AMORE brings together Anaesthesia and A MORE, two ongoing editorial projects by Valentina Abenavoli (published or due to be published by AKINA).
Exuberant and multifaceted, Abenavoli’s creative activity encompasses almost everything: from book editing, publishing and writing to curating her own narratives into autonomous visual essays of reveries that abruptly turn into volcanic manifests of political activism regarding today’s image world.
AMORE is an exhibition about an unfinished trilogy. From the horror of love in Anaesthesia to the confessional desire, the mute carnal love and the pornographic poetry of A MORE, it leads to an unknown territory, pervaded by a feeling stronger than the extremeness of being and not being. From the printed book sequence to the wall installation, from vernacular vintage photographs to reproductions, from the written word to the dictated one, from photography to cinematography, and vice versa, the show confronts media and integrates the image in a process of incessant re-interpretation, re-appropriation, consumption… Through her visual essays, Abenavoli reaches the liquid frontiers of the image and meaning, wherein exhaustion is prevalent. She questions the very mechanisms of seeing, and reinvents the notions of documentary and fiction —of what is deemed to remain in the private realm and what is public. This confrontational and uncompromised visual mash up of media images and meanings builds a solid visual essay that consolidates Abenavoli’s female voice and status as a contemporary visual thinker. Similarly to Chris Marker, hers is not mere storytelling but a courageous and unconventional at heart confrontation with the contemporary dystopia.
Natasha Christia