'Cold Stories' by Nicola Lorini at Rehearsal Project, Milan

“A couple of weeks ago, after leaving the studio I was walking under a heavy rain, one of those summery monsoon storms that slowly moved from East to West. In the distance there was a Chinese bar, with a multitude of texts written on the vitrine, one of them was “tavola fredda” (cold dishes). Lost in thought, due to the rain and distance, merged with my mood and the unreadable font, I read “favola fredda” (cold fable). Once I realised the mistake I thought it was, after all, a good metaphor for how I’m working at the moment. A mix of desperation and romanticism, that implies a narrative aspect and at the same time rely on an empathic, non linear, experience of things. A fragmentation of possible stories and contexts that tends to a resolution that never really happens.

I would like to create an environment where all the elements coexist within single system of relationships.

This aspect absorbs the dialogue raised while developing the exhibition about the dynamic of exchange/symbiosis between the workspace, the elements that occupy it and the work declared as such. The fact the since a few months I have been living in the studio has an influence on the necessity of creating a quite subtle but dynamic habitat in the space.

I would like the exhibition to be a collection of fragments produced during the last year. Some of them are finished works, others are tests or parts of previous works.

Lately I have been thinking a lot about the intersection between a contextual approach, driven by a strong conceptual rigour, and actions related to irrational and deeply subjective impulses.

In these terms I’m interested in how political, social and economical superstructures emotionally impact on individual subjects, regardless of them being people, animals, plants, objects, contexts, thoughts.

Sand for example, at first sight soft and homogeneous, contains fragments of every material entity in the world. It’s the basis for human civilisation and at the same time, in form of high-purity silicon dioxide particles, the essential raw material from which we make computer chips, fiber-optic cables, and other high-tech hardware—all the physical components on which the digital world runs.

At the intersection of Object Oriented Ontology and the notion of animism in relation to the digital, I’m fascinated by the relationship between the concepts of primitive, Internet, animal, technological, towards a post-anthropocentric perspective.

But I’m not interested in a dualism between opposites, quite the contrary; the collapse of the binary conception of good/bad, human/nature, past/future, and of history conceived as a linear phenomenon. I believe history in this sense has an enormous potential - in a time where the notion of exploration is geographically saturated but translated on the web - it can be overturned becoming something dense and tangible, to caress as a bearer of human expectations, nightmares and infatuations.”

(email sent to Rehearsal - 17.06. 2019)