Philosophical reading
Opera Filosofica Nomade
Fate, character and freedom
20 June 2009
Saturday June 20, 2009 - from 6.30 – 8.30pm - at the Guido Costa Projects in via Mazzini 24 in Turin, the latest round of the project Fat Iggy by the Californian artist Martin Kersels. The gallery will also host the Opera Filosofica Nomade.
This performance is a rare opportunity to experience one of the most eccentric and radical theoretical experiments around. It is the next step of the Fat Iggy series, following Martin Kersels’ two shows already staged in via Mazzini, the first on March 20 followed by the freestyle night held on May 15. These performances were incursions into the realm of the words and their semantic nuances, leading up to a sophisticated reflection on the ways of communication, passing through the author’s silent body into the redundancy of meaning. This process involves a progressive overshadowing of the concept of truth, culminating in July with a radical reunification with the urgencies and the contortions of the body itself.
For this occasion Fat Iggy invited along Opera Filosofica Nomade, one of those rare living theory experiments and heretics in limbo for more than three decades.
The Opera Filosofica Nomade is a bachelor machine par excellence, contrary to any authorial privilege, impervious even to the written word and any other of the basic rules for transmitting content. It is a kind of pre-Socratic experiment keen to identify theoretical vanishing points, paradoxes and fundamental philosophical questions, poised between mystic celebration and therapeutic session. Here the field of discussion takes shape gradually from the friction generated where different points of view rub against each other (verging on thoughts of deprivation), from needs and the surface meanings of the subjects involved.
By refuting apodeixis, all forms of dialectics and the authoritarianism of philosophical assertions the Opera Filosofica Nomade communicates first and foremost the pleasures inherent in metaphysical argument, drawing the public into an intoxicating vortex of thoughts as they sway into and away from meaning. The audience finds itself guided by an alchemy words that wanders across unknown lands, traditions and myths as they skim nonchalantly across the surface of archaic theories and the heritage of the history of civilization and culture.
A rare example of open philosophical discourse, Opera Filosofica Nomade is ideally suited to the anti-institutional vocation of Fat Iggy’s art and the most secret soul of Guido Costa Projects that increasingly probes the folds of theory and to those non-places of reasoning where meaning runs off the rails into the unnameable and the latency of sense.
How proud and grateful the contemporary art gallery is to Opera Filosofica Nomade for transforming it, albeit for a few hours, into the port of call of free thought, without subjects or authors, in an exemplary theoretical sacrifice of Narcissus and his coryphaei.
For a few hours only, Opera Filosofica Nomade will engage the public between spring and summer, but its musings are certain to lodge in the minds of those lucky few who attend these brief encounters in the gallery.
Active in Italy for more than three decades in many theoretical forms, Opera Filosofica Nomade is an organic and strictly anonymous collective whose distilled and unpredictable public appearances find expression at the confluence of performance and installation. During each encounter materials and documents will be shared with the audience to serve as compasses to help plot a course across these oceans of words. When the Fat Iggy presents:… project is complete audio-video documentation of the whole experiment by Martin Kersels will be available for consultation in the gallery.