Ibid., the new work created by UK artist Alec Shepley for KdMoFA, references the idea of previous works and alludes to the artist as a traveller, drawing the viewer in and inviting them on an existential journey – a journey through imagined sites of the fragment such as those witnessed by readers of Invisible Cities.
Shepley's improvised sites made by grouping together various materials such as found and made objects and models, broken forms, photographs, video and sound, invite the viewer to move around a place of making (and unmaking), speculate on the notion of a work's becoming and to create a narrative of possibility.
‘I am from Leonia’ influenced by Italo Calvino's book Invisible Cities (particularly the cities of Leonia and Sophronia) is a new video piece made especially for this show at KdMoFA. In the video which is played on a continuous loop, the viewer witnesses a figure steadily and progressively sweeping his way around what appears to be an abandoned and ruined building and attempting to fulfill the seemingly impossible blueprint referred to by the inhabitants of Invisible Cities.
The voice over in the film recalls the street cleaners who are welcomed like angels to the city, and who ‘engage in their task of removing the residue of yesterday's existence in a respectfully silent ritual that inspires devotion', however:
“Nobody wonders where, each day, they carry their load of refuse. Outside the city, surely; but each year the city expands, and the street cleaners have to fall farther back. The bulk of the outflow increases and the piles rise higher, become stratified, extend over a wider perimeter.”
This question about what to do with our worldly possessions, once we no longer have a use for them, is as poignant today as it ever was and Ibid. is an attempt to pause, visualize and reflect on the status of the fragment within an embodied relationship with the modern world and the world of our future.
Exhibition Date: 2014/12/26-2015/2/15