In Afternoon there is nothing, except the traces that border the vertiginous abyss of a properly imperceptible, as everywhere hovering abysmal void. Has anything irremediable happened, a catastrophe, a disaster or has this already been absorbed and metabolized leaving a dispersion without meaning or hope? What is certain is that everything is perceived as reaching out to welcome an encounter with the unknown, the unexpected. The experience of a complete suspension with respect to time and space, coming from and going towards a radically indeterminate “where” and “when”: this is what Afternoon offers.
Francesca Banchelli, Afternoon, 2023, photo Leonardo Morfini, courtesy Associazione Culturale Dello Scompiglio
The real context could not be more suitable: Tenuta Dello Scompiglio (near Vorno), a vast expanse of meticulously cultivated hectares, lying on the verdant hills around Lucca marked by vineyards, cypresses, olive trees, villas and blocks of flats, increasingly destination for cosmopolitan acquaintances. The location, which is also surprising, is a large hall in the exhibition and performance space of the homonymous cultural association that manages this estate, whose exhibition programming is co-curated by Angel Moya Garcia and Cecilia Bertoni. It is here that Francesca Banchelli has arranged her project, the last of the many aimed at painting, sculpture, drawing, performance, video, which have led her artistic research, intellectually more elaborate than ever, to exhibitions at Museum Pecci in Prato, Villa Romana in Florence, MACBA in Barcelona, Tate Modern in London, Museo Novecento in Florence.
Francesca Banchelli, Afternoon, 2023, photo Leonardo Morfini, courtesy Associazione Culturale Dello Scompiglio
In the hall that houses Afternoon, the floor covered with gray and black ash, that creaks under the soles, creates an almost volcanic but dormant atmosphere, while the continuous and monothematic music evokes dreams from elsewhere. From the high ceiling from which a neon light is profuse, unambiguously, drapes and sheets descend, on which the sketches of unspecified human figures stand out, splashed in soft colors and signs. The exception is a powerful large black speck inhabited by an almost shapeless and vaguely infernal group of anthropomorphic images between the pathetic and the tragic.
Francesca Banchelli, Afternoon, 2023, photo Leonardo Morfini, courtesy Associazione Culturale Dello Scompiglio
But there’s more. All of this is brought to life by a group of almost naked performers (Sara Capanna, Barbara Carulli, Chiara Casiraghi, Giulia Gilera, Ana Luisa Novais, Emanuel Santos, Michele Scappa, Luca Zanni), each of them covered by a different sandy and contaminating tint. They wander among the falling drapes and above the ash on the floor. Their movements are slow, contorted, lanky, almost uncertain, as if in search of a meaning rather than a direction, but from time to time they produce casual encounters in which the performers sometimes linger, creating unexpected physical lumps with hugs, gestures matched and the superimpositions of their bodies. These events, however rare and of limited duration, inevitably challenge the spectator who wanders around these spaces like the performers and therefore is always close to them.
Francesca Banchelli, Afternoon, 2023, photo Leonardo Morfini, courtesy Associazione Culturale Dello Scompiglio
The questions that then, more or less consciously, can glimmer recall a theme that is very dear to Francesca Banchelli. It is the theme of the event, in the singular and particularly elaborate meaning given to this term by a philosopher personally known by the painter herself. He is one of the best known and most translated philosophers in the world, who goes by the name of Alain Badiou and who in 1988 wrote a monumental essay entitled L’Être et l’Événement, currently available in Italian thanks to its edition by of the Mimesis publishing house in 2018. So why should the occasional encounters of the Afternoon performers stimulate the observer to question himself on unknowns close to what Alain Badiou theorizes? An unanswerable question, of course. Or, at least here, inappropriate. But perhaps a nod does not hurt. However it is inevitable for the writer, who has been a more or less faithful pupil of this philosopher for almost half a century. It will then be said that the event we are talking about cannot be assimilated to any simple fact that can happen every day. Nor can it be reduced to an effect determined by historical or personal circumstances.
Francesca Banchelli, Afternoon, 2023, photo Leonardo Morfini, courtesy Associazione Culturale Dello Scompiglio
Instead, it is a rare event, as happy as it is dazzling, which opens up new and unexpected horizons to being, or, as in the case of the onset of love between two future lovers, to the existence of those who experience it. And this even if at the very moment in which one is struck by it, one cannot be aware of and measure it. Consciousness and measure that can only be achieved by trying to become faithful subjects of the consequences of the same event. Therefore, the emptiness that Afternoon evokes can appear as a metaphor for the extreme rarity of happy events that characterize our present, more than anything else cluttered with ash, of the now almost vanished traces of past events. And here the uncertain wandering of the performers can make one think of the restless search through the sparse landscape marked by the vestiges of the past: a landscape that comes alive only when the meeting between bodies gives hope for a new regenerating event. But let’s be clear: it can. Francesca Banchelli’s work is in fact so rich in suggestions that she can very well suggest many other interpretations.
Info:
Francesca Banchelli. Afternoon
22/04/2023 – 16/07/2023
The exhibition is accompanied by a program of performances, on the following days:
6 May, 20 May, 17 June, 1 July, 15 July 2023, from 15.00 to 19.00
Dello Scompiglio
67/B, Via di Vorno, Capannori (LU)
www.delloscompiglio.org
Valerio Romitelli (born in Bologna in 1948) taught, researched and lectured in Italy and abroad. His disciplines: History of political doctrines, History of political movements and parties, Methodology of the social sciences. Among his latest publications: L’amore della politica (2014), La felicità dei partigiani e la nostra (2017), L’enigma dell’Ottobre ‘17 (2017), L’emancipazione a venire. Dopo la fine della storia (2022).
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