Signs and symptoms. Blowing up the meaning

Is called AUTONOMIARTEPOVERARCHIZOOMEMPHISUPERSTUDIOPERAISMO and you can visit it until February 18th at the Macro Museum in Rome the installation of the Dutch graphic studio Experimental Jetset. Forty-four jagged surfaces are arranged in disorder around the room like fragments of meteorites, remnants of three-dimensional typographical codes in the Experimental Jetset installation at the Macro Museum in Rome.

They are the remains of what they define as a semiotic explosion whose trigger occurs from the clash of two references: the mysterious neon logo that appears in a scene of Blow-Up by Antonioni in 1966 and the deconstruction of the hammer and sickle symbol carried out by Enzo Mari in various works between 1954 and 1977. Where in Antonioni the insignificant sign acquires meaning as a narrative element, an object capable of triggering actions and modifying relationships , in Mari’s operation the symbol of the hammer and sickle loses its highly ideological meaning as the result of a series of purely formal operations.

photo ">

The what no longer matters, what matters and the eminently political action can only start from here, from work on the forms and ways of expression. From this awareness, which is at the center of the work of the Dutch collective, as well as of the radical Italian cultural sphere defined in the Sixties and Seventies, the action of Experimental Jetset begins which re-evaluates the potential of the sign, making it once again indeterminate, a piece of debris which no longer has any function other than that of being new material available to those who want and know how to use it. In a context saturated with symbols, in which the only effective communication stratagem seems to be metaphor, communication now seems like a silent word, emptied redundancy, amplification of any meaning.

Reopening the processes of construction and mediation of meaning is a necessary assumption of responsibility not only for professionals. On the other hand, this is what our cities are made of: insignificant symbols and fragments of lost symbols scattered everywhere in which, and through which, we build our collective existences. From this perspective, writing and space have a lot in common as Lettrists and Situationists had already understood since the early 1940s.

Graphics is not just an interface that defines the way we relate to the world, but it is itself the world, equipped with its own depth, tangible material characteristics, temporality and elements of randomness. Talking about “graphic events ” – as James Dyer and Nick Deakin say in their Graphic Events: A Realist Account of Graphic Design – graphic facts, rather than graphic design, allows us to reconsider the way in which signs acquire meaning and modify it based on the context and the networks of human and non-human actors that pass through them.

The Experimental Jetset exhibition seems to take on this awareness, placing at the center of the discussion what no longer has or does not yet have meaning. If the lesson of Antonioni and Mari today seems to have materialized in the symbolic impermanence that distinguishes our semiotic universes, this does not, however, produce any imaginative liberation. Symbols have become hyper realities in which it is easy to immerse oneself, but which is increasingly difficult to understand. Going back to designing signs without underestimating the importance of what is unpredictable and therefore unplannable seems to be the only way for the life of signs as well as for ours.