| Céline Condorelli | September 13 – October 26, 2013 |
Céline Condorelli is an artist who works with architecture, combining a number of approaches from developing structures for ‘supporting’ (the work of others, forms of political imaginary, existing and fictional realities) to broader enquiries into forms of commonality and present urgencies, resulting in projects and/or exhibitions merging installation, politics, fiction, display, public space, sound, and writing.
We just came to say No is a film installation which confronts and intermingles two separate histories of injustice, a plot taking place in fascist Italy is set against Charlemagne’s wars against the Muslims, and both are performed by puppets, who exchange the roles of stage and audience and intervene in each other’s stories to cheer on or disagree.
We just came to say No follows Silvestro on one screen, who beset by feelings of hopelessness, decides to travel to his native Sicily; he encounters a number of characters along the way, as a series of allegorical representations of the time. The play is an adaptation of Conversations in Sicily by Elio Vittorini, a novel written as a poetic allegory in order to bypass fierce censorship in the midst of an ‘abstract rage’ against of 1938 fascist Italy.
This puppet show has an audience on the other screen, amongst which puppets from the traditional Carolingian trilogy (which forms the basis of all Sicilian puppetry), play an unruly public, enacting a second play. Incensed by the seeming passivity of the characters on stage, by their failure to revolt against fascism, puppets in shining armour – who have much experience of popular revolt, warfare and injustice – mock and refuse this version of their future by calling for rebellion “Mora! Mora!” (Die! Die!)
Double play with puppets conceived by the artist and originally staged with puppeteers Fratelli Napoli in Modica, Sicily.