The silent rooms of #saymaybe are filled with portraits, eternal ghosts, standing in a perennial limbo within the walls of the concrete structure, where past and future collide. Figures in time and space - freed from delusions of both permanency and ephemerality - are preserved and able to shape their own form, making us critically wonder about the hybridity of contemporary life.

Starting with the idyllic look of Gaillard’s The Lake Arches, which combines teenage folly with Ricardo Bofill’s postmodern apartment blocks, parallels may emerge between the failure of the youth’s playful but naive dip into the artificial lake and the vain nature of the architecture, originally created with visionary ambitions, now reduced to ruins. The face of the young person itself is transformed into a ruin under the weight of 20th century failed narratives, just as the body that Douglas Gordon shows us, which is visibly damaged by the weight of war. In 10ms-1 (scientific notation for the pull of the earth) the figure is painfully struggling against gravity and tries with uncertain actions to stand up and reclaim space, like a social body in its declared vul- nerability. By breaking found-footage down through slow motion, it generates a choreographic eternal loop, offered to us as a means of catharsis.

Different are the spectres in Brinker’s interval: when he went back to the relics of an unfinished holiday resort, he found the same stray dog that he had filmed two years earlier and filmed him again, still wandering in the deserted landscape, caught in an apparently perpetual time. This reveals how the suspension of temporality only affects anthropocentric perspective and de-centres the subject, leading human history to a further failure. Similarly, Monica Bonvicini shifts the point of view to the object as a body through the hybridisation of industrial materials, referring to the modernist canon, with culturally sexualised symbols. StripLight unveils the power of ordinary objects with strong connotations to demystify preconceived and dominant associa- tions, suggesting a different way of questioning our identities and shedding light on the concrete texture of the architecture - both symbolically and literally - that shapes them.

Here stands Portrait #5 [Douglas Gordon], shot by Welz in Gordon’s studio. Both synchronised sequences of the hand are positioned opposite in the space, reaching over to one another and bridging the fragmented body, mostly corresponding in an uncontrolled dialogue with each other. The artist consciously explores the dynamic relationships between figures, losing linearity while showing them under a new light.

These works intertwine to guide the spectator along a journey of unconscious awareness, across the blurred line between romanticism and decay. The curator’s need to give life to #saymaybe germinates from the continuous uncertainty and powerlessness of the present we are living in.

Silvio Saraceno