CONDYLURA04
w/GIULIANA ROSSO
2021
Edition of 100
20 pages
Broadsheet
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A soup of bile and electrical inputs causes a tear in the front cover, the invite is to explore the depths of the rabbit hole, descending into a gully that opened in the kitchen, through the underground stomach. The pages guide the condylura on an intimate yet generational journey, through the pshichic and somatic landscapes of a metabolic trip.
TEXT
A lisergic soup causes a rip in the front cover, a blank page that, filtered through the oneiric prism, irradiates the newspaper with nefarious rainbows. The invite is to explore the depths of the rabbit hole, descending into a gully that opened in the kitchen and through the underground stomach. The journey feels intimate but generational, a metabolic trip to digest the experience of an acid world, made of personal traumas yet shedding light on wider social chronicity: attività intestinale analitica.
The protagonist of this intestinal journey appears to be the state of restlessness that accompanies the adolescent in the perception of the self and the world. From the slender figures that act as guides - populating the pages with loneliness, anxiety, and self-abandonment - to the copy-paste explosions of references to the Nineties, the cartoons and toys that make up he shared memory of the generation that grew up in Rosso’s years. La paura fa 90’s! Subjects and memories are tinged with creepy, weird atmospheres, inhabited by zombified bodies, cratched lines and acid, toxic, almost regurgitated colors: a Creepy Crawlers’ laboratory that generates a world of hidden, hard to translate sensations. Reminiscences and oblivions charge the atmospheres, which recall another symbol of the decade, the book series Goosebumps, from their radioactive covers to the stickers on the last page, which seem to return in the montages of emoticons and compressed images. It’s the memory of that age that appears to have re-emerged from a process of Lossy compression, like the layers of a meme in which Shrek cuts off a Biker Mice from Mars with a katana while hearing the scream of Home Alone.
The suggestion of a possible continuity between the perceptive realities of the paper and the screen recurs in Giuliana Rosso’s artistic practice, characterized by an expanded and hybrid approach to painting: from the use of illustration techniques and the choice of colors that seem to be synthesized by liquid crystals, to the outflow into the three-dimensional space of the installation, that resembles more the augmented presence of the digital object than traditionally sculptural interests. The presence of childhood and adolescence is also a recurring element in her work, due not so much to a thematic interest, but to their ability to embody a psychic and emotional condition that evokes current social transformations. Nessun panico. Nessun dorma. The journey is as sleepless as a life spent under the blue light of the screen, eating a soup of bile and electrical inputs that recalls Bifo’s insights on the mutazione connettiva or Fisher ones on the resemblance between the realism of the depressed and capitalist realism, which according to the English critic gained precisely in the 1990s an ontological weight. We recognize its glitches when the mechanisms of the oneiric and memory disorders become emblems of a state of altered stratification of time: the basis for the perfect retrotopic minestrone.
It’s the world that increasingly infuses goosebumps, reflecting the hallucinated and fantastic scenarios set out by Giuliana Rosso still-narration, its phosphorescent settings, which seem to belong to a logic that is as magical as it is pharmacological. The pill is bittersweet, its adventure through the digestive system of memory resolves under clear skies of relaxed contemplation. The psychic and somatic landscapes of the jurney end up composing a collective rite to exorcize the monsters: Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me something good to eat, whether it is a solid soup, a ramen-emoticon, or a spooky biscuit.
C
The protagonist of this intestinal journey appears to be the state of restlessness that accompanies the adolescent in the perception of the self and the world. From the slender figures that act as guides - populating the pages with loneliness, anxiety, and self-abandonment - to the copy-paste explosions of references to the Nineties, the cartoons and toys that make up he shared memory of the generation that grew up in Rosso’s years. La paura fa 90’s! Subjects and memories are tinged with creepy, weird atmospheres, inhabited by zombified bodies, cratched lines and acid, toxic, almost regurgitated colors: a Creepy Crawlers’ laboratory that generates a world of hidden, hard to translate sensations. Reminiscences and oblivions charge the atmospheres, which recall another symbol of the decade, the book series Goosebumps, from their radioactive covers to the stickers on the last page, which seem to return in the montages of emoticons and compressed images. It’s the memory of that age that appears to have re-emerged from a process of Lossy compression, like the layers of a meme in which Shrek cuts off a Biker Mice from Mars with a katana while hearing the scream of Home Alone.
The suggestion of a possible continuity between the perceptive realities of the paper and the screen recurs in Giuliana Rosso’s artistic practice, characterized by an expanded and hybrid approach to painting: from the use of illustration techniques and the choice of colors that seem to be synthesized by liquid crystals, to the outflow into the three-dimensional space of the installation, that resembles more the augmented presence of the digital object than traditionally sculptural interests. The presence of childhood and adolescence is also a recurring element in her work, due not so much to a thematic interest, but to their ability to embody a psychic and emotional condition that evokes current social transformations. Nessun panico. Nessun dorma. The journey is as sleepless as a life spent under the blue light of the screen, eating a soup of bile and electrical inputs that recalls Bifo’s insights on the mutazione connettiva or Fisher ones on the resemblance between the realism of the depressed and capitalist realism, which according to the English critic gained precisely in the 1990s an ontological weight. We recognize its glitches when the mechanisms of the oneiric and memory disorders become emblems of a state of altered stratification of time: the basis for the perfect retrotopic minestrone.
It’s the world that increasingly infuses goosebumps, reflecting the hallucinated and fantastic scenarios set out by Giuliana Rosso still-narration, its phosphorescent settings, which seem to belong to a logic that is as magical as it is pharmacological. The pill is bittersweet, its adventure through the digestive system of memory resolves under clear skies of relaxed contemplation. The psychic and somatic landscapes of the jurney end up composing a collective rite to exorcize the monsters: Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me something good to eat, whether it is a solid soup, a ramen-emoticon, or a spooky biscuit.
C