99
informing them about the material plane,
and weave topological networks which are
hardly speculative, residing in the reality of
a connected world. This connected world is
not the one often superficially used as the
only paradigm to explain contemporaneity,
but a world that was connected well before
the Internet: Invernomuto reminds us about
history, often official to the extent that it is
obscured, one of the motors of colonization,
first creating interference, graft, and exchan-
ges between its many individual histories,
and in fact generating micronarratives that
can be recounted.
These histories (the official one and the mi-
nor ones) coincide in an exasperated way in
the monument which has always played a
central role in the practice of Invernomuto,
deconstructing the rhetoric with a critical
eye that uncovers its symbolic weight. Finally,
in the same way and even more, there is the
body (Malù, lo stereotipo della Venere nera
in Italia, 2015 and Bones, 2015) to be the re-
pository of these stories, to be its living mo-
nument: to this body is given a voice; it is
enabled to express in a problematic way its
complexity as a trait of identity edification,
outside of any moral and Manichean rhetoric
that is behind every colonial view of the
world.
The artistic practice of Invernomuto opens
the dizzying possibility of connection between
the reality to us nearby and those more di-
stant in time and space, looking through la-
yers of individual and collective history, une-
arthing the hidden power dynamics behind
phenomena that seem neutral at first sight:
the best possible portal for a world you want
to understand, that still is not traveling faster
than the speed of light.
Mattia Cappelletti
It is thus that a word, negus, uttered by the
inhabitants of their city of Vernasca near
Piacenza, initiated a journey that took them
in Ethiopia and Jamaica (Negus, 2013-2016),
exploring the connections that the official
history had been silent about, but that their
extreme curiosity as artists reactivated; in
fact, they built a new wormhole – in the form
of a triangle. The attention of the artists to
the vernacular quality of the story, as well
as the dynamics of power that make this
story somehow less than the “official” one,
they take to the streets as little jokes, a coun-
ter-history still to be written.
This sensitivity to the story, which is not
translated into the passive role of the recei-
ver, or the documentary fly on the wall, in-
stead sensitizes Invernomuto to its role wi-
thin the narrative; the production of the
artists is always elliptical and never self-suf-
ficient: it’s the narration that makes it, that
fills in the gaps.
The negation of self-containment and inde-
pendence in the work, in addition to defining
the attitude of a generation—theirs—of ar-
tists (though one finds few equals in Italy
that so substantially apply themselves to
their practice), is an inherent characteristic
of their favorite medium, the moving image,
taken in an expansive field.
The result of their (real) travels through the
portals opened by words and symbols, is not
only on film—although they play with the
representation itself on the liminal plane
between documentation and staging—but
the creation of a world that flows from it,
with excess. It is thus that in installations
and sculptures the artists can treat symbols,
the aesthetic languages of counter-history
