Alfredo Pirri: RWD – FWD

The RWD and FWD (“rewind” and “forward”) buttons will always be remembered with nostalgia by the generation that lived through the transition from analogue to digital. Re-listening to or re-seeing what has already passed and then, at the mere press of a button, projecting oneself into the future has enabled us to feel powerful ahead of our time, elevating this simple action to a metaphor for the unique sense of omnipotence, lightheartedness and modernity that distinguished the 1980s.

Opening the drawers, boxes and cupboards of the Pirri Studio-Archives, I unexpectedly found myself reliving my childhood experience of analogue and manual time travel, triggered by the action of pressing those two magic buttons: RWD and FWD. Not only does the material conserved by the artist – illustrating his artistic modus operandi and testimony to a past inscribed in Italian cultural history – take our thoughts back in time, it also allows us to veer towards a time yet to come, opening up a past that always hints at a potential future. The sketches, workbooks, models and photographs speak of a creative moment in the past but form a bridge to a potential future action, underlining the intellectual and stylistic consistency that distinguishes the artist’s wide-ranging work, not only in the visual arts but also in theatre, architecture and graphic design, all inseparable disciplines in constant dialogue in Pirri’s poetic. After all, as Jacques Derrida taught us in Archive Fever (1995), despite a gaze that is seemingly looking back, the archive is always dominated by a sense of the future, a desire for eternity that reaches beyond death.

  Seen as a place showcasing the transient nature of things, exposed to both memory and, potentially, oblivion, one of the main characteristics of archives is that they are experienced as a place that accumulates, retrieves and conserves historical knowledge and memory forms. Dutifully created by public institutions but, first and foremost, by the will of individuals and groups, the archive differs from the collection or library in that it constitutes a depository or ordered system of documents and testimonies, both verbal and visual, that forms the base for constructing history. According to Foucault, the archive governs the said and the unsaid, the recorded and the omitted, and the aim of the knowledge archaeologist is to learn about the past via its material remainders, retrieving and reconstructing the archive to show how it can shape the construction of a historical meaning.

“RWD – FWD” proposes a version of the archive that is slightly different from the norm, claiming the existence of variations on the term “testimony”. The archive generously opened and provided by Alfredo Pirri declares itself as an attempt to collect – as fully as possible – and conserve a past, albeit in idiosyncratic order and with unexpected and fragmentary material, an inevitable part of a life and a creative process. The archive here is neither an accumulation nor a scientific and objective rendering of materials but a theatre of the memory where several characters pursue one another and interweave on stage, revealing their identities past and present. “RWD – FWD” takes the form of an open and participatory narrative script, conducting spectators through the meanders of 35 years of Italian creative history via the voice of an artist who is active every day. It is archaeology that records personal times, movements and stories inscribed within a more universal cosmology. Surprising and meticulous, the archive provides an understanding of key stages in the artist’s development while, at the same time, casting light on certain moments in Italy’s artistic path. The, often concerted, story narrated by the Pirri Archive is the product of joint efforts, shared opinions, partnerships and debates.

A flow, a circular movement, like a puff of air, recurs in and invades Alfredo Pirri’s work, and is the leitmotiv of the exhibition. This is what shaped his new work, Quello che avanza, conceived and developed by the artist over the last three months at the Nomas Foundation, which momentarily ceased being purely an exhibition space and was used as a workshop, a hotbed of creation. This work marks the end point of “RWD – FWD” yet projects itself towards the next stage of I pesci non portano fucili, a project that looks back at Alfredo Pirri’s complex and structured research. The title Quello che avanza seems to reference both what remains and what is moving forward, outlining a past and prefiguring a future. It continues the research into light and colour that has always distinguished Alfredo Pirri’s oeuvre. Comprising 144 prints, this work is the fruit of research into the cyanotype technique which makes it possible to create large-format off-camera photo prints featuring intense shades of blue. Of these, 130 sheets record the phases of a work process and what it leaves behind; the other 14 are products of a unique procedure using the direct application of feathers to sheets prepared with chemical substances and then exposed to UV rays. The result – exhibited in one of the two rooms at the Nomas Foundation – is an enveloping environment of great visual and emotional impact. The neutral and white cube of the Foundation was turned into an immersive space, a place of meditation, inhabited by forms, sometime evocative of vegetable ones, and linking up to the work of the botanist Anna Atkins, a pioneer in the study of flora using cyanotype and author of Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions.

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25 January 2017
Alfredo Pirri. RWD – FWD
One Day Exhibition
Curator: Ilaria Gianni
Studio Pirri @ Nomas Foundation
viale Somalia 33, Rome