Exact dates are unknown. Nonetheless, it is probable that history’s lone typedrawing machine, the Japanese born and marketed Imperial Typepicter, inhabited the 1910s. After all, its sole print advertisement speaks in the graphic idiom of that pivotal Japanese decade. Its copy, orderly and Ming-faced, bears the stolidness of Meiji. Whereas small Gothic type, sitting just below the keyboard, sounding the chitter chatter of its operation, beckons Taishō with its buoyant modernism. At top, a typedrawn… [read more »]
Basic Zone
The definition of the basic is constantly evolving, as the standards one uses to identify the normal changes radically with the coming of each new generation. When looking at ourselves in the mirror, one can’t help but to compare what is seen to the tired, surgically reconstructed faces of reality television stars or the technological mishaps and mistakes of the celebrities we love to hate. The internet takes this duality a step further, as it simultaneously supplies us with a “freed” space to become our own, while dictating faster than ever a global encyclopedia of truly popular culture. The imagined community is hyperreal, and the people have finally spoken.
In Basic Zone, Alessandro Bava curates a space in which the tools at hand in this digital era are brought together to create a new biography for the collective ‘self’. Featuring work from artists Juliette Bonneviot, Dena Yago, Ilja Karilampi, Marlie Mul, and Bernadette Corporation, Basic Zone “is a place of resistance, a way out from the slavery of creativity, a place for happy mediocrity.”
BASIC ZONE | 13 February – 16 April
Piazza dei Martiri, 58
Napoli, Italia 80121
