An ever-changing and permeable configuration of ideas, agencies and knowledge, Fronte Vacuo could be defined as a radical exercise in interdisciplinarity and collaboration. Composed of three artists who met in Berlin in 2014, it manifests the idea of a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. Margherita Pevere, Marco Donnarumma and Andrea Familari, each operating within distinct aesthetic registers and equipped with varied sets of skills, brought their diverse practices together in 2019, united by the need to “create something that would speak to the immense complexity of today’s crises (social, techno-capitalistic, ecological)”. They conceived Fronte Vacuo, from the Italian “fronte” denoting a military or political front, and “vacuo” as something vacuous, without contents, empty; a militant proposition for alternative artistic languages capable of responding and acting upon our anguished realities.

Defying boundaries between disciplines and infiltrating different contexts, Fronte Vacuo crosses over from new media art into dance and theatre, while absorbing elements from body art, bio art, video art and sound art. They create multisensory experiences and installations varying in scale and duration, incorporating emerging technologies, living organisms, sound and video. Each artist has their own expertise, but as they describe it, they are entangled with one another (…); it’s not like a puzzle where there is only one way of fitting the pieces together. Ideas mesh with one another; somebody may develop things further and then pass them on (…) We try to get the best out of each other’s skills by provoking our thoughts to collide in interesting ways.

Immersed in continuous experimentation and mutual activation, the artists find the essence of their project at this unstable point of friction. Further collaborators, working in disciplines ranging from stage design, wearable sculpture and computer science to cultural studies and architecture, continue to bring new elements to the works and their reiterations. No role, form, material or relation remains known and settled; instead, they are continuously composed and recomposed in pursuit of unpredictable interaction:

Our practice taught us to think ‘through’ the combination of various media. Each material – be it live sound and video, AI or water – has its own ‘agency’ and poetics. So, what we do is to magnify the intrinsic poetics of each material, and put them under a huge lens so that the tiniest feature becomes a world to immerse yourself in.

Η συνέχεια εδώ.