Upon taking a few steps, you enter the exhibition space and are faced with a large screen playing the work „Il Capo“ (2010). Yet, it feels too early to concentrate; the architecture instead urges you to wander, to understand the way the space is constructed – the stairways, the divisions, particularly on a first visit. Nevertheless, „Il Capo“, which is part of the Trilogy „The Malady of Iron“, is very quick to introduce one to Ancarani’s work.
Exhibition space
Most of the works, etherealizing an interface between art and cinema, are displayed in a series of separate rooms. Heavy red Venetian curtains separate these spaces from the rest of the museum’s main hall. Each room has a huge screen, and the sound is reproduced from several loudspeakers, always arranged in different configurations. Sound is a focal element of Ancarani’s work.
The curators of this exhibition, Diego Siela and Iolanda Ratti, describe the language the artist has moulded through decades as an amalgam of everything: Italian master directors, fiction, Japanese cyberpunk, literature, and archaeology. His works are unscripted, maybe you do not need much when you are an observer like him. Accordingly, the medium itself refuses fixed definition: alternately labeled film or video, described by friends as painting, and by others as sculpture.
Memories for Moderns: Ambulant merchants, slot machines, ice cream shops
Then we are in the main room, which contains eight screens, positioned one next to the other, so close that there is almost no distance. You can watch the works from above, sit on one of the benches, or you can go up and down the hallway ramp. What we see in „Memories for Moderns“ is not a single work; it is the output of an almost decade-long work cycle (2000 – 2009), which is for the first time featured together. You rarely get from where the sound comes or to which video it belongs; you can only guess by pairing them with the fragments. Indeed, Ancaran only shows fragments to his audience, leaving you to judge for yourself. We encounter here narratives of different individuals, social, political and very mundane stories of the Riviera Romagnola. Here we encounter the children of Lido Adriano, the beach, the ice cream shop, ambulant merchants selling plastic supermens, and the bronzed Strandläufer*.
Then a bar filled with slot machines and slot machine screens loaded with words that give hope and dreams: Monte Carlo Gold, Hawai (…)
On the next screen, a community is filmed while celebrating, or perhaps forgetting – they dance with bucks in their hands, but we don’t know anything else besides this repeated fragment. Many fragments continue repeating in a kind of eternity, such as the dance on a street sign pole next to the highway of a likely sex worker or the image of condoms floating in water.
Before going
I briefly enter the rooms where the works „San Siro“, „Da Vinci“, and „The Challange“ are featured. So, I find myself within a short time in one of the largest stadiums in the world, then in an operating room where technologies confront bodily defeats, and then to a falconry competition—after witnessing claws and beaks being sharpened and armoured, possibly with electric nail files. Perhaps I am simply searching for the sensation of passing beneath the curtain, of discovering spaces in which to keep thinking. It is time to leave. Yet the psychedelic images linger, accompanying me as I wander through Milan, through my journey home, and into the present.
Exhibition: Yuri Ancarani, Lascia stare I Sogni (Forget your Dreams)
Exhibition duration: 04.04 – 11.06.2023
Address and contact:
PAC Milano
Via Palestro 14
www.pacmilano.it
Note: *Strandläufer is a borrowed term that artist Sibylle Ciarloni has been coining – https://sibylleciarloni.com/2018/07/01/strandlaeufer-lungomare/
