Francesco Finizio: ARKPARKCRAFTRAFT- CLINICCLUBPUB

Dates: 12.02.2015 – 30.05.2015

Curator: Joshua Simon

About the Exhibition

The title of the exhibition, ARKPARKCRAFTRAFTCLINICCLUBPUB, is largely indicative of its spatial character; it integrates different spaces into a single portmanteau word – ark, park, craft, raft, clinic, club, pub. What usually defines a space is the very fact of its immobility. Even the French word for real estate “immobilier,” follows this logic of “immobile property.” However, in our reality, space itself has become monetized, and so the nature of the space that we occupy at any given moment is constantly changing. Market economy was able to make the space flicker and shiver – from the skyscraper that enabled the extrusion of the rentable floor space per unit area of land, to the suburban sprawl, that gave a spatial expression to the socially engineered form of lifelong indebtedness, the mortgage loan.

In this reality we become disorientated – the interchange demonstrates the counterintuitive nature of the current spatial reality; to take a left turn we need to get off at the right-hand exit. In this reality, you get offered to buy an insurance policy at the privatized post office and a shaver at the commercial gas station. When everything is exchangeable you are no longer sure where you are.

ARKPARKCRAFTRAFTCLINICCLUBPUB combines a survey of some of Finizio’s key works with new projects he has developed especially for MoBY. Through the use of DIY aesthetics and an often off-the-cuff approach full of humor and self-irony, Finizio has been developing a unique and idiosyncratic body of work rooted in the observation of incidents and phenomena that revolve around questions of exchange and value as well as agency and cultural meanings. His installations operate as both events and models. They entangle the depiction of scripted spaces of commerce, habitat, display, construction, archive and work – ​​encompassing a model-like quality that actively speculates on the uses, statuses, and sentiments that these spaces perform.

Through the use of DIY aesthetics and an often off-the-cuff approach full of humor and self-irony, Finizio has been developing a unique and idiosyncratic body of work rooted in the observation of incidents and phenomena that revolve around questions of exchange and value, agency and cultural meaning. His installations operate as both events and models. They entangle the depiction of scripted spaces of commerce, habitat, display, construction, archive and work, with a model-like quality that actively speculates on the uses, statuses, and sentiments that these spaces perform.

Since nothing is certain under the rule of capital, we are all busy speculating – both the investment banker and the precariat, are constantly compelled to create models by which they can conduct themselves. The only invariant element in these models is the perpetuation of the market economy. Under capital, speculation has changed from independent and inverted thinking to a way that ensures that the economic and political world remains intact.

With their playful makeshift style, Finizio’s clever installations push a given situation to its breaking point, revealing contradictory states and hidden dimensions of the economic world we live in. By proposing the familiar world as it is folded inside-out, Finizio’s work suggests a mode of operation that we can call counter-speculation.

Photo Credit: Gal Deren