CONDYLURA07
w/JACOPO BENASSI
2023
Edition of 100
20 pages
Broadsheet
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10 €
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Flashes of light burst into the tunnels of the condylura, followed by the thundering of a trumpet. Jacopo Benassi's Musica Analfabeta (Illiterate Music) is the manifesto of a body-to-body photographer that feels the urge to probe the liveness of the event and the audience, galvanizing its presence, and phisycally exposing himself to it.
C07 RELEASE LAUNCH & PERFORMANCE︎12.10.2023 - Raum Bologna
TEXT
Musica Analfabeta (Illiterate Music) is a manifesto, a programmatic action that implements Jacopo Benassi’s performative experimentation as a tool to widen his photographic practice (in the past two years he has created new situations of sound and live shooting, centered on a self-ostensive gesture). A performance stemming precisely from the urge to probe even more the liveness of the event and the audience, galvanizing its presence, and phisycally exposing himself to it.
In all its manifestations, the Illiterate Music transforms the scenic space into a crowded arena, where the audience's body is acted upon and, in turn, acts out. A storm of flashes and sounds. Hurled by the cameras trained by the artist, arranged in the space or outsourced to others. Directed by a trumpet-camera, which moves with Benassi, yet plays and photographs autonomously like an organ endowed with a life of its own. Fueled by the interventions of the invited musicians, informed by a ‘score’ of that collective body, fragmented and incidental. A fundamental element is thus orchestration, which occurs by proximity and contrasts, dismemberment and concentration.
Jacopo Benassi has always been a body-to-body photographer, moved by a will to contact. Brutal in the immediacy with which he sculpts his subjects in a flash gesture, yet profoundly human, for the empathy of the eye. A photography that always conceals also a reflective mode, finding in the other a form of self-portrait and self-narrative, of laying bare. Perhaps because it was born as a filter to channel a violent liberation, acted upon the body. That of underground music, hosted at the B-Tomic club, which through Benassi became a self-documenting live set, and that of the cruising woods in La Spezia, where photographic mediation helped him delve into and break through his sexual repression. A photography that constantly searches for its history and that, by occupying the scene, carries out a cathartic reenactment of its foundational elements.
Benassi's performances draw a parable of dissociation from the medium, a drive for loss of control. Preset cameras act in the hands of the assistants, generating pictures that are self-portraits. His trumpet screams in a sound system that involves other musicians, drawn into the artist's world, where there is no alphabet but animal communication, made up of moods and signs exchanged between bodies. A condition of role bartering, between Benassi's presence with the musicians and the audience, that turns into an expansion of the self through the bodies, evoking the multiplication of a metastasis or the spread of a reverb. What emerges is a sense of vertigo, an instability that is intrinsically linked to the perception of sound and that manifests itself in a physical condition, the thrill of falling: "a kind of dance" stretched between the frames of a moshpit. The camera becomes thus an instrument of upheaval, for the transmission of an Illiterate Music intended to actualize once again and infuse its disruptive foundational energy. The Camera-Manifesto of a personal that becomes universal.
In all its manifestations, the Illiterate Music transforms the scenic space into a crowded arena, where the audience's body is acted upon and, in turn, acts out. A storm of flashes and sounds. Hurled by the cameras trained by the artist, arranged in the space or outsourced to others. Directed by a trumpet-camera, which moves with Benassi, yet plays and photographs autonomously like an organ endowed with a life of its own. Fueled by the interventions of the invited musicians, informed by a ‘score’ of that collective body, fragmented and incidental. A fundamental element is thus orchestration, which occurs by proximity and contrasts, dismemberment and concentration.
Jacopo Benassi has always been a body-to-body photographer, moved by a will to contact. Brutal in the immediacy with which he sculpts his subjects in a flash gesture, yet profoundly human, for the empathy of the eye. A photography that always conceals also a reflective mode, finding in the other a form of self-portrait and self-narrative, of laying bare. Perhaps because it was born as a filter to channel a violent liberation, acted upon the body. That of underground music, hosted at the B-Tomic club, which through Benassi became a self-documenting live set, and that of the cruising woods in La Spezia, where photographic mediation helped him delve into and break through his sexual repression. A photography that constantly searches for its history and that, by occupying the scene, carries out a cathartic reenactment of its foundational elements.
Benassi's performances draw a parable of dissociation from the medium, a drive for loss of control. Preset cameras act in the hands of the assistants, generating pictures that are self-portraits. His trumpet screams in a sound system that involves other musicians, drawn into the artist's world, where there is no alphabet but animal communication, made up of moods and signs exchanged between bodies. A condition of role bartering, between Benassi's presence with the musicians and the audience, that turns into an expansion of the self through the bodies, evoking the multiplication of a metastasis or the spread of a reverb. What emerges is a sense of vertigo, an instability that is intrinsically linked to the perception of sound and that manifests itself in a physical condition, the thrill of falling: "a kind of dance" stretched between the frames of a moshpit. The camera becomes thus an instrument of upheaval, for the transmission of an Illiterate Music intended to actualize once again and infuse its disruptive foundational energy. The Camera-Manifesto of a personal that becomes universal.