Elisabetta Benassi
Corsaro, 2014
Performance 4-6 April 2014
Non basta ricordare / Remembering is Not Enough
Curated by Hou Hanru
MAXXI Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI secolo, Rome, 2014
“As with the video You’ll Never Walk Alone (2000), in which Benassi plays football with a young man who resembles Pier Paolo Pasolini, with Corsaro “Pasolini” comes back again, this time riding a motorcycle through the museum’s galleries. The noise and the smell of the exhaust fumes invade the museum before we even see the bike. The action gets repeated for three consecutive days, from 6 pm to 8 pm during the museum’s opening hours.
Corsaro is an action that presents and investigates some of the themes analysed in the Benassi’s works: the meaning of the past in the present, history and the importance and power of images. Elisabetta Benassi re-activates our ability to observe, through a reflection on the relationship established between what we know, what we see, and what we imagine. As with the videos Timecode, 2000, or You’ll Never Walk Alone, 2000, in which Benassi plays football with a young man who resembles Pier Paolo Pasolini, Corsaro returns to the theme of desire; Pasolini riding a motorcycle through the Museum’s galleries. Her work expresses a need to represent that which cannot be seen, as the artist seems to suggest, “to look at things a second time”, revealing a density, a hidden, in an unexpected way.” Anne Palepoli
Courtesy the artist and the MAXXI Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI secolo, Rome