The suburban streets, with their ranks of popular buildings, often disused sheds and divested urban furniture, offer an emblematic image of the artificial habitat in which man has adapted to live and the intricate system of signs that these objectives emergencies support have inspired writers, artists and film makers the most visionary projections on the future.  In particular, many street artists have used the crumbling surfaces of degraded areas to denounce the dehumanization of contemporary life, the intellectual homologation of mass society and the ecological urgency of our times.

In this context is inscribed the work of Dissenso Cognitivo, “a single collective project with a variable number of members from 0 to 10” that since 2012 leaves indelible traces of its passage in abandoned places throughout Europe emphasizing the disturbing aspect of these wrecks of a recent but already obsolete past. The name, taken from the Bruce Sterling’s novel Artificial Kid, suggests a descent from the classics of science fiction (such as Dick, Gibson, Ballard and Asimov) and anticipates the post apocalyptic atmospheres that feeds his painting. Each urban intervention of Dissenso Cognitivo projects the degraded factories and buildings on which he decides to operate in an unspecified remote future where human beings have been replaced by new biomechanical creatures generated by the disintegration of the ruins of post modernity.

Camouflaged in the cracks of plasters consumed by humidity and in the rusting of iron doors of electric panels or disused advertising panels, a new genealogy of wired beings proliferates menacingly locked up in their hybrid exoskeletons waiting to conquer the world. Born from the acrobatic assembly of anatomical tables and technical data sheets of industrial machinery, they are paradoxically plausible in the insensate consistency of their deformations. The muscles, the tendons, the bones and the joints of these impossible organisms are pierced and connected by cables, metal bars, beams and tubes in which no lifeblood seems to flow. The ensemble that results is a calcified but mysteriously metamorphic agglomeration of structures of end-to-end connection, of blind and empty canals in whose slits sometimes faces a stubborn vitreous eye not necessarily belonging to the complex. Expression of a carefully twisted creative principle, these corrupt forms are the last possible form of adaptation to a world that the productive madness of generations of human beings has rendered uninhabitable and their grotesque resistance preconizes the new sick ecosystems that could arise from the ecological disaster. The super-insects of Dissenso Cognitivo are so tragic that they become caricatures and evoke identification due to the profound organic weakness that transpires from their ostentatious mechanical aggressiveness.

In recent times the artist has chosen as the preferred support for his street painting the empty advertising panels that the most recent digital communication strategies have made obsolete: on these surfaces deformed by weather and corroded by rust he developed a particular technique, in whose color is applied in the negative as in order to redeem the images naturally created by the oxidation of the materials from the latency. These paintings, placed in strategic and clearly visible places of the city, “advertise” the decadence as a protest to the power of publicity in mass society and invite a broad and casual public to react critically to the false certainties imposed by the media. Against the exploitation of street art as a palliative to aesthetically rehabilitate the marginal areas of the city, with these actions Dissenso Cognitivo reiterates the public function of unauthorized street art as a powerful tool to trigger an uncompromising debate on the political and social implications of urban space.

The exhibition Tetanus at Portanova12 brings together a series of rusty and painted metal plates, whose sharp and dangerous edges become a metaphor for a message that is not neutralized by the indoor presentation. To the sequence is added a panel (not restored and not for sale) painted on the street that the artist has taken from the original site to preserve it from scrapping, whose presence in the gallery reinforces the identity and cohesion of the other works.

Info:

Dissenso Cognitivo. Tetanus
May 4 – June 5 2018
Portanova 12
Via Portanova 12 Bologna