Vello d’oro | Alice Palamenghi
By 1998 the digital revolution had come to fulfillment and its end was decreed. Twenty-three years later, the territory of The Internet was traversed in its entirety. Reaching the end of the Internet means there is nothing left to see, and there is no longer any link to visit. Once you have covered each of the ganglia of the network, you find yourself outside this connective swarm, without being able to re-enter it. So, who a little before was being in the world, then is a traveler. And his, an exclusion from history, more than the end of history. The shelter for the abdicator in his wandering is the Golden Fleece, capable of healing any wound.
Alice Palamenghi
March 23, 2020
London. First day of Lockdown.
Vello D’oro (Golden Fleece), 2020, is a video work by artist Alice Palamenghi.
Vello d’oro is a fantastic narration of the landscape of The Internet. Palamenghi reconstructs a mythology of the Net and its symbols, telling us about the journey of the digital revolution and retracing its iconic motifs, references. The ‘end of the Internet’ is narrated by the artist with epic tones as an exclusion from the world, an exclusion from history that occurs, however, within its narrative. The ancient Greek epic is the pivot on which the artist develops her research which she presents always through a digital formal outcome.
The perfect setting for her work is the vaporwave aesthetic with which the scenes that follow one another in the video at ever more pressing rhythms are constructed.
The Golden Fleece and its mythical healing properties is an image and at the same time a magical tool that has proved useful in this era marked by the covid-19 epidemic and which at the same time helps to cope with another emergency of our time, that of the shipwrecks of refugees on the Mediterranean coasts. The fleece offers shelter, protection, care. It is a sort of rescue blanket used to help the castaways, the survivors.
In Vello d’oro Palamenghi explores elements related to the narrative features of Western mythology which after a long process of translation and tradition have crystallized in the form that is now part of our cultural heritage. At the same time she applies these same narrative categories to the history of The Internet and along this, the technologies that have allowed its diffusion. Interesting for Palamenghi is the theme of error which, within the translation of language – both verbal and artistic – creates the discard that modifies the features of the work and completely renews it: the glitchy feature that defines its aesthetics, allows to formalize this attention to error and give life to new compositional and expressive canons.
Vello d’oro (2020)
Alice Palamenghi
Video 1080 x 1920 H.264
Loop
©the artist
