Dimora Artica presents Fiordiluna, a solo exhibition by Paolo Brambilla (Lecco, 1990). In this project the artist explores the act of telling, between fiction and the real world, creating a metanarrative environment inspired by the forms of fantastic literature.
The proliferation of methods manipulating reality pushes us today into a hybrid dimension, a world where the experience of reality can not be separated from the interweaving of narratives that constantly reshape its features.
Contemporaneity appeares as a fluid and stable process, open to an infinite number of potential interpretations and at the same time firmly anchored to narrative structures repeating themselves as overlapping patterns. The contents that form collective imagination are like fragments of a single story that repeats relentlessly, in which the world is told and self-generating at the same time.
The cyclicity of cultural processes inspires the research of Paolo Brambilla. At Dimora Artica he examines the very act of telling, creating a metanarrative environment that is a story that speaks of other stories. Brambilla considers narrative as a dimension without space or time, whose history, therefore, never ends. However, it makes use of canons, rules and stigmas that prevent its order from being undermined and that act as a link between the reality of the world and the fiction of the story.
Reflecting on the modalities of writing proper to the speculative narrative, and in particular re-reading The NeverEnding Story, Michael Ende's fantastic novel published in 1979, Paolo Brambilla develops enigmatic fragments that, like magic symbols, connect imagination and reality, intertwining the timelessness of the fantastic dimension at the time of biological life. Fiordiluna is the name that Bastian, unconscious protagonist of the novel, gives to the Empress of Fantàsia to save her from Nothing, thus becoming aware of the creative power of her imagination. Enigmatic figure of Ende's novel and the subsequent film version of Wolfgang Petersen, the Empress exists only thanks to the name given to her. Her body is an entity of ageless light, a phantasmata made by humans’ creative imaginary.
At Dimora Artica Brambilla takes inspiration from the novel recreating the same diaphanous atmosphere, transforming the space into a lunar light scenario in which shapes with a changing metallic color, changing reflections and mysterious symbolic values come to life. Each element shows itself as an open narrative element, a fragment to be completed and from which a new story can be developed.
A carpet invites you to stop near a flame as a moment for sharing stories, among objects that simulate other materials combining seduction and deception, highlighting the illusory value of the environment in which spectators are immersed. Space and time are interconnected as an Uroboro, an ancient symbol that in The NeverEnding Story has the form of an amulet called Auryn, in an infinite pattern suggesting the creative potentialities of imagination.