2023 L’era dei giganti - Alessandro Sambini

Alessandro Sambini

L’Era Dei Giganti

This Exhibition has been realised between May and July 2023 at the Galleria Michela Rizzo in Venice. The core of it was exactly this VR performance where you could engage into a conversation with a giant whose only reference and knowledge was every video from TikTok.

“It is already hard enough to understand what someone is saying.
Discussion is just an exercise in narcissism where everyone takes turns showing off.
Very quickly, you no longer have any idea what is being discussed.”

(Deleuze, Two regimes of madness, 380)

Giants are characterised by a fragile body. They have pushed onward, against gravity, like children on stilts experiencing the thrill of altitude -“look daddy, I’m so tall.” But their posture is shaky, just a short time before they eventually capitulate to the ground. And that end of giants is the entertainment given to those who wonder what it means to see things from up there, what it means to see everything from where no one else can observe, to be the only one. Fragile bodies that soon succumb to the weight their mass brings. Many giants have died young, much younger than you would expect from those who have already shown the ability to cross such a line of knowledge. From a giant you would expect nothing more than living far beyond us. The gods were giants. What exceeds us outlives us. But it’s the other way around here. Getting out of Earth’s gravity takes a lot of strength, and a giant releases this power constantly ending up being worn down by it. The giant goes to the circus, among the beasts, elephants and chatGpt.

The first problem triggered by the project is the reconsideration of one’s point of view, which through the apparent hyperbole, the magnification of our interlocutor, is strategically made to shift two or three dimensional planes.

The question that the viewer may do in the presence of the giant (prophet of an incredible variety of stories, of notions, of legends) is: ”Who asked you?””Did I ask you?””When and where would I have manifested the need to know?” But the question is not polemical. It is one of those that are aimed at getting an answer. It is a question that normally obviously falls on deaf ears.
And considering the question “”who” asked you”” we have the opportunity to try to inhabit that “who.” “Who?” It is a “who” that becomes universal, because TikTok stories are addressed to everyone, and simultaneously at least potentially to no one. We represent that “who.” For the time of the performance we are “who.” We are absence and we are presence. We are individual and we are universe.

And eventually the inherent question arises as to the universality of that question that is never heard, never declaimed. It has already been asked tho. Then we must conclude that we must be the subject or the infinite non-subject that has undoubtedly asked it. We maybe forgot about that moment. Because we still believe in the choice of the one who is speaking to us, the giant in front of us. We rely on the belief that what triggers the impulse to speak to us must necessarily be the result of a choice and in the first place of ITS need. We believe in its need to talk as the result of a solicitation.

The relationship between the user and the creator is divine and at the same time human. It is private but one-way. It is narcissism in its fullest form where the interlocutor disappears completely. God is narcissistic.