«in the beginning was the word» (John 1:1)
Reads Goethe’s Faust from the old testament. But the word nothing else describes the action.
It’s not the world to be the beginning, in the beginning was the act. Thus opens Barbara Bologna’s Fall 2022, with an act, that let us perceive the theatrical and performative background of the artist that does not abandon her origins deeply rooted in her emotional perception of the world.
A challenge, the umpteenth as if it were the first one the artist is called upon to face, the will to power, so human, incredibly strong and inexorably fragile.
Fragility must not be a wall, it must be as high as a mountain, a path on which to collect amulets, collect defeats and re-discover ourselves in all our imperfection.
“Structuring is chaining creative freedom”, so Barbara decides, in a stream of consciousness, to clean up, to free herself from artefacts, from superstructures. On the spur of the moment, because there is nothing more authentic and benevolent than letting oneself flow without the filter of reason, she authoritatively takes up again the contradictory freedom of being every form in which she recognizes herself.
“Favst me”, escorted by the subtitle “ne sors pas” (don’t go out), is not a path of redemption, it has no beginning and no end, it is comparable to a labyrinth, a rhizome mirroring contemporary society: “where every point can connect to every other and the succession of connections has no theoretical end since there is no longer any outside or inside, the rhizome can proliferate ad infinitum. Even wrong choices produce solutions. ” (Umberto eco)
If you want to analyze it, you find yourself lost. If you want to identify with it, you find yourself everywhere and at the same time never really anywhere. No branch is watertight, nothing is immutable, static, salvific or damned. Everything is imperfectly human.
It is the Grey, the smell of cigarette smoke, the taste of freshly caught fish. He refuses to feel, he only follows well-trodden paths, the unaware man who does not get unbalanced and walks slowly without bothering to look around. “No emotional people required”, as the clothes in this mood say, personifying the catatonic state in which society pours into, soaked in selfishness and imperturbable.
Black is a smell of pepper and coal, taste of pure liquorice, contaminated and branched. The black of «simple is enough’», a black that is as much home as a leap into oblivion. It can lead to «whatever», a conscious choice of indifference towards the labyrinth, furnishing one’s own cage and making it comfortable, accepting the compromises of the kidnapper; or, it can launch itself blindfolded into ambiguity, courageously deciding to pursue that ambivalent “bestie”, interpretable according to language but also, if one wishes, to destiny, the sweeter the more brutal.
As it’s rust, the smell of a mountain hut, the taste of coffee on an empty stomach. The sedimented past that rusts the present, inexorably contaminating the future.
And pink, the smell of condoms and nappies, the taste of sparkling candy. A newborn love, as innocent as it is eager for contamination.
Faust, for those who have not read Goethe, is saved from damnation only through his will to power, his never being fully present in the moment of most intense pleasure that allows him to be human and as such to always aspire to a higher good. Imperfection, that apostrophe as small as it is saving, which makes the unsatisfied world continue to reinvent itself.
“Once you stop to admire the moment so much that you want to stop it, you are damned”.
(J.W. Goethe “Faust”)
ART DIRECTOR: BARBARA BOLOGNA
PHOTOGRAPHY: DANIELE GOLIA
MODELS: MARIAGRAZIA ROSSELLO & MANFRED VANNUCCI / CHIARA MAGNI & FEDERICO ALESSANDRO BIANCARDI
STYLIST: BARBARA BOLOGNA
ASSISTANT STYLIST 1st : VERONICA BELLI
ASSISTANT STYLIST 2nd : YLENIA BONORA
MAKEUP ARTIST 1st: CRISTINA CALANCEA
MAKEUP ARTIST 2nd: VIRGINIA MANTELLI
HAIRSTYLIST: BEATRICE RAVENNA
MUSA: LEIJH AKHEL , GERMANA STELLA
COPY & WRITER: YLENIA BONORA
Sito internet: https://www.barbara-bologna.com
Instagram: @barbarabologna
