Flavio Palasciano bei New Jörg, Wien

Ausstellungstext:

Of gardens and castles and borders and playgrounds

Of gardens and castles and borders and playgrounds

Of gardens and castles and borders and playgrounds

The title of Flavio Palasciano’s exhibition contains many possible narratives. It leads the visitors’ thoughts towards a cluster of personal stories and memo- ries and it easily engages one to mix facts with ction. A holiday memory from spring 2015, Samos, Greece: Climbing up a narrow trail (a desire path) we look down onto the at blue surface of the coast. There are clothes oating back and forth, robes in several bright colours. Later that day, taking a refreshing swim at another small bay, we nd the washed up silver packaging of emergency drinking water, re ecting the burning sun. The Mycale Strait between the Aegean Island and Anatolia, Turkey is only 1.6 kilometres wide. Three-quarters of a year later and 3.000 kilometres further, the Swedish government decides to shut down the Öresund Bridge for Refugees. The bridge is 4.8 kilometres long and conquers the strait between Denmark and Sweden. For a brief moment people fear the Baltic to become the new Mediterranean Sea. An obscure twist in various respects.

Of gardens and castles and borders and playgrounds

Of gardens and castles and borders and playgrounds

Of gardens and castles and borders and playgrounds

With irony, Flavio Palasciano stages places of longing, places of blurred memory that indicate a bright future. Like in a theatre with minimal means, he composes cheap materials together with tourists’ leftovers and lucky-charms, creating a setting of recognition and alienation, hope and despair simultaneously. The warm lighting attracts visitors, like the talisman structures, bringing them closer towards their sharp and rough surfaces (think of angler- shes). In the European south, sometimes people decorate their garden walls with colourful glass shards, a welcoming gesture. Hot wax has been thrown into cold water, a forecasting of a mystic future, a prediction of personal fate. They decorate (storm) bent pipes. In the other room, Puglia's rocky shores appear as lunar landscapes, idyllic by day, empty by night. Some other tubes are smeared with sticky glue paste, wrapped up with garden mesh, to keep them in check.

Of gardens and castles and borders and playgrounds

Of gardens and castles and borders and playgrounds

Of gardens and castles and borders and playgrounds

Tender interdependencies sprout between the pieces, characterised by indications of protection and cohesion. But simultaneously a kind of violence and aggression evolves that speaks of a constant fear, a mistrust and suspicion towards both, the inside and the outside, the self and the other. The works on view operate along the break between idealisation and painful realisation. Holidays, vacation, free time spent at special places, promises relief from all kinds of stress and responsibility. But put in perspective, they might just be a temporary relocation within the framework of social and personal reality.

- Pia Remmers