“Happy Holiday”, a ready made modified by the artist, is the neon phrase that embrace the visitor in entering Mauro Folci’s show at Auditorium in Rome.
Taking advantage of the peculiarity of the exhibition space, divided into two communicating rooms, the artist uncovers the dialectic relationship between bios and zoe (political qualified versus unpolitical qualified life), on which Western capitalism is founded.
Whereas the philosophical photo stories in the outer and luminous room are an homage to the irony of language and the mot d’esprit of the human intellect, the mysterious power of the animal world pervades the inner and obscure room through the powerful presence of a masterly projected sleeping bear.
The artist constructs so a coherent visual narrative, which tends to blur the perverse dichotomy of Western capitalist binary logic, promoting instead a line of flight, that of an essential inactivity as theorized by Agamben, which sees precisely in the holiday, as vacancy time separated from work time, the perfect device.
Text by Anna Cestelli Guidi
