attraverso diverse temporalità. Ossessionato
dall’urlo di Godzilla fin dalla sua infanzia,
Aceto decide di ricrearlo da solo. Tra le scul-
ture del museo raffiguranti scene cristiane o
di battaglie, il suono del mostro rimbomba
nelle ossa dei bronzi e dei marmi.
Per il suo ultimo progetto, Endemisms, Al-
fredo Aceto re-interpreta il film Duel (1971)
di Steven Spielberg tramite sculture urbane,
mobili, video e una serie di acquarelli. Per la
prima volta, l’artista utilizza l’immagine in
movimento per continuare la sua epica ed il-
limitata mitologia.
T h e K n I g h T,
T h e a l I e n ,
T h e a l l I a n C e
( A g u i d e
f o r t i m e - t r a v e l )
There’s a kind of child who doesn’t
get so easily satisfied by the stories that are
given to them. Alfredo Aceto must have been
one of them. And trying to imagine what his
relationship to classic childhood narrative
was is not that uncanny, since most of his ge-
stures take that stage of his life as a point of
departure. More precisely, they exploit parti-
cular details that became, with time, obses-
sions: we’re talking about Sophie Calle, Pri-
pyat, Whales, Godzilla, or cars (and
specifically some models). Those are the com-
ponents of a cosmology that the artist is per-
manently reconfiguring for every project, buil-
ding up a world full of symbols and events,
where the timeline is unclear – meaning non-
linear.
The timeline – more than time itself – is pre-
cisely Alfredo Aceto’s primary obsession. Con-
cerned with the way stories are narrated, his
exhibitions are always finding a way to tell a
story without telling one. The first missing
element being characters. The human is never
present in the artist’s work, but always sug-
gested. That state of absence of any identifia-
ble characters doesn’t mean there’s no one.
Like Pripyat-the-now-ghost-town, his works
are full of traces. The human presence can
be tracked, but seems to escape. This mani-
fests itself in Aceto’s gestures, which often
have the particularity to be undetectable, his
work reaching a state of quasi-readymades
(if reaching is the right word?).
This was already the case for most of of his
early works. Take the clocks series, pieces
that are made out of a wall clock which is not
running. Their heavy shiny frames show the
impact of bullets whose origin is unclear: is
the artist responsible for the shots? The story
surrounding them wants us to believe some-
thing else. The artist recalls, talking about
them, that passage of Walter Benjamin’s On
the concept of history (1940), recounting the
French Revolution:
”During the evening of the first skirmishes,
it turned out that the clock-towers were shot
at independently and simultaneously in se-
veral places in Paris.”
Harking back to this anecdote, Alfredo Aceto
replaces the work in another time-frame. Ho-
wever, the temporal tensions are pushed to
their extreme: the clocks used for this series
also have a story – they are Aldo Rossi’s clocks,
and, more precisely, the enlargement of the
original Momento design Aldo Rossi created
for the first Alessi’s wristwatch. The clash bet-
ween the product, the history of this very pro-
duct, and the violent intervention arising from
a historical event blurs the lines between the
author, the maker and the artist.
Even in the pictures Alfredo Aceto produces,
his intervention can be questioned. Subver-
ting the classic idea of style, the artist often
borrows codes to different genres to draw and
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