Quite often a work of art or an installation changes its purpose and meaning depending from the context or the historical times in which the pieces are displayed. For example, when it was first installed in 2015, Sara Goldschmied and Eleonora Chiari's "Dove andiamo a ballare questa sera?" (Where are we going to dance tonight?) was conceived as a memento of a specific moment in Italian history.
The installation consisted in a landscape of festive relics, a room bathed in a bright vaporwave fuchsia light, its floor strewn with confetti and mirror balls and covered with empty champagne bottles, cigarette butts and with a few random shoes and items of clothing scattered here and there. Music continued playing in the background, even though there were no more people dancing and a smoke machine was still intermittently emitting a dense white fog.
The room referenced the '80s, a decade of consumerism, financial speculations, parties, excess and decadence as well, and the installation took its name from the guide to the best Italian discos, compiled and published in 1988 by a fan of disco dancing, the late politician Gianni De Michelis, who was then Minister for Foreign Affairs (you can check out a short video of the installation here).
The installation will open again on Saturday at Milan's Galleria Poggiali (Foro Buonaparte 52), where it will occupy a window, so it will be possible to view it from the street, respecting in this way the Coronavirus rules and regulations. Only five years have gone since it was first displayed but the meaning of the installation has changed and the vision of a past of excesses has now transformed into a dystopian future, marked by a pandemic.
Our lives have been disrupted by Coronavirus and the abandoned party room looks like something hastily abandoned right after the very first European lockdowns in March this year, or the many discos that will remain empty during the holidays as quite a few European countries are opting for new lockdowns and red zones over the festive period to prevent the spread of the virus before the vaccinations start. So the sentence "Where are we going to dance tonight?" assumes almost a surreal meaning: there's a curfew out there and everything is closed, so we are definitely not going to dance anywhere.
The room is not just a wasteland, a sort of modern Pompeii minus the bodies of the victims on the ground, but a rather scary urban memento of what we were and what we may never be again. You look at the room and immediately think about how it may have been packed with people, dancing shoulder to shoulder, sharing glasses or maybe even drinking from the same bottle, obviously without wearing a face mask. So the installation becomes a hymn about something we have lost at least for the time being.
Goldschmied and Chiari often develop through their works of art landscapes of colours and textures: in their "Artificial Landscapes" they used smoke bombs, here, they employed a variety of materials such as bottles and tinsel to recreate textures and colours, a visually striking chaos that is now tinged with nostalgia for something we have lost in 2020 and that may return only after vaccines arrive and the immunisation proves effective.
The installation was previously displayed at Bolzano's Museion and at the Serlachius Museum in Mänttä, Finland. There is actually a hilarious story linked with the installation in Bolzano: zealous cleaners actually thought these were the relics of an opening party and cleaned them up (View this photo), an accidental post-art intervention that ended up in the news all over the world and inspired a scene in Ruben Ostlund's film "The Square", with cleaners removing all the carefully arranged rubble from an exhibition space in a modern art museum.
Image credits for this post
1-3. Goldschmied & Chiari, Dove andiamo a ballare questa sera?, 2015, site specific installation, smoke, lights audio, bottles, mixed materials, Museion, Bolzano
2. Goldschmied & Chiari, Dove andiamo a ballare questa sera?, 2015, site specific installation, smoke, lights audio, bottles, mixed materials, Photo Sampo Linkoneva, Serlachius Museums
4. Goldschmied & Chiari, Photo Meneghel Zanella, courtesy Museion
Comments