A room of wonder is a performative installation project that departs
from the literal but torn meaning behind the word biography: a life that writes
and collects. It interests me the multiple ways that a man
writes his history and how he belongs to a wider community, the biography codes
through which one is seen, read, historicized. Writing as related to tracing,
to registering, to framing; biography as related to accumulation, collection of
moments, images, and sensations.
Recently I came across the wonder rooms and the
cabinets of curiosities. These collections of singular objects common during
the Renaissance were collections of universes, whose categorical frontiers were
yet to be defined. They were pre-museums of individual claim and a model for a
microcosm or theater of the world, a memory gallery. They were particular
inventories, highly meticulous of what one felt as out of the common thread, as
land marking, singular, bizarre. A sort of tridimensional diary of what had produced wonder in that person.
A room of wonder proposes the adventure of
creating the collection of wonders of a group of artists and its insertion in
real time in an exhibition room for common share. A collection of their artistic trajectories, of their days, of
their belonging to different histories of the art, of the scene, of their
imaginaries and of their time. A collection of men and women, dancers,
actors, sculptors, video artists, performers, ordinary people, working
collaboratively across fields, helping each other sharing tools and knowledge
for the creation of one room of wonders.
On our present days, the museums have
become the guardians of mankind’s common history, where the categorizations
have gained the force of the absolutes, however, the desire of making one’s own
inventory of the world, one’s own collection of wonders, hasn’t abandoned us.
Visible in the endless quantities of blogs and in the proliferation of virtual
social networks, more than ever, the force of the inventory still continues
enchanting individuals in their Simultaneously, these individuals search for
witnesses of their present and throw themselves, yet in a stumbling and
provisory way, into the challenge of creating another possible future through
the rewriting of their own past.
The project will be part of the program International Creator in Residency at Tokyo Wonder Site, from September to November 2012, in the creation of a collection in collaboration with Japanese artists coming from different fields. From January 2013, the project starts a new collection in Rio de Janeiro with Brazilian performing artists, funded by FADA.
Tokyo Wonder Site : http://www.tokyo-ws.org/english/aoyama/index.html
