Spazio d’art Morel, Lugano, 28 June – 20 July 2017 (solo show)
Il popolo delle visiere (visor folks) is an installation showing a collection of caps spanning almost thirty years of trends, mostly linked to a Ticino reality. Included are caps produced from the 90’s to the present day, from bars and supermarkets in Ticino but also from the USA, showing an emergence of globalisation.
The choice to present the installation as a sort of anthropological exhibition creates a distance and supposes a parallel society which places caps as a central iconography to present itself and producing sculptures to stand this object.
This position stemmed from a Foucault theory on the difficulty for Western people to make their own anthropology and how to deal with creating an exterior gaze to see elements from our community. Presenting caps which are linked to a local reality and which are also part of a fictional community produces an effect of distance for the audience, who may see this collection with a historical point of view while feeling the local appropriation of this typical American outfit.
To make clearer the differentiation to our reality, during the opening only classical music was played and the professional singer Claire Michel de Haas performed a few pieces of contemporary vocalist composers. Placing this kind of sound produced a contrast with the usual programme of Morel Art Space who usually have a large rock and contemporary pop music programme. Changing the habits of sound linked with baseball caps and mixing it with « savant composition » was also on purpose in order to create a gap with our usual perception of this object.
Furtherreflections on the exhibition are written by Elisa Rusca and can be found at the bottom of the page. Below are also pictures of the installation and the vocal performance during the opening.
