We live immersed in a liquid world, we are naked in a sea of ​​sensations that surround us, open us  cover us and shipwreck in our body, an exchange place where the subjectivity that shapes our perception meets the external reality, that once introjected, shapes us from the inside. The investigation of the body and of the organic feelings crossing it has always been the heart of the artistic research of Sissi, that with the exhibition project Anatomical Manifesto located in four different buildings in the historic center of Bologna offers the public a circular reading of the main issues on which her work is articulated.

Exploring the potential of heterogeneous languages ​​(performance, installation, photography, drawing and artist’s book) this exhibition-organism curated by Gianfranco Maraniello and Sabrina Samorì invites the visitor to penetrate the imaginary of the artist that reveals its treasures as a princely chamber of wonders. The route, which focuses on the metaphorical construction of a metamorphic and fragmented body, offers a reinterpretation of the human organism and its functions that in the interpenetration of the scientific and aesthetic analysis regenerates into a new and fluid reunification. The first stage housed in two rooms of Palazzo Poggi Museum is dedicated to the project Parallel Anatomy, a set of tables and an artist book conceived as an anatomical treatise of the seventeenth century that by the late Nineties accompanies the artist in his tour of performative lectures in anatomy theaters across Europe. Accompanied by sheets, images, bibliography and invented references, these pages make up an encyclopedic and fantastic corpus that draws its pseudo plausibility from the same free crossing of matter and spirit that informed the pre-modern scientific investigation. The origin of life are in finding nourishment and in the transformation that animate the mysteries of the poetic dynamic body: such as the cartilagismatic cannibalism, the acrobatic expressions of capelo in a foliage of flora, the resplendent bloom of lingual petals or the winding ribbon shape.

The second articulation of Anatomical Manifesto ranks in the Hall of the Primitives of the Municipal Art Collections where is exposed the installation Apparatus of an organic discourse: a series of iron structures outlines the graphic lines of a thought that stages the objects through which the anatomical concept of the artist has developed over time. Ceramics agglomerations, dresses with sculptural extensions, knotted or tangled ropes and natural finds embody a handicraft processuality that becomes introspection and allude to an absent body that materializes itself in the illusory completeness of his archetypes. In the same room lies on the ground Relics: sways drunk losing its mind, reconstruction of a headless human skeleton consisting of fragments of wood that the sea has shaped and returned to shore. In its continuous search for bodies Sissi transforms lack in presence with an exercise in which contemporary archeology of the dispossession becomes genesis and discovery.

In the Gipsoteca of the Museo Civico Archeologico the precious collection of plaster casts of Greek and Roman sculptures is compared with the vestimentary people of the artist, a collection of mannequins dressed in clothes and accessories from Addosso 1995 / in progress, the archive of the wardrobe-creature that catalogs the disguises made ​​and worn during her performance. The dress is understood here as an emanation of the body and its organic and emotional impulses, as inhabited the skin that becomes style and behavior, as habitus, way of being, will and destiny to dwell by themselves accepting their assigned condition as the ancients perceived by intuition. The ideal bodies of classical statuary enrich themselves in the counterpoint with new colorful characters who exhibit the twists and seams through which their resilient structures take shape in an osmotic alternation of inside and outside.

The review is concluded in the Jurists’ ambulatory on the main floor of the Municipal Library Archiginnasio by the installation Comparisons, composed of ten windows designed as work tables where notes, studies, tables and fetishes of the artist are juxtaposed with ancient illustrated volumes that represent some sources of inspiration for specific topics of her research. The contemporary sensibility of Sissi then arises in relation to continuity and dialogue with the distinguished genealogy of criticism that precedes it, restarting the life cycle of knowledge with the suggestion of unexpected iconographic correspondences. The aristocratic arms of the eighteenth-century “Blazon Bolognese” find therefore an ideal continuation in images documenting her  performance and the “Musaeum Metallicum” by Ulisse Aldrovandi continues in the collection of  her fossils, objects that she found over time as wrecks of shipwrecked processes that find form and time in her personal method of taxonomic classification .

Info: Manifesto Anatomico, 22 gennaio – 8 marzo 2015
Sedi:
Museo di Palazzo Poggi, via Zamboni 33 / da martedì a venerdì h. 10.00-16.00, sabato, domenica e festivi h. 10.30-17.30
Collezioni Comunali d’Arte, Palazzo d’Accursio, Piazza Maggiore 6 / da martedì a venerdì h. 9.00-18.30, sabato, domenica e festivi h. 10.00-18.30
Museo Civico Archeologico, via dell’Archiginnasio 2 / da martedì a venerdì h. 9.00-15.00, sabato , domenica e festivi h. 10.00-18.30
Biblioteca Comunale dell’Archiginnasio, piazza Galvani 1 / da lunedì a sabato h. 9.00-19.00, domenica e festivi h. 10.00-14.00