Lorena Zilleruelo
Élan et élégie - Installation - 2009
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 11
Installation
Utopia is born from the irrepressible desire of the soul, wounded by the pain of social existence. it will not and should not be halted. it is necessary for social life, because it forces people to form and renew a collective identity forever tempted to legitimize itself and, by camouflaging its faults, to reproduce its injustices. The elegy, such as it is defined by Gilles Deleuze, is a reaction to overwhelming power, to the shock of an encounter, to a disproportionate, unbearable event; the elegy pushes an excess that threatens to break the ego so that it generates a way of being, an art of lamentation. A means of expression for the socially excluded, the elegy metamorphoses lamentation into a song capable of turning suffering against itself, of turning misfortune into happiness, death into life. I took as my starting-point the picture Il Quarto Stato ("the Fourth Estate"), painted between 1898 and 1901 by Giuseppe Da volpedo in which workers engaged in the class struggle are shown rebelling and on the march. Today, the class struggle concerns not only workers, but employees with few qualifications, the unemployed, illegal workers.. the march is an act of revolt and /or emancipation. the revolt aims to give a face to those who often have none. To my father.
