Title
From State To State
Publisher
Electa
Edited by
Diego Tonus
Texts by
Diego Tonus, Lorenzo Benedetti, Pietro Rigolo, Francesca Zanella
More Info at www.electa.it
2023
Italian – English
112 pages
Softcover, 17 × 24 cm
ISBN 9788892823365
This publication presents the work From State To State and its exhibition at CSAC – Study Centre and Communication Archive of the University of Parma, on the occasion of the “PAC2021 – Piano per l’Arte Contemporanea”, promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture.
From State To State is one of Diego Tonus’s most representative works, and one which highlights the importance of archiving, seen as a creative and indeed obsessive gesture in the artist’s practice, articulating an artistic production based on processuality and works put together over a long period of time.
Since 2006, the artist has collected tickets from all his journeys, whether by plane, bus, tram, subway, taxi, train or ship, etc. While on the one hand these tickets are a reminder of all the nomadic movements and dynamic situations of thought in which new ideas were born and then shared with the artistic community, on the other hand they constitute an archive that provides a record of all his movements, including expense (€), ecological impact (CO2 emitted), distances travelled (km), time invested (h) in travelling and a testimony of how individual movement may influence the collective environment, both a physical / natural environment and one of thought.
Precisely thanks to his commitment to the gesture of archiving, prolonged over time, and the vast group of accumulated objects, the work makes it possible to observe the tickets not only as graphic elements or souvenirs/fragments of memory, but as thought-triggering objects in relation to the cultural value they take on in a collective discourse of sharing experiences facilitated by travel.
The volume presents the exhibition From State To State, conceived by the artist for the spaces of the CSAC in the Abbey of Valserena. A show that allows the viewer to experience the installation of the work for the first time, along with the expandable-adaptable nature of the archive on display. For the viewer, the exhibition serves as the starting point for confrontation between the artist’s methods of investigation and those of the broader community of researchers, as well as the processes of transformation of the works and the role of the exhibition and exhibition design. The collaboration with the CSAC on the one hand provides Diego Tonus to undertake a spatial exploration of the paradoxical archive landscape evoked by the travel tickets in the exhibition inside the church and, on the other hand, a temporal exploration of the archives, interfacing with the works and the historical-cultural heritage to be found at the CSAC.
Heightening the reflection on themes such as the dimension of the journey, the critical vision of representation of places and territories, the nomadic dimension of the artwork and self-construction, a selection of artworks from the Archivio dal vivo (‘Living Archive’) are also presented, including works by: Archizoom Associati, Gabriele Basilico, Cini Boeri, Andrea Branzi, Alighiero Boetti, Luciano Fabro, Ignazio Gardella, Luigi Ghirri, Enzo Mari, Bruno Munari, Bob Noorda, Ettore Sottsass, Bruno Stefani, Pino Tovaglia, Franco Vaccari.
This selection is articulated in an exhibition itinerary that explores the various spatial visions of the archives. The rigour found in the monumental installation of From State To State – from the filing pouches to the transport boxes, to the extension of its data in the Olivetti Synthesis filing cabinets – thus compares with CSAC’s ordered and organised paths in the Archivio dal vivo, through works and visual documents that trigger connections, relations and expansions between archives of various kinds.