GERANOS
Planomenon Dance Movement II
Solo Show | Museo Elisarion | Locarno CH | 2024
Exhibition View_Ph. Mattia Angelina
The Geranos project, the result of a collaboration between Italian artist Riccardo Arena and Swiss curator Noah Stolz, is part of a broad interdisciplinary investigation that involved several iconographic archives at the Warburg Institute in London, as well as two institutions in the Locarno area, Monte Verità and the Eranos Foundation, whose histories played a central role in the cultural development of twentieth-century Europe.
In 2022, Riccardo Arena presented two initial contributions to Geranos: one at Monte Verità titled “GERANOS Choreography of a Mental Landscape - Movement I,” coinciding with the Eranos lecture series on Jung’s Red Book, where the artist created a mental diagram of the initial project investigations presented through a wall collage; and a second at the Casa del Lago of the UNAM University in Mexico City through a reading developed at the end of a study period at the National Museum of Anthropology during the Error Residency Programme, supported by the Italian Cultural Institute (ICA). From March 9th to May 19th, 2024, Riccardo Arena will present a further development of the project with the solo exhibition “Geranos Planomenon Dance - Movement II,” curated by Noah Stolz and hosted at the Elisarion Museum in Minusio, in the district of Locarno. Geranos is the name of the ancient primordial dance performed by Theseus after killing the Minotaur, to which the historian of religions, Karoly Kerenyi, a very active figure during the Eranos conferences, traces the origin of the labyrinth in classical myth. A row of dancers, bound together by a rope, performed this ritual by simulating the movement of a spiral entering and exiting to represent the eternal cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. The exhibition GERANOS Planomenon Dance—Movement II represents the culmination of Arena’s research conducted at the Warburg Institute, where precious iconographic archives collected over decades by the Eranos Foundation are preserved, which have decisively inspired the creation of this new artistic path. Arena, after his residency in 2022 at Monte Verità, said: “Every element that one touches has the power to open up to a series of potentially infinite narratives, a propulsive force so dazzling and proliferating that it was capable of shaping the form of the entire twentieth century, and which has surrounded the territory with a legendary, almost mythical, aura, to such an extent that over the years it has attracted scholars and researchers who have spent rivers of ink trying to penetrate its mystery, thus adding further levels of complexity to the previous ones. And among these, obviously, is Harald Szeemann who undertook cyclopean research in an attempt to reconstruct its dense and extraordinary course of events and which led to the construction of his exhibition ‘The Mammals of Truth’ at Anatta House.” |
“Observing and studying the vestiges that the archaeologist Szeemann has skillfully collected, reconstructed, and presented as if he were an ‘architect of ruins,’” Arena continues, “I began to understand that perhaps it was interesting to work not so much on the actual history of the mountain, but on the enormous complexity of the plot of relations in itself and by itself, in its complex, namely what is woven together—revitalizing the material to evoke its creative potential—in order to contemplate the enormous combinatorial force in which we are all immersed.”
The exhibition path unfolds over the three floors of the museum: the archive collections, memories, and historical documents initially presented in their “archaeological staticity” will gradually layer and crystallize into collages, assemblages, drawings, sculptures, and increasingly complex installations to create new fields of vision within which the original material will lose its historical narrative framework, increasing its meanings and metaphors. This process, activated by the oscillation between study analysis and creative intuition, will lead at the end of the exhibition path to the complete abstraction of the material itself, saturating the large dodecagonal hall of the Elisarion with a large installation: a visual choreography made up of suspended forms in space called Planomenon – subtitle of the exhibition – whose meaning is ‘to wander’, a term used in ecology to indicate the set of organisms that live freely suspended in the waters. Arena started with the powerful metaphor of labyrinth architecture as a gestural and mental movement of knowledge to develop an evocative path through the revitalization of historical collections, intertwining them in a plot of narratives, visions, and expressive languages aimed at stimulating their imaginative potential within a structure open to potentially inexhaustible interpretations and returning to a wider audience the complexity and poetry of a universal heritage that continues to inspire entire generations of artists, scientists, and philosophers. Riccardo Arena GERANOS | Planomenon Dance - Movimento II Curated by Noah Stolz March 9th – May 19th, 2024 | Opening on March 8th, 2024, at 6:00 PM Elisarion Museum | Minusio, Locarno, CH Maria Chiara Salvanelli Press Office & Communication Maria Chiara Salvanelli | mob +39 333 4580190 – email [email protected] Anna Chiara d’Aloja | mob +39 329 3961225 – email [email protected] |