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December 2, 2010

Fiamma Montezemolo: Flowing Energy and Stardust



In this installation, I chose to represent the earth through a 1930s globe that takes the shape of a birdcage. The globe parallels evoke both, iconically, the bars of a prison cell and, allegorically, the ‘iron cage of modernity’ described in the early 20th century by Einstein’s contemporary, the disenchanted German sociologist Max Weber. Through this object I wish to express my ambiguous relation to our disoriented and muddled critical perspective as de-centered subjects of modernity. As an artist and an anthropologist, I am keenly aware at how the "Family of Man" often forgets its own sense of relativity, its being just one part of a larger system and flux of energy that ties together 1/ the Sun (here represented through a television monitor tuned on an intense sulfuric yellow color), 2/ its Rays (a five-channel sequencer with special wires that produce waves of light penetrating the globe-cage through 5 parallels I manipulated and opened up in order to let the wires-rays inside the earth, passing through a plant (major and most important producer of photosynthesis and consequently bigger in scale) and finally, but just finally, us, human beings, constantly shifting and modulated figures of Anthropos, represented as very tiny little people walking on the swinging bar situated in the heart of the earth (to give a sense of reduced - not diminished but reduced - importance to our species). This installation is basically a system with several points of intensity (Sun-TV; rays-wires; plant; people).

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