– 01.10.2017
SEVER is the encrypted message that Maria do Carmo, shortly before her death in Lisbon, wrote on a note addressed to the protagonist of Antonio Tabucchi’s short novel Il gioco del rovescio (The Backwards Game, 1981). This novel also gives its title to an entire collection of short stories which “are connected by the same revelation: the fact that one day you realise, due to the unforeseeable circumstances of life, that a certain thing that was one way was also, simultaneously, another way,” as the author explains in his introduction.
SEVER brings together works by international artists from different generations, whose practices reflect on the idea of identity, of the individual or a collective, conceived as a visible element that is also shaped by its opposite side, its reverse, which always redraws the uncertain boundary between reality and fiction, variously under the pressure of dreams, desires, the will to transform, memory or aspiration. All the works have a relationship with the body in a more direct or evocative way: sometimes the body is present and represented, sometimes it is absent, but its traces are there, reflected in the works, embodied as objects.
– Sara de Chiara, curator
– 01.10.2017