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I Grandi Liberi

White straight wall, white staircase, red dress, video projected on the wall, white light beacon, very high volume audio, loudspeakers, 2019.

Text by Maria Chiara Wang

Performance

Hinterland Galerie, Vienna

May 18, 2019

Who are the Great Free? 

 

In a society like contemporary Western society which, with its imperative 'LIVE!', imposes the standard of eternal beauty and eternal youth, the Great Freedmen - in Vale Palmi's interpretation - are the Suicides, the subversives of the System, those who consciously decide to pursue the only true, absolute Freedom - Death - by self-determination.

 

Free from the impositions that accept as the only possible 'end-life' the 'natural', biological one. 

Free from the process of accumulation that has led to the transition from the concept of life to that of capital-life and to a quantitative evaluation of existence. 

Free from the social control that from birth (birth-control) to death (death-control) claims to dispose of our lives. 

 

The Great Free claim and reappropriate their right to life and death; suicide, therefore, as subversion of that ideology which forbids any subtraction of capital and value, where every human life is understood, precisely, as a particle of capital.

 

In the performance, the descending movement of the suicides alternates with the ascending movement of the artist who is the spokesman of their requests; slow, reflexive movements, made up of expectations and subtext: the bodies remain suspended in mid-air; the moment of impact is omitted from the viewer's sight, only revealed in the finale through an epiphany made up of sound and light.

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