Six questions to Agostino Iacurci
What role does research play in the development of your projects and how does it balance with the simplification of the forms you propose?
Research plays a fundamental role, coinciding with the work itself. The work is nothing more than an attempt to formalize a series of cues, insights, and intuitions, ranging from the more theoretical, such as cultural references, to the more practical, such as the choice of materials.
I seek synthesis rather than simplification in my work; I am reminded of the technique of simmering in cooking, in which you let water evaporate, thickening liters of broth into a few deciliters of sauce, all while trying to maintain a concentrated and complex balance of flavors.
What potential do you attribute to fictional storytelling as a special political language?
Certainly the potential to make potential scenarios visible, “making worlds,” as the 2009 Birnbaum-directed Biennale was titled. I believe in the figure of the artist more as a visionary than as a chronicler of his / her times, and fiction when inserted into reality constitutes a powerful tool to stimulate a collective imagination process. I have marched in countless demonstrations under the slogan “Another World Is Possible,” so I believe imagining and designing possible futures to be a highly political gesture.
Where does your work approach a utopian imaginary of the future?
In actual fact, my work has a traditional nature and is often very classical in its formal outcomes. However, I think there are archetypal elements of certain cultural universes that are able to cross eras, and I like to work with those elements by seeking out new potential. This makes these imaginaries as ancient as they are futuristic. After all, the very idea of a utopian imaginary of the future has its own classical nature precisely by virtue of its being aspirational and ideal.
How does the proposal you developed for Thinking Like a Mountain dialogue with aspects of the local context?
My work started out as a reflection on the transformation of the Italian landscape and more specifically the Lombard landscape, so there is an initial level of dialogue with geographical nature.
Furthermore, the work Dry Days, Tropical Nights is a representation of a dystopian landscape made up of artificial palms and cacti, a surrogate for a futuristic landscape, set in the context of a botanical garden that also houses real palms and cacti. Like much of the Italian landscape for that matter, the botanical garden is itself an artificial landscape that is the result of human labor, created on the terraces of a Bergamasque hillside by grafting plants of different origins that evolve and which are constantly changing.
Then there is an additional element, and that is the upper gunpowder storage building which houses the installation, offering a semi-dark environment ideal for luminous works. I find it interesting that this gunpowder magazine was never used for the purpose it was designed for, i.e. to house combustible material, since it was infiltrated by too much moisture and therefore damp.
If we consider that traditionally one of the ingredients of gunpowder is charcoal—charred wood, precisely to eliminate all the moisture—the installation offers a continuous reference to the interaction between the plant world and human activity on various levels: elements such as fire and water, darkness and light, the permeable space of the open windows traversed by the sampled sound of South American forests and overlayered with the sounds of the surrounding environment, or again, the theme of failure.
Apart from communicating with the community or with people, how would you define a collective practice?
I would say an activity that has the capacity to have an impact on others, even on a minimal or imperceptible level. For me, this might be even presenting a drawing is a collective practice, if it manages to elicit emotions, reflections, or better still, to trigger a dialogue, even if it’s only with a single interlocutor.
Is there something you might pinpoint as essential to your way of working?
Restlessness.
