website.

Pictured is Nanni Balestrini’s reinterpretation of El Lisickij’s “Break the Whites with the Red Wedge.”

Red October: Nanni Balestrini revisits the Russian avant-garde in Milan on the centenary of the revolution

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