the land of the last things

the land of the last things is the title of the exhibition for the return of the second edition of SUPERBLAST, an international call for the assignment of six residences to six artists focused on the experimentation of artistic languages ​​within the spaces of Manifattura Tabacchi

A path through abandoned spaces, from the foundations to the roof of Manifattura Tabacchi, accompanies the visitor adrift. the land of the last things is a journey through the paradoxes of the present which, looking away from the privileged perspective represented by the city, reveals another subsoil, in an atmosphere that is dreamlike and disturbing at times.

The exhibition brings together the unpublished works by Irene Adorni, Roberto Fassone, Beatrice Favaretto, Lorenzo Lunghi, MERZBAU and Davide Sgambaro, created during the SUPERBLAST residency at NAM – Not A Museum. At the time of the launch of the call, inspired by a reflection of human action as a trace in history, on places and in time, the artists conceived projects that were the object of research of an individual path and shared. Expressive freedom emerges in the variety of languages ​​on display, including installations, sculptures, videos and performances, and in individual searches. The translation of the movement of the body into the principle of construction of the real; the feasibility of creating an ecological collectivism in the face of an individualistic culture; the collapse of the spectacle through the experimentation of apocalyptic practices and fantasies; generational behavior in the light of the contemporary ideology of work; the realization of publishing projects unrelated to consumer production purposes; the representation of sexuality freed from patriarchal dynamics. The diversification of the themes explored and the close connection with the places, for which the works were conceived, inspired the creation of a narrative text / letter that calls the visitor into another dimension. Taken together, the works constitute a living and lived material and represent acts of resistance with respect to the culturally accepted and introjected paradigms of the present time.

The collective questions the role of the ephemeral in a post-capitalist society, sometimes recovering prelogical mechanisms, such as ritual, dreams or dance, other times using its own tools, such as social media, performativity or overproduction. The artists, dissecting the practices and paradigms of contemporary culture and celebrating its enigmas, find themselves in the land of the last things to be inhabitants of a dystopian land, making the dimension of which we know, mainly the urban one, appear in its absurdity and conservative tenacity. Playing on a double level of interpretation, the exhibition tells of an apparently hidden world, which finds in the collective experience of the works on display the testimony of something that actually exists in the present and that is worth bringing to light.

Conceived as a reflection device on post-anthropocentric thought, SUPERBLAST is completed and concluded with an editorial project that collects, through an interdisciplinary study, the interventions of artists, intellectuals, writers and critics. The SUPERBLAST book is edited by Nero Editions with essays by the authors Angela Balzano, Ivan Carozzi, Giulia Crispiani, Federico Di Vita, Matteo Grilli, Laura Tripaldi, who accompanied and enriched the residency of the six artists. The publication will be in distribution starting from December 2022.