ODEON

Renata Fabbri is pleased to announce ODEON, the first solo show at the gallery by Gaia De Megni (Santa Margherita Ligure, 1993), as part of the Sotto project room programme. The exhibition project gathers a selection of sculptural and photographic works in dialogue with the performance Il Mito dell’Eroe (2021), with the latter presented exclusively on the evening of the exhibition’s opening.

Ranging between diverse mediums, including sculpture, installation, video and performance, Gaia De Megni’s work analyses the potential of the image through the crumbling of Western imagery and its representations. What catches the artist’s attention is the moving image in particular, from which De Megni identifies both individual and collective matrixes. Drawing on cinematic language, both historical and contemporary, as well as digital media, her work questions the balance between absence and presence, monument and movement, representation and reality, through processes of deconstruction and reformulation of visual and verbal codes.

A recurring element in her production is the investigation of the military context and its rituals, from which De Megni appropriates symbols and aesthetic paradigms, such as arms, badges and uniforms, or even specific gestures or postures, re-elaborating the latter in the form of sculpture and performance. In this way, roles and actions bound to an idea of offence and defence are decontextualized in the artist’s works and voided of any symbology of belonging or spectacular intent. What remains are repeated gestures, slow and extended gaits, dysfunctional devices and stage costumes: the result of a procedure of abstraction and fragmentation of the original content, given to formulating new interpretations and relations of meaning.

Through the re-elaboration of typical elements of military performance, cinema and theatre architecture, the exhibition conceived for the Renata Fabbri gallery questions the hero archetype by operating on history and its representations to deconstruct the rhetoric of the hero figure in favour of a subjectivity with no provenance, race or gender (Marco Scotini). The performance Il mito dell’Eroe (2021) – which evokes the typical on-site march by an actor dressed in military clothing – represents the prelude to a series of works that, in-between fiction and reality, question univocal and dominant narratives rooted in media culture. Referencing the architectural structure of the Greek Odeon and its multiple uses throughout history – both a theatre and a parade ground – De Megni reflects on the theatralisation of violence as a metaphor for the contemporary world.