Exhibition · Cassina Projects · Milano
Cassina Projects is pleased to present Awaiting Climax, a group exhibition curated by Federico Montagna, bringing together works by Mattia Barbalaco, Nicolò Brezza, Edizioni Brigantino, Lucia Cristiani, Andrea Di Lorenzo and Marta Ravasi. The project investigates the space of intermediation and experimentation originating from the ever more sidereal distance between the human and non-human dimensions. At a historical moment when imagining a single ecosystem in harmony has become an increasingly utopian proposition, the individuality of the anthropic horizon—both singular and collective—struggles to open itself to the outside world through an equitable and mutually generative exchange. In the contemporary condition, this inability to decentre the self seems to repel every authentic bond, which should presuppose an encounter with the Other as an alterity that eludes the control of the Self, resists it, and can neither be possessed nor consumed—it is the ‘Eros in Agony’ theorised by philosopher Byung-Chul Han in his essay of the same title. This concerns not only anthropocentric thinking, but also extends to real relationships and connections that are becoming increasingly difficult to trace and consolidate in the present, rendering the future an inscrutable zone of shadow. The idea of equilibrium has itself become a hope to be pursued, paradoxically, within a condition of continual transformation. After all, speaking once again of nature, in ecology a state of absolute quiescence—the so-called climax—is by definition the endpoint of a process of succession, one that passes through turbulent, often dramatic phases of change before reaching stability. The works in the exhibition thus seek to suggest new and possible reconfigurations of these ambivalent relationships, reconsidering terms such as domesticity, habitat and landscape as fluid and mutable concepts. Edizioni Brigantino (Valentina Lucchetti & Canedicoda), working from the field of design and from a practice…