The Mimesi project was born immediately after the exhibition of the same name, held at Galleria Studio G7 in Bologna in May 2004. Mimesi represents a further phase of reflection, begun in 1999, on the spatiality of the screen as a new dimension of the natural landscape, and on the relationship between the gaze and a new virtual horizon that has grown upon the ruins of perspectival depth.

In Mimesi, for the first time I considered the creation of a painted environment, directly using the exhibition space itself as a support along with the canvas, in the idea of a landscape-screen. The image, articulated continuously and uniformly between canvas and wall, gave rise to a kind of trompe-l’œil created through the spatial repetition of sections of the same icon. The term “representation” here refers to the possibility of reflecting on the categories of copy and model within the realm of digital language, outlining the visual product of that reasoning, and simultaneously investigating the process of representation in the strict sense. The term “dramaturgy” in this project refers to the modes of reception conventionally associated with the dramatic art of theatre—namely, the specificity of a traveling “performance” visible only for the duration of the exhibition.

I thus distinguished the production phase from the realization phase. In the production phase (still ongoing), I began to contact individual curators who could serve as links to a space, located in a specific city, where the installation could be realized. In the realization phase, I worked on the image directly in relation to the space. This phase generally begins with a preliminary image previously developed, used as a point of reference to reason through its visualization in relation to the chosen space. At times, however, the exhibition space itself acts as the origin of the image, in relation to its specific features. The site-specific work entails a constantly shifting balance between the portion of the image painted on the wall and that painted on the canvas, so the total number and size of the canvases embedded in the wall also varies. Finally, the very nature of the image becomes an analysis of the city, such that the space where the environment is created may symbolically serve as a portrait of the city itself.

I decided to call the first painted environment at Galleria Studio G7 Mimesi.00 and to number each subsequent intervention in chronological order. The figure of the curator typically implies critical participation in the event, in the form of a written text that contributes to a deeper understanding of the conceptual rationale behind the intervention, though it is not assumed that the roles of critic and curator will always coincide. The Mimesi project, after an as yet undefined number of stages in Italy and abroad, will conclude with the publication of a book that will collect the entire process in each of its individual phases. The endpoint of Mimesi will be determined by the evolution of the project itself, which—after a series of phases—will inevitably reach that of its necessary disappearance, as soon as the complexity of the project confronts the sterile repetition of a module.
Flavio de Marco, November 2004