Enrico Pozzobon
Enrico Pozzobon delves into audiovisual creations, oscillating between the mundane and the sublime, between jest and poetry. He exaggerates the fragmented nature of today's hypermediated condition to bring to the foreground the spectacle driving contemporary society.
What fascinates you about audiovisual art?
I am fascinated by audiovisual art, just as I am fascinated by painting, writing, and performance. We currently live in a time of great fluidity, where everything can transcend into something else and barriers are constantly melting away. It is undeniable that we live in a highly audiovisual society, so creating audiovisual art has become an essential means to approach and deconstruct the media landscape in which we exist.
Today's hypermediated condition is rooted mainly in the audiovisual realm.
Our society is primarily spectacular, yet surprisingly, the spectacle has never been thoroughly explored in writing. But let's set sarcasm aside for now. We are transitioning from a society centered around writing to one that is predominantly audiovisual. This implies that not only entertainment, but also knowledge, is now largely conveyed through audiovisual means. We seem to prefer edutainment over traditional education, perhaps because we have become accustomed to voice narrations and imagery before the written word. It's all a matter of habit, of course. However, this shift is not without its challenges. For instance, much of the knowledge and information we acquire today is filtered and fragmented by attention economy politics, which prioritize monetization and commercial interests. Consequently, quantity often takes precedence over quality. This may appear trivial, but we are undeniably immersed in a society that places consumption at its core.
What are you exploring through your art?
Most of the things I do involve deconstructing established myths about technologies: self technologies, sight technologies, attention technologies, etc. Every technology is a tool of power, and most power is highly addictive. This doesn't necessarily mean that power is always negative, but we always need consent and knowledge to understand what is truly happening in the room.
How do you approach the mise-en-scène of a video work in a space?
I tend to prefer a very subtle approach. I like to refer back to everyday objects and try to create a subtle relationship, a subtle connection, a dialogue between the video and its placement in the space. It's not a complete spillage out of the screen, but more of a contamination, a real hybridization of these two elements. Also, I don't really like things that are finished. I appreciate the undefined, the fragmented, the unconcluded. For example, the installation of Untitled Machine, which was exhibited at Studio Home Awareness, changed many times. Firstly, the video was projected onto wires hanging from the ceiling, and so the video was piercing the wires: someone could literally enter the video but in a physical way. Later the video was projected on a television, and the trampoline wires changed their function and became a sort of wall tent. The trampoline became a barrier for a clear vision and also ingrained this voyeuristic process of seeing from behind a tent. This added mystery and declared that you needed to make a simple but very difficult gesture to see the video - move the threads, temporarily or not. Once, a girl came and put most of the wires behind the television; it was such a revolutionary gesture in the installation ecosystem. I loved that.
What are you working on at the moment?
Right now I’m working on a lecture performance and an audio installation, which are two different spinoffs of the Untitled Machine project. The performance and the audio installation, like the video, are based on this series of writings I wrote in the last couple of months, in which poetry, stream of consciousness, and prose are mixed in one literary genre. The topic is the concept of the subject as a black box compost, who is undefinable for definition, who is lost in the indistinction. The discourse is grounded in the speech poetry culture and sees me as a lonely narrator dispersed in a schizophrenic flow of images. You know, images flow, words flow, sounds flow in a big cauldron called indistinction, and no end seems to come. The audio installation, instead, is an eight-speaker installation in a very tiny room that creates this compost of electrical voices lost in the reverb of the room, giving a sense of disorientation to the spectator.
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