When a Crowd Dreams Together, curated by Olivia Teglia, unfolds underground in the former Pincio Warehouse, in Bologna’s Montagnola Park. The works by Sara Cortesi, Giorgia Polverini, Susana Ljuljanovic and Eliel David Martínez Julián trace an imaginative mapping of the park above: an alternative configuration shaped through processes of alteration, displacement, shifting and recomposition. The place re-emerges in an enchanted dimension, like a hallucination of the familiar landscape, a ripple on the surface of the visible.
The exhibition title borrows from and reinterprets Judith Butler’s reflection on the crowd as a heterogeneous plurality of bodies. For Butler, assembly does not simply coincide with the simultaneous presence of a multitude, but is constituted through the relation between bodies, in their being together—which is a political act—capable of producing and reconfiguring public space. During four months of residency, the artists inhabited the park within this multitude of bodies, encounters and trajectories, allowing the context to enter their research. What emerges is an underground constellation of visions that reassembles and rewrites the same landscape.
Giorgia Polverini’s I(T) FUNERALI explores dynamics of power and control in public space through a choreography of human and non-human bodies. Two guardians, inspired by the figures of Diego Sarti’s monumental fountain, watch over and disorient the passage between park and exhibition space, creating a short circuit between human and mechanical body.
Sara Cortesi’s Trionfo evokes abundance through a sisal-fibre cornucopia, while a gate loses its function as a boundary and collapses to the ground. Small spirits inhabiting the trunks of felled trees infest the space in an organic proliferation.
Susana Ljuljanovic alters the perception of the landscape through Coro: ceramic sculptures, acetate drawings, projections and shifts in scale transfer details of the fountain underground. With Plurifonia, a plurality of voices collected during the residency introduces an intimate and relational dimension into the space.
Concluding the journey, Eliel David Martínez Julián’s La terra prima del fuoco leads the gaze beneath the surface, through a material and layered painting in which fabrics, vegetal forms and spices compose an almost archaeological landscape. Food becomes a device for investigation and transformation, leading from the visible forms of the landscape to the matter that generates it.
The underground journey of When a Crowd Dreams Together comes to completion in a zone of half-light, where the territory of the familiar blurs its contours and wakefulness takes on the uncertain form of reverie. It is through a stumble, a sudden loss of friction with the surface of things, that one enters the underground: a crack opens in the landscape, like a passageway; and one falls into the dream.
