Morestalgia:
un’opera multimediale di Riccardo Benassi
Xing/Live Arts Week presents
Riccardo Benassi
Morestalgia
winner of the 5th edition of Italian Council (2019), main project ART CITY Bologna 2020 on the occasion of Arte Fiera
Italian première
opening Thursday 23 January 2020, 8.30 pm >12 am
coffee with the artist Saturday 25 January 2020, 11 am
24>27 January 2020, 6 am >11.30 pm
Bologna Centrale train station – Hall Alta Velocità (-4 floor)
Xing presents Morestalgia by Riccardo Benassi, a project supported by the Italian Council (5th Edition, 2019) program to promote Italian contemporary art in the world by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity and Urban Regeneration of the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism.
Morestalgia is an environment based on sound, text and objects that has as pulsating nucleus a LED screen traversable by the human body. The project stems from a research into nostalgia and its social implications in an age where the internet is encroaching into our lives. It will take the form of a multimedia and multi-sensory work: a hyperdesigned object. In keeping with Riccardo Benassi’s research pathway, it addresses the theme of displays in living spaces and in urban, infrastructural, and behavioral contexts, starting from an analysis that centers around the human being and its interrelations.
The techno-curtain of Morestalgia will appear in Bologna from 23 to 27 January 2020, in the underground space of the Alta Velocità Hall in the Bologna train station, the hub of the infrastructure that has changed our way of traveling. After the opening, that will take place on 23 January 2020 (from 8.30 pm to 12 am), the installation will welcome travelers and visitors for the following four days (from 6 am to 11.30 pm) and it will also offer a prologue of Live Arts Week IX, that will be held from 26 March to 4 April 2020. Morestalgia is part of the main projects of ART CITY Bologna 2020 on the occasion of ARTE FIERA.
With the invention of the word “morestalgia” Riccardo Benassi intends to update the concept of nostalgia after the Internet, investigating and cross-referencing different thematic fields such as memory and affects, migration and homesickness, phenomenology and interface design, history and futurology. It can be also defined as “augmented nostalgia”: a specific kind of homesickness, whose sense of pain is similar to that caused by the feeling of envy, a feeling of lack – self-translated as loss – whose direct reference is experienced by others. Morestalgic human beings are those who have the desire to live an experience they have previously understood as a plausible one but who, instead of recalling it from their own past, supplant it with an immersive navigation experience offered by the Web. The artist poses the question: how have social networks and online communities contributed to the unification and normalization of subjective pasts? Can digital empathy become a useful tool to remodel the future rather than creating an alliance around an apparently shared past? In other words, how can we transform a subjective feeling of belonging into a collective future?
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