Tris Vonna-Michell
GAMeC, Bergamo, Italy
Tris Vonna-Michell, 'Studio A: Monumental Detours / Insignificant Fixtures' (2008-ongoing). Courtesy of the artist; Cabinet, London and T293, Naples. Photograph: Jacopo Menzani
On entering Tris Vonna-Michell’s exhibition ‘Studio A: Monumental Detours / Insignificant Fixtures’, viewers find themselves enveloped within a semi-darkness pierced by fleeting shafts of light, mechanical noises and a variety of indistinct voices. A labyrinth of wheel-mounted moveable walls, punctuated by small windows, generates a series of visual screens. The walls are placed so as to create corners behind which are hidden various objects, items of furniture and obsolete equipment. A number of slide projectors, set up to run slightly out of sync, project onto the walls a series of images taken in post-industrial areas of Detroit; the images are accompanied by the whirring of turntables and cassette players emitting unfathomable ambient sound, which was also recorded in the city, and the voice of the artist, who recorded the tale of his daily wanderings onto a 33rpm vinyl disc.
Reminiscent of a film set, the installation is an architectural complex of visual, physical and acoustic elements that provides a temporal arena for the interweaving of stories, memories and images created by the artist between 2007 and 2009 in the city of Fordism. Vonna-Michell takes Detroit – his father’s hometown, and a symbol of the faded American dream – as the springboard not only for a personal narrative but also for a broader reflection on a city that has gone from being an icon of capitalism to being an emblem of social and economic decline. The black and white photographs of industrial wastelands and the dark imagery of the Detroit-set sci-fi film Robocop (1987), clips of which were shown on a suspended screen in the second room of the gallery, depict a melancholy reality wreathed in fantasy, personal reflections and cinematic fictions.
A work in progress, ‘Studio A…’ (2008-ongoing) was first presented at the Berlin Biennial in 2008, and then at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit in 2009. In its latest incarnation at GAMeC, curated by Alessandro Rabottini, the piece engages new levels of meaning – due in large part to the addition of sonic elements, which define not only the space but also the viewer’s perception of time.
Reflecting on the awareness of being in relation to memory, Vonna-Michell proposes a new way of occupying time and space – one that is more concerned with the psychological – in which autobiographical experience and collective history, both real and imaginary, unite in a kind of impossibly expanded cinema. Vonna-Michell continues to develop his practice by elaborating an original process-based approach that is specific to the props he employs (the slide projector, the record-player, the cassette player), the obsolescence of which has enabled him to achieve a linguistic reinvention of performance practice.
Translated by Ros Furness
Marinella Paderni
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