Massimo Mastrorillo, Aliqual, 2015

There is a very simple game that consists of repeating a word again and again until its meaning breaks down and becomes something mysterious that disorientates us and gives un the opportunity to imagine a world that has suddenly become something else. Laquilalaquilalaquilaaliqualaliqualaliqual: a city animated by a distant and alienated vision, a modern version of Gulliver’s moral travels.

In a deconstruction of a bird’s eye view, Aliqual emerges as in a miniature that inexorably draws everything in with the irresistible attraction of a black hole. But no sooner do we immerse ourselves in these places, than we find ourselves eslwhere, forced to wander endlessly among a series of reflecting mirrors. The perception of things drifts towards a parallel worlds, in a suspended time where historical reference is set aside in an operation that makes the past and memory relative: photographic recording, which draws us into a shadowy area lying somewhere between riddle and puzzle. Here in Aliqual, the city centre is a mass of rubble, inexorable ruins, empty yet animated, surrounded by an archipelago of inhabited suburbs that seem to urge the discovery of new visions. Its a dystopian space located somewhere in a future that is simultaneously near and remote, which forcefully brings home the very real loss of a sense of scale; a crisis that reaches beyond an event’s effect.

Everything is upturned in this improbable settlement, where organic and inorganic merge in continuous metamorphoses, and we see only shapes: lines, circles and triangles. These hyper-formal, almost automatic recordings, have ceased to probe themselves and ask questions. As in an upturned theory of ruins, we are immersed in the representational space of a distorted reality, where an uninhabitable world comes to life. The comparison with history and memory takes the path of discovery, in the quest for these fragments that come to life on their own. Their exploration and explosion lead us toward an improbable measurment of chaos, whose movements share the dynamics of Russian roulette: a bet with history that finds itself crumbling with a predictable yet always unexpected motion. While it may seem impossible to record this world using the language of documentation, its comparison with figures alluding to geometric and mathematical models, and to the abstract and hypothetical truths of scientific abstractions, opens up a personal and newly human dimension. It is a puzzle that incessant breaking down and recontruction of what had seemed merely an interplay of shapes.