performance ritual and visual experimentation
2. December 2016, Atelier Montez, Rome – Within Gio Montez’s cycle of performative and research-based works. The event saw the artist hosting the group of performance artists known as the Barbari Sognanti (Dreaming Barbarians), led by Vitaldo Conte, in an encounter of high symbolic and poetic intensity, situated at the intersection of performance, ritual practice, and visual experimentation.
the dreaming barbarians
The practice of the Barbari Sognanti is grounded in a dancing and visionary poetics that draws upon a complex and stratified imaginary: from the esotericism of Aleister Crowley to Valentine de Saint-Point’s Futurist Manifesto of Lust, through the war hymns and D’Annunzian deliriums of the seizure of Fiume, and the erotic poetry of Julius Evola. What emerges is a decadent mysticism, a poetics of the “accursed,” articulated through the body, the voice, and the ritual traversal of urban and performative space.
a scenic and dynamic direction
Within this context of artistic “uproar,” Gio Montez intervenes with a scenic and dynamic direction, not aimed at control but at amplifying the narrative gestures of the performative collective. Imagination thus takes shape as a relational device in which the performance of others becomes living material for an authorial reflection on the status of the image, of documentation, and of the boundary between self and other.
imagination (lit. imaginazióne) n. f. [from the Latin imaginatio -onis].
1. A particular form of thought that does not follow fixed rules or logical connections, but presents itself as a free reproduction and elaboration of the content of a sensorial experience, linked to a specific emotional state and, often, oriented around a fixed theme; it can give rise to a dream-like activity (as in so-called “daydreams”), or to harmonious creations with artistic content (artistic i.), or even, with a mechanism that is linked to intuition, to conclusions rich in practical content; in a more general definition, the ability to form images, to elaborate them, develop them and even deform them, presenting itself in any case as a creative power […] a narrative, dramatic, or artistic work, in which things imagined by the artist are told or represented. Even the mind itself, insofar as it creates or evokes or associates images, whether or not corresponding to reality.
2. The act or activity of imagining.
3. The thing imagined itself.
the perceptual limbo of the imaginal
For this action, Gio Montez focuses on transforming video and photographic documentation into a genuine poetic instrument: images do not merely record the event, but are deformed, traversed, and reworked until they generate contents of the “imaginal,” situated within a perceptual limbo between his own work and that of other artists. Central to this process is the investigation of the “threshold”: the critical point at which individual authorship ends and that of the other begins.
capturing bodies in motion
Within Imagination, Gio Montez develops an experimental audiovisual documentation practice of Vitaldo Conte’s performance RITUAL EXTREME LOVE, realized through an “anti–darkroom,” which Conte himself would call “the cage”: an inhabitable, interactive installation capable of capturing dancing bodies in motion. The “cage” thus becomes a perceptual and conceptual device, a space in which the performative gesture is condensed and contained.
an other-than-self object
This concept would later prove fundamental to Gio Montez’s poetic research, oriented toward an investigation of the physical, cognitive, and perceptual limits of the Kantian “unattainable” object, transformed into a mental condition of the real within the other-than-self. From this intuition arose research into the imaginal and the possibilities of relational aesthetics in the poetic field, leading the artist toward the conception of the “in-existence of the object”. This theme was subsequently developed in numerous artistic experiments of the same period, including the documentary film IN EXISTENT and the project The Body with Wings at the Futurism & Co. gallery.
transformation of a performative corpus
The outcome of Imagination consists of a video documenting the event and a series of six photographs signed by Gio Montez, produced as unique editions. These works visually and poetically present the transformation of the performative corpus into an imaginal “cloud of smoke enclosed within a cage”: an object that exists solely by virtue of its context, and of the threshold that renders it perceptible.
Azione n°11 – Immaginazione
02/12/2016, Atelier Montez. Roma
Director: Gio Montez
Actors: Gio Montez, Vitaldo Conte, Violet’Or, Laura Grispigni, Laura Baldieri, Tiziana Pertoso, Helena Velena
Photo/Video: Gio Montez
