Round

Galleria GRAFFIO Bologna
Video-installation, 21′ — 1996

On one hand the « noble » art of boxing, on the other an equally noble precedent, even though assigned to such an elusive and fleeting protagonist of DADA as Arthur Cravan, who in 1916 in Madrid challenged the then heavy­weight champion of the world, and was inexorably knocked out in the first round…

Next, Fabris’s sharp and hard video, where he takes off the athlete’s and boxer’s suit and attacks the movie camera and the spectator in a challenge without direct response, which is meant to proceed in the physical time of a real « fight for an image ». In the same way the fragmentation and the dispersion of an identity referring to the cold iterative harshness of the video, relates not so much to the taste of defeat, as to the reassembly of the parts a living and pulsating body.

Extemporary impressions and disassembled fragments mark the « field » of a shared action which is meant to put it all together again, besides the simulacrum of a presentation directed at the innermost « self » to reassemble the scattered fragments of one’s self and our selves.

Roberto Daolio
March 1996