In Esercizi Obbligatori (Compulsory Exercises) the aesthetic ambition of power is declined in multiple contexts: the social and collective, the individual one and finally the family one, in the context of a collective and individual projection of society.
In these contexts the Bodies are also a product of situations and of the forms of power they undergo, becoming therefore pure demonstration material.
When I started planning this work, I wanted it to be like an Opera, defined by a tension in space — with only internal movements—that remains unexploded, metaphore of the objective uselessness of the exercises, creating a condition of expectation that is never resolved.
Totalitarianism is a political strategy that can be continually exercised in a mass society: one technique that aims to conform the individual and the masses to a single thought. Totalitarianism is therefore a "method", aimed at transforming human nature through the state and politics: the conception of the world is not only integralist, but static and immutable. Body control is a fundamental strategy in regimes, that declines in functionality of the body, training, efficiency, learning of functions and actions given and built. The individual, therefore, is no longer a body, but has a body. And the latter it becomes a potential force, at the same time a productive body and a submissive body.
Divided into three acts like an Opera, Esercizi Obbligatori (Compulsory Exercises) manifests itself in the construction of a society, or rather of the archetype of Society, stripped of the superstructures, naked in the execution of the actions, that can be collective (Act I), individual (Act II), formal (Act III).
The power constantly represented is not perceived as property but as a strategy, whose domination effects are attributed to provisions, maneuvers, tactics, techniques, operations. In the static nature of the gestures and actions of the three acts of Compulsory Exercises, ideology declares itself religiously faithful to violence. The three acts in the representation interpenetrate, and at the same time define the reciprocals borders.
Today more than ever we must remember the need for a critical sense and the illusory nature of our autonomy of thought.
Act I is the reproduction of the mandatory Saturday exercises of the Fascist era. Formalized as a metaphor for the Greek choir, Act I represents the body in the Society, which thinks and acts as a unicum, finding its fulfillment in the collective ritual.
Act II narrates the individual in everyday life, the difficulty of living, the continuous effort of the body to adapt to the limits imposed, contexts in which simple gestures such as eating or undressing are deformed by the amputation of one or more possibilities. In other words, the body that adapts and accepts.
Act III is the archetype of the first social form that man meets, the Family. It is represented through the staging of formal rites, here emptied of meaning. The stereotypes of family photographs, constructed situations and frozen, refer to the mandatory exercises of Act I, creating a visual and narrative continuum.
Act II was created during an artist residency at Twenty14 Contemporary gallery, MI (Italy)