Erika Malzoni | Expressura

Erika Malzoni’s aesthetics of recognition

There is nothing that does not bear the power of language.

Jacques Rancière

We don’t know it, because we are unable, but we all sense that much is hidden in the muteness of the world. In the same way as the irrational interferes in what we call reason, contaminating our words and actions, be them individual or collective, with that which is unspeakable, we also spill over (ours, the created, the interpreted) bodies what can only be called culture.

Everyday objects bear within themselves, visible only to the most attentive of us, the history of their use and decay, their untimely death, be it by planned obsolescence or by the destiny that they were fit to fulfill – disposable packages, temporary casings, things born with the purpose of becoming trash. Now, in this temple of modern rationality that is the residency designed by Rino Levi, some of these objects gain new life by the hands of Erika Malzoni.

The operation realized by the artist over the things of the world is not of ontological order. She does not change the essence of the objects that she appropriates, does not bestow on them any being other than what they already possess. There is no metaphysics in vigor on the transformations effected by her over the wide, and underestimated, universe of everyday things. Her mode of operation – based on the immanence of the being, the bodies, the matter – is, more than anything, an affective procedure: the establishment of an aesthetics of recognition. The artist recognizes in the objects that which already lies in them, but is veiled by layers of prejudices that blind less generous eyes, and point to that which while being the same, can be something else.

Caroline Carrion