Roberta Bertozzi interno 38

Oh, die Dummheit der Wissenschaft!
in Francesco Bocchini, Domino - Blumen - Falene
Text: Roberta Bertozzi - Photos: Dario Lasagni
Mel Kunsthandel, 2008

abstract

[...] Once upon a very short time, machines were innocent. There was once a time during which they had were only nourishing their own imagining proliferation, while outlining the system of nature with no intention of taking its place. A time in which they idealized nature’s perfection by imitating it. And even so, along with such optimism of technology, a diabolical grimace was already making its appearance, a desire for supremacy, an aspiration to disengage: the automatism of the Renaissance, robotics, humanoids were foretelling the system’s future autonomy, its future capacity to do without nature. Bocchini’s mechanisms seem to wink at these early stages of Renaissance engineering; they precisely do so through their extraordinary candour, their character of conclusiveness and visionary futility. And yet, they also carry within themselves the germ of discontent, unrest, an irresolvable tragedy. These are machines that have seen a dream transforming into a nightmare, work converting itself into exploitation, advantage into speculation, planning into surveillance, philanthropy into carnage. These devices show a two-faced appearance: they encompass, at once, a playful and carefree childhood of technology that lives along with the torment of its own ruthless maturity.

This is the parody of the industrial cycle, of iron and metallurgical artillery, of media and commercial vulgarity, a parody of the statistical index and social barbarity. But it is also a reliquary of waste, of the unabsorbed residue of the production chain, of a foreign body that, similarly to a virus, infects the hygienic and homogeneous cycle of seriality. Here there are rejected tin and steel plates, junk and remnants that suddenly become real, alone, unique. Their isolation from official production redeems them, by providing them with a halo of resentment, provocation, a feeling of quiet accusation in which a nobilitas, a supreme breakage, are stirring. Not only does this redemption invest in the devices’ material dimension, but it also extends to the discourse, because each mechanism carries a historical or biological matriculation number imprinted on its metallic case. One must not underestimate the importance of the inscriptions, of the alphabetical and numerical codes, and of the catalogues that are on these works: they are not calembour, puzzles or tricks of verbal estrangement. Each epitaph tells us the historical, physical and political reality it refers to: it represents a memory that has been liberated through the purity of the list, thanks to its incontestable evidence, a liberation from any possible ideological falsification. The chains of names and surnames, the zoological or botanical shelves, the semantic associations, all these stand for nothing but a way of nailing the story of thought to its museum-driven, criminal will. Objects are emptied of any cultural authority, of any pedagogical value, of any didactic consolation – atlases, synoptic tables, bestiaries similar to collections of human stupidity – oh, die Dummheit der Wissenschaft!