MAMbo Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna

Museo chiama Artista. Gianluca e Massimiliano De Serio. Un Ritorno MAMbo

12 Jun - 28 Sep 2014

MUSEO CHIAMA ARTISTA. GIANLUCA E MASSIMILIANO DE SERIO. UN RITORNO
MAMBO
12 June - 28 September 2014

curated by Gianfranco Maraniello

Gianluca and Massimiliano De Serio Un Ritorno. Stemming from a collaboration between the MiBACT (Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism) and AMACI (Association of Italian Museums of Contemporary Art), the project Museo Chiama Artista (‘Museum Calls Artist’), curated by Ludovico Pratesi and Angela Tecce, aims to provide active support for the system of contemporary art in the country, commissioning from year to year the production of a new work from an Italian artist that will then travel around the museums belonging to the association, laying the foundations for the creation and utilisation of a common heritage. For the first Museo Chiama Artista project the directors of the members of AMACI have chosen the twins Gianluca and Massimiliano De Serio, who for many years have combined their work as visual artists with a career in films, in a constant search for a balance between photography, of which they are masters, and artistic intentions. Out of this ‘call’ has come the film Un Ritorno (‘A Return’), made at a moment of creative crisis for the artists and out of their need to understand the reasons for it and overcome it. With the assistance of Giuseppe Regaldo – an expert in techniques of rapid hypnosis – the pair of artists becomes the subject and object of an experiment in simultaneous hypnosis: they film themselves talking to each other in this state, interweaving the conversation with memories of their childhood, going back to the moment before birth, in which they were still in their mother’s womb, in a process of progressive regression without the mediation of narrative. In addition to being the first known experiment of its kind, in which a pair of twins are put into a state of simultaneous hypnosis, it is an attempt to hold a dialogue on the crisis they are going through, with the aim of attaining a state of profound introspection.
Gianluca and Massimiliano De Serio’s film is accompanied by a catalogue devoted entirely to the Un Ritorno project, published by Libri Aparte, with texts by Maria Grazia Bellisario, Beatrice Merz and Angela Tecce and a conversation between Ludovico Pratesi and Gianluca and Massimiliano De Serio.