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Stockholm hosts a performance installation by Stefano Serretta

​The Italian Cultural Institute in Stockholm hosts a performance installation by Stefano Serretta, which forms part of Vasco Forconi’s project entitled  ‘Shoegaze’, a veiled tribute to a subgenre of indie rock that was in vogue in the United Kingdom in the late ’80s. The project aims to develop a cycle of exhibitions throughout 2019 by artists working in Italy and in Sweden who will have to interact with the building of the Institute, which was designed by Gio Ponti.

Serretta created an environmental installation by emptying the building’s foyer and using sheets of newspaper to entirely cover the large windowpanes. It is the way by which the artist narrates a story made up of images:  visitors are invited to walk across the installation and decode the characters that crowd the sheets of newspaper covering the windowpanes on which the artist drew and produced the story.

Serretta reproduced a paradoxical suspension of time by completely covering up the large windowpanes, creating an image that, in the contemporary collective imagination, evokes a commercial activity going out of business, thus offering a different interpretation of the architectural space. However this two-fold action – that of emptying the foyer and preventing anyone from looking in – is only temporary: from inside the installation, the polychrome sheets covering the large windows enable the sun to seep through and become the pathway through which the artist unfolds an itinerary made of  images and fragments of texts. The texts reproduced on the sheets become an obsessive repetition of mantras and fragments of ambivalent and ambiguous discourse that the artist borrows equally from the rhetoric of contemporary political narrative and from the culture of literature, cinema and music in which irony, fear and ideology are inextricably mixed.