It is said that during the course of human history the moment in which the form of the vase arises marks the passage when human beings began to perceive themselves as existing within a timeline. The possibility provided by a vessel to store something allowed us to start thinking about tomorrow: food, for example could become a reserve; it no longer had to be consumed immediately, but could also be conserved and transported. It is said, then, that the vase – and, in a wider sense, the act of containing this form implies – is one of those realities that has gradually enabled us to understand that we are temporal beings, and that the “after” also contains the end. An end that the gesture of conserving attempts to postpone.
So it is no coincidence if the same horizon of temporality and finitude has been the one in which vases began to also appear amongst ancient grave goods, to allow the deceased to pass into the realm of the dead, accompanied by the comfort of some earthly provisions.
In the English language the term “holder” – the title chosen by Davide Allieri for his exhibition – has a dual meaning: on the one hand, it indicates a device whose purpose is to materially contain something; on the other, it refers to a person who possesses something, like a power or a right. In its factual connotation, then, this term points to a hollow object – like a recipient or a receptacle – that conserves a substance or has a function of support for something else, hence a subsidiary function, of service. In a metaphorical sense, instead, “holder” defines the status of one who owns something – like a passport – which grants them a condition of advantage or impunity.
Between these two poles of meaning a space opens up which is as utilitarian as it is authoritarian, a space that echoes the ambiguous slipping of scale we can observe between the two spaces of the exhibition, conceived as specific spatial and sculptural interventions. The objects we encounter in the first room, in fact, replicate in fiberglass the measurements and features of a series of containers: some, in a literal way, reproduce utensils like fuel cans, while others seem to be slightly altered in their proportions, and might remind us of oxygen tanks or funerary urns. The second room, instead, is entirely occupied by a sculpture, again in fiberglass, which has been conceived for this space and is itself a space, a walkable structure that admits us to its interior almost like a vat, in which we come across a second empty vat, a low well. The exhibition thus shifts from what we deploy to contain to what contains us, from full and impenetrable volumes in the first space, to the hollow, inhabitable volume of the second. From the mute objects in the first room, to the open, interactive space of the next. Within this transition of receptacles that shift from utensils into spaces, we might almost ask ourselves how long it will be possible for us to transport something with us, and when instead will come the moment in which we will have to be ourselves displaced.
This ambiguity, which slips from formal to moral in character, is amplified by a factor whose persistence makes it become impassive, namely the mono-material nature of all the works in the exhibition: fiberglass is a manufactured material, completely exempt from anything we can still define as “natural.” A material that from an extreme and initial ductility passes, as it dries, to an extreme, everlasting hardness. It is perhaps due to this achieved fixity that fiberglass can represent a condition of stasis, the passage from something that was mobile to something that is mobile no longer, the trail of an unstable and former vitality we can now observe in the form of a relic.
The sensation of being faced by the forms of an imminent ruin is reinforced by a few drawings placed on the walls. Almost completely filled with dense strokes that convey a sense of breathlessness, these views depict impenetrable defensive structures and are framed, or even sealed, by cumbersome devices like display cases.
Holder is an exhibition in which every volume – graspable, inhabitable or represented – implies the idea of protection, of isolation and crossing of some inhospitable distance. An exhibition of emptiness and fullness, in the midst of which the body is absent, perhaps because it has already transpired, perhaps because it still awaits.
—Alessandro Rabottini