Performance by Stefano Tenti. RUFA Space.
The work consists of an audiovisual installation and an action. Two monitors play with the conceptual matrix enclosed in the title of the work, through the definition of a dialogue between “giggles”. The locution “HI HI”, which has become an answer, an aesthetic-onomatopoeic seal in the field of interpersonal and non-personal communication – assimilated to a social possibility of participation in aesthetic discourse -, actually draws its origins from a concrete need to facilitate communication in Morse code. For obvious ciphering reasons, standard codes of a few letters were created to indicate entire phrases: “HI HI”=”I’m having a giggle”, “giggle”.
The Morse code is then the central element of the action: a plastic and conceptual redefinition of a 6-metre-long, 16-millimetre-diameter iron construction rod. “Beauty is a freak of nature” is the thought that analyses the phenomenon of widespread aestheticization and is implemented through the action of rubbing and smoothing the raw metal that follows the writing rules typical of the Morse language. The result is the redefinition of a visual code, pushing it to the threshold of decorum, almost to the point of defunctionalization in favour of plastic leziosity. An action that brings with it all the contradiction of the aesthetic discourse. The materials and the action, the concept and the relationship, redefine the space and everything within it, generating a logic of action that allows a crossing of different semantic fields: rehabilitation, estrangement, hybridisation, spatiality, plasticity, sense, discourse.