THE BODY OF TRANSGRESSION.
Galería Benzacar, August 2014. Flavia Da Rin confronts us with an unexpected shift. The scale has been reduced, the color withdrawn, and with it the strident and fantastical paraphernalia we knew so well, whose memory makes the almost ascetic concentration of these new scenes all the more surprising.
Yes, the visual evidence is abundant, but it matters insofar as it embodies a true conceptual displacement. For the first time, photography, rather than being a support, becomes a reference. It is modern documentary photography that encourages this new monochromatic and succinct language. Moreover: for the first time, Flavia Da Rin’s work points toward the past. Because earlier the history of art appeared as just one more of the codes eradicated and freely recombined by postmodern culture, which has turned them into equivalent signs of an eternal present. We even have reasons to suspect that this new series puts a pause to that frantic struggle against obsolescence to which we are subjected.
Femininity remains her theme. But in the previous work, it was the stereotype of the Young-Girl, who is not necessarily young nor even a girl, but rather the model of the consumer citizen*. Flavia Da Rin stops embodying the many faces of that ubiquitous character and enters the historical records of real women. Lizica Codreanu, Giannina Censi, Mary Wigman… all of them could also be a single figure traversing decades and countries, but here the fiction is relative, for it merely plays at bringing together the nuances of the same process, of the same conflict.
It is suspicious, the silence that covered the role of women in the historical avant-gardes. If, on the main stage, the act of destroying “great” art was carried out by its legitimate owners, they held the key to a backstage. Transgressing the rules of ballet (the duty of decorum assigned to women in the social theater), they put their bodies forward — not only amid futurist machinery and expressionist masks, not only amid Dadaist absurdity and constructive geometries, but also, like Valeska Gert, in extreme spaces that cultural history would record decades later as the zero degree of conceptual action or the raw exhibitionism of the punk movement.
Flavia Da Rin pays them homage in the best sense. It is not about “reworking” a found photograph but about embodying an experience once again. Digital post-production, which in the earlier work was a language in itself, here returns to being merely a tool, a means. Everything essential is resolved in the theatrical adventure: the effort of the poses, the dialogues between body, space, and objects, the costume design, the scenographic composition.
Those situations can be lived again because there is a document, a material trace of the past, because not everything has been absorbed by the culture of simulation and the hypermachinery of the eternal present. Flavia’s production has always been intense and joyful, but this one is more so. “It is her masterpiece,” I thought yesterday. Afterwards, I chased that thought away in order to let her images continue to challenge me in the future.
