Manifesta7 - Principle Hope

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The Last Desire, (Opening), 2008, Inkjet print on blueback paper on billboard, 460 x 230 cm

The Last Desire, (15 Days after), 2008, Inkjet print on blueback paper on billboard, 460 x 230 cm

The Last Desire, (30 Days after), 2008, Inkjet print on blueback paper on billboard, 460 x 230 cm

The Last Desire, (45 Days after), 2008, Inkjet print on blueback paper on billboard, 460 x 230 cm

The Last Desire, (60 Days after), 2008, Inkjet print on blueback paper on billboard, 460 x 230 cm

The Last Desire, (75 Days after), 2008, Inkjet print on blueback paper on billboard, 460 x 230 cm

The Last Desire, (90 Days after), 2008, Inkjet print on blueback paper on billboard, 460 x 230 cm

The Reconstruction of The Trephor Tower, 2008, 4 framed photographs, each 70 x 100 cm, made with Gianni Pettena

Manifesta7 – Principle Hope

Rovereto, 19 Jul 2008 - 02 Nov 2008

 

For Riccardo Previdi the artistic act is a volcanic process and all artworks are open, unfinished products waiting to be completed by new actors who are yet to take the stage. From spatial interventions and performance to platforms for other artists’ actions and sculptural installations, his work is a set of confrontational eruptions, crowded with references to minimal sculpture, modernist utopia, 1960s counter-culture, experimental architecture and radical design.

 

The Last Desire is a series of billboards in public spaces in Rovereto, based upon the seminal 1968 project by Hans Hollein, Golden Smart , and a photomontage featuring a gigantic cigarette floating over the landscape. Forty years later, Previdi has decided to light up the cigarette and to perform an act of smoking in the billboards every two-weeks, until the cigarette is smoked out. This is the artist’s silent, though “fiery,” tribute to the failure and impotence of revolutionary acts and radical movements; indirectly, it is also his homage to the Manifattura Tabacchi, Rovereto’s industrial monument that after 150 years of operation has completed its original mission. The Last Desire functions like an hourglass, announcing the end of utopian thought and the new era of transformed society.

 

Additionally, the artist has collaborated with one of the founders of Architettura Radicale, Gianni Pettena. Their ambitious action of rebuilding the slipped-down mountain top of Torre Trephor in the Dolomites by “completing” it with a PVC foil silhouette, results in a series of photographs taken from the viewpoint of Tofana di Rozes in South Tyrol, recording the two artists, “as if” holding the reconstructed mountain.

By Adam Budak

 

 

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