"Ipersegno altrosuono: The aesthetics of collaboration" by Mariuccia Casadio

Renouncing their centrality, artists such as Meriem Bennani, Emily Kraus and Clara Hastrup design combinations of the organic and the artificial to create dynamic works, in which movement, light and noises are the fruit of collaboration and the relationship between different subjects.

The art system is in transition. Of course, artists still exist, just as galleries, museums, foundations and collections still exist. But the roles tend to become increasingly fluid and now seem to be changing significantly.

What changes? First of all, the way those who make it present themselves, who withdraw from their centrality and stop thinking and presenting the work as something for which they are solely responsible. And even if they can continue to sign it, they choose to entrust it to a process that requires other contributions. In short, the artist loves to work more and more in a team, involving ideas and skills of different specialists. The staticity and immutability of the work, to be contemplated on a wall or on a pedestal, increasingly appear out of play. The laws of physics and the effects of chance, evolution and transformation over time, the dynamics created with the help of electrical cables, digital programming and ingenious contraptions tend in fact to make it mobile and changeable, visual, but also sonic, a masterpiece of concerted actions at least as unpredictable. Impermanent, pulsating, moody and polyphonic like life. And no less surprising, spectacular, open to every kind of encounter, contact, interference and interaction with the real world. Taking a step back, the artist leaves the work the widest autonomy and freedom of action.

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Finally, the American Emily Kraus: with a degree in religious studies from Kenyon College in Gambier (Ohio) and a master's degree from the Royal College of Art in London, she is an interesting painter, who works inside a cubic metal structure, a sort of frame on which she rotates a ring of raw canvas, to create her large-scale paintings, to which she only adds manual interventions later. The streaks produced by the tubes on which she applies the color generate strange pentagrams and permeate the canvases with an invisible rhythm, the result of a refined and well-considered consequence of chance. "I wrap my paintings around me. They surround me in my studio, we tune into each other and resonate. The mantra of the mechanism is the ticking of the misaligned bearings and the slightly deformed tubes that rotate at my command", explains Kraus. «Able to move only in two directions, the canvas is bound to the linear spectrum of time and also to that of a loop: the system insists on the coexistence of linear and cyclical time… It is a ritual of being, of being in, of being with».

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