GREETINGS FROM COMMONVILLE at NAC • NOVEGRO ARTE CONTEMPORANEA 2019
MILANO • PARCO ESPOSIZIONI DI NOVEGRO • 10 11 12 maggio 2019
GREETINGS FROM COMMONVILLE • a trans-artistic project conceived by LUCIEN MOREAU
Commonville is a city. Or rather, a "Prototype Community of Tomorrow", although it belongs to an indefinite and, at times, impossible past. It seems to be located in the Standardshire prefecture and that it existed in the intermediate period between the decline of the Monochrome and the rise of the Technicolor. This, at least, tells the extraordinary documents found by chance in an old shoe box; an unbelievable box, full of postcards that collect, in the form of images and texts, the testimony of an anonymous traveler, engaged in a diplomatic expedition. Only a handful of elements have come of him, of the mysterious traveler: a grainy photograph depicting him against the light, an enameled pin bearing the words "Educational Travel" on the image of a rising sun crossed by a swallow in flight, some peculiar personal effects and the pseudonym with which he signs each postcard: Vogel.
Of the unusual city of Commonville it is possible to guess by reading between the lines of the traveler, in an attempt to reconstruct the characteristics of this unsettling non-place. What emerges is the portrait, in some ways paradoxical, of a utopian community destined not to survive: an island of bureaucratic rigidity mixed with the psychedelic flavor of the dream, populated by a phosphoric enclave of cultures, ethnic groups and visions; an urban core of a modernist style, dominated by brutal metabolist architecture and overlooking a metaphysical territory, of which the postcards of our Vogel show some views.
Commonville sums up the loss of every point of reference. Everything is possible in Commonville. In Commonville transcendence becomes the art of everyday life. In Commonville, a past that never happened coexists with an unattainable future. Commonville is the capital of the "if", the empire of the "but", the realm of "may be". From the found documents it is possible to understand how the city of Commonville belongs to a surreal, alternative, and uchronic dimension. The anthropic geography of Commonville, apparently engaged in a struggle for the distillation of color, seems to come from everything in order to move towards the horizon of the whole, which is then nothing.
"Greetings from Commonville" is a trans-artistic experiment conceived by Lucien Moreau in the form of a historical fake, belonging to a retro-futuristic dimension. The narration is accompanied by detailed digital collages, in which common photographs from every age, every place and every cultural context are reworked. It is important to underline the fundamental reference to the history of modernist, functionalist, metabolist and brutalist architecture, which constitutes the fulcrum of the urban personality of Commonville and its creator. Inhabited and inhabitants, who determine each other. Is the form of architecture determining the shape of the person who lives it or, rather, the opposite? Identity, dream, model, function, color, memory, loss, utopia are just some of the keywords that describe this ethnography of the paradox.
Exhibition curated by Studio Archeo900 at NAC Novegro Arte Contemporanea 2019 • Milano
