“As a substitute of being afraid of the night shadows—famous a celebrated Berlin mental—cheerful kids benefit from them to amuse themselves.” When Walter Benjamin transcribed this motet present in a playbook from his childhood, he referred to a fairly correct second: the fever’s juncture, a hushed interval the place issues softly change their standing. There’s, nevertheless, an underlying theme operating by means of Benjamin’s textual content.

That’s, when the routine turns into jammed and time can lastly wrap round itself, the connection between issues undergoes a slight however substantial mutation. Even when we dispense with Benjamin’s theoretical supervision, it’s straightforward to know how the kid, specifically a person in probably the most inclusive sense of the time period, when left alone earlier than, tries to form his being himself. He does so, first, to cheat boredom. Then as a result of, in his personal method, he’s a curious being, a demanding collector and a cautious accumulator. Maybe he’s desirous and even worse, terrified by obsessions that he prefers to relegate to chasms that the gaze can’t attain. In any case, we are able to assume that he’s serenely stressed, prey to that restlessness that lays down frivolously on issues, as an professional monster would, crouching between the slats of an outdated mattress. The mechanism is elementary: confronted with the unknown, one reacts by appearing and typically creating in an iterative, pseudo-engineering, documentary, mocking, tender or cryptic method. Of this hovering contour, whoever makes (the artist?), just like the baby, advantages by taking part in with it. That’s, by sublimating (or parodying), what awakens the creativeness right into a ductile materials, a pretext for declarations of intent, but additionally for nightmares and rhapsodies.

This is the reason the kids’s room resembles a Chinese language shadow theatre or a mirage. It has little to do with plans, confidential registers, and litmus exams: it merely stands collective, typically breathless, between creativeness and materials tradition. On nearer inspection, the room resembles a weird axonometric view. Its object and the sport as an creative phenomenon are tenfold and confused: it is sort of a snout that smiles whereas whimpering. In a body teeming with historical tales, the inhabitant (there they’re once more, artists) is stubbornly absent. Of them, nevertheless, every part speaks, and, above all, everybody whispers. One inevitably turns into a visitor from a particular second within the kids’s room. Friends who’re typically nostalgic, seldom tireless, and infrequently caught up in an pointless embarrassment. Furthermore, the inscrutable card seems scarcely playable: there are the hosts, the marginally dusty objects, maybe legitimately irritated, able to sing.

The so-called “oculist witnesses,” who’re without delay factor, gesture and story, scatter clues. Amongst them are pictograms of minor, unpronounceable incidents that lurk within the reminiscence swiftly mocking. Considerate compositions that gratify the pleasure of doing with care and beautiful ability. Surfaces that play with layering and notion providing what solely the body, a repository of secret subtleties, can reveal. Sculptures that dawdle about pretending to be furnishings parts or trinkets after which ogle with Polyphemus’ eyeball or feral gaze. Sculptures declare their proper to ask play or to resemble toys. Constructions that tickle the seek for a perspective, enlivening the stranger.

Drawings of nice microcosms caught getting ready to turning into three-dimensional dioramas. Pictures turn out to be stratified animation in house and sense or vociferous units of romantic mechanics. Presumptive objects that exhibit swallowing, bringing to shore a rebus from a deep time. The kids’s room, some would say, is a riddle, not essentially to be solved.

—Valentina Bartalesi

Curated by
Giulio Bonfante and Alessandro Carano

Collaborating artists:
Sara Bisacchi, Jack Brennan, Alessandro Carano, Gloria Capoani, Stefano De Paolis, Valentina De Zanche, Gabriele Ferrarini, Dario Guccio, Samantha Lasko, Daniele Milvio, Giacomo Montanelli, Valerio Nicolai, Alice Peach, Giulio Scalisi, Davide Stucchi, Federico Tosi, Eva Vallania.

at CASTIGLIONI, Milan
till July 15, 2023