The Then About As Until is an artistic project hosted at Palazzo Forti, the historic home of Verona’s Galleria d’Arte Moderna, which is reopening to the public after its closure in 2015. A collaboration with Video Sound Art, it draws on the festival and production centre’s experience with breathing new life into places like schools, theatres, basements and swimming pools through exhibitions concentrated on the language of video.
The exhibition explores the relationship between text and image, starting from the verbal/visual experimentation of the 1960s, which led artists from across the globe to develop new visual forms of linguistic production. Drawing on the legacy of Futurist free-word compositions, Dadaist poetry and Lettrist and Surrealist collage, verbal/visual art nourished itself with multilingual and interdisciplinary dialogue. This project focuses in particular on exchange between Italian artists (Lucia Marcucci, Eugenio Miccini, Ketty La Rocca, Giuseppe Chiari) and Belgian ones (Alain Arias-Misson, Julien Blaine, Jean-François Bory, Paul De Vree). The Then About As Until uses rewriting and linguistic experimentation (in its deconstruction, displacement and spatialisation) to investigate and question contemporary existential and social paradigms.
In The Pure Necessity, David Claerbout appropriates characters and settings from the Disney film The Jungle Book, freeing them from all forms of language and anthropomorphic references, stripping them of their human faculties. Instead of speaking, singing and dancing, the animals go back to being bears, panthers and pythons, showing us a different way of listening, communicating and representing living beings.
The works on view include installations, videos and performances that question the linguistic frameworks that govern our perception of reality. Here, language transforms into possibilities for collective invention, redefining the very conditions of what we can think and share as social and existential experience.