PARAPLUIE, the duo of Andrée Julikà Tavares and Gianluca Monnier (both of them born in 1971), is proposing HIMMEL + HÖLLE, whose title (Heaven + Hell) is a clear reference to a type of outdoor game played by children. The work is an installation on multiple planes and levels, where the artists like to ponder the perception of times present and of memory: children’s playfulness and the global interplay of political powers between impulses that are contextual before being conceptual.

The settings they devise cite the philosophy and sociology of how we live, since the representation and the meaning of the piece tend increasingly to nullify the work of art as an object phenomenon, the metaphor of an image, stripped bare of all social and political references. This, then, is the environmental context in which visitors find themselves, construct to the full that total locus, where the dialogue between observer and artist, between passive and active in the act of observing and of offering ourselves for observation, blends at levels that are more social and existential than artistic.

Text by Mario Casanova, 2022, translated by Pete Kercher