• Lorenzo Manenti
  • 1 new message - performance
Curated by:
  • Elisa Genna
  • Vittorio Urbani
San Ludovico Oratory:
  • Dorsoduro, 2552 (Calle dei Vecchi) - Venezia
  • Waterbus n.6, 2, San Basilio stop

On the occasion of the finissage of Lorenzo Manenti's solo show La dignità prima del pane at the oratorio di San Ludovico, Nuova Icona is glad to present the performance 1 new message.

Extract of the interview Lorenzo Manenti had with Nuova Icona in November 2013:

This performance represent for me an opportunity to end a work whose gestation turned out to be very complicated. The center of gravity of this final moment will not be the Arab Spring with its hopes and its peculiarities, but the perception we have of it in our country through the media. In particular, I have done my own personal analysis focusing on Syrian issue. The Syrian civil war reappeared in all the newspapers and TV news because of the thousands of victims of chemical gases. It filled me with indignation since in Syria they have been fighting and dying for over two years; there are more than 100,000 (one hundred thousand) deaths and millions evacuated people, and the media deal with it only in the most resounding moment, probably due to mere needs of audience.
After only few weeks Syria came back again in silence, forgotten! Yet they are still fighting every day... For few weeks I've done a small gesture everyday, posting on my Facebook profile videos shot by the people who live in the war, filming it with their mobile phones. On Youtube you can find thousands of them. It does not matter if they are realized by soldiers loyal to the regime, by the rebels who still have a high ideal of a democratic Syria, by gangs of organized criminals or by innocent citizens: what matters to me is to focus attention, in my own small way, on what is happening there everyday, while leaders and Western public opinion seem to have stopped worrying after Assad's promise to deliver his chemical gases. Those videos are often very violent , to the limit of endurance, rough, and shotted in low quality, but it's actually live, unfiltered, without interpretations, cuts and adjustments. Apart from rare cases, the reaction of my " friends" on Facebook is total indifference. Or that's they way I interpreted it. Indifference will be the focus of the performance. That's everything you need to know.