Boccioni’s mother in an ambulance and the casting of the bell

Specifically conceived for the main gallery of the museum, the show by Diego Perrone comes to us as witness to a personal dimension within the public space of the museum. An invisible line – traced by the sequence of three works placed on a ramp – runs up through the entire space: “If I could do a show in a museum without any limitation, maybe I’d choose a point in the void. In this present case I’ve chosen a line, sloping upwards”. Taking no account of the pre-existing architecture of the museum these “three things in a line uphill ” prompt the visitor to rethink his/her relationship to the exhibition space and suggest the possibility of remodelling aesthetic forms and meanings autonomously. The huge new sculpture La fusione della campana (2007) is a translation into physical and spatial terms of the timely process of casting a bell. The video installation Il primo papà gira in tondo con la sua ombra, la mamma piega il suo corpo cercando una forma, il secondo papà batte i pugni per terra (2006) shows us three distinct forms in the very act of taking form before our eyes. La mamma di Boccioni in ambulanza (2007) is an object existing in different versions and without any single defined sculptural form, in which the face of the mother of Futurist painter and sculptor Umberto Boccioni is superimposed on an image downloaded from Internet and reworked on computer, showing a simulated emergency in an ambulance. By giving life to material that is an open source both in an iconic and in a plastic sense, the artist envisages a cross between image and form as well as between colliding meanings, to be thereafter refashioned by yielding to the possibilities suggested by the imagination and the uncontrollable potentialities afforded by the appropriation of present-day multi-authored technologies and practices.