Signs and symptoms. GONG: recall nature

To recall means to bring to mind and usually refers to a time, a memory or a person. In the popular context, re-enactments are activities with which the intention is to re-propose events or situations from past eras. In reference to mediumistic practices, reenactment means bringing someone back from the afterlife.

This is often done to make us tell something about our future as if past and future have much more in common than we think. Each re-enactment produces a suspended time that disturbs us to the extent that it forces us to escape from the linearity of history as well as our everyday life. In this suspended time we can observe ourselves from the outside, reflect on the choices to be made and perhaps understand something more about what we will be.

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Following this reasoning, recalling nature can be a useful exercise to acquire awareness of our role in relation to the environment in which we live. It can constitute the precondition for an assumption of responsibility that passes through the construction of a new imaginary. We are now saturated with ideological images of a hypothetical golden age in which we lived as men with full respect for nature, as well as visions of a catastrophic future in which natural resources are now unavailable.

All we have to do is recall a suspended and inconsistent time and space that can restore the short circuit of the ecological crisis we are experiencing in which present and past, natural and artificial, reality and representation are confused. Gong. Recalling nature is an attempt to give shape to this thought, one of its possible expressions.

Created by Studio GISTO – a studio with attention to context, resources, sustainability of materials and circular development processes – the project reuses devices usually used for historical re-enactments as scenic and symbolic objects. They are urban installations and scenography that propose a shift in perspective capable of translating the contradictions of our relationship with nature into an immersive environment that invites us to observe places with an attentive gaze and a renewed sensitivity.

Installed on the occasion of Affluenze, Fermignano’s program for Pesaro Capital of Culture 2024, the project includes a series of images created by SS16 which, expanding the concept of a synthetic world in which reality and fiction merge, give substance to an atmosphere suspended in whose hypothetical inhabitants rediscover contact with water and the river, source of life and sustenance; an imaginary multitude taking part in a sort of secular baptism.

The images, created with the help of artificial intelligence, could be memories from the past as well as snapshots from a near future, the story of a possible catastrophe or a collective rebirth. A selection of the prompts used to create the images on display, printed in large dimensions, it is an invitation to imagine, in the awareness that imagination itself must be questioned to overcome the limits of an anthropocentric vision.