Gianni Motti
First Step in Argentina (Primer Paso en Argentina), 2011. Cement. 55 x 55 x 12 cm
Gianni Motti is not a typical artist: “terrorist”, soccer player, politician, gallery owner, magician, “dead”, psychoanalyst, astronaut or telepath. His work uses several methods to destroy reality, injecting it with interference and disturbances.
Motti is, himself, the protagonist in most of his works. He is not necessarily a performer, acting in front of an audience. He is, more accurately, the one that documents and translates the artistic process, usually carrying a political position.
Usually, Motti’ s works are not material, meaning they do not always end in a material production of the work, but are often actions made in specific contexts and in relation to previous events. The work as direct actions, which accomplished with the help of the media and the institution, gallery or fair inviting him, achieves a greater impact. Motti interferes in everyday life with that method, surpasses the art world’s frontiers and makes a greater statement to an audience that does not expect one.
His imagination makes him elaborate works that offer an activist and political character never short of humor or irony.
Motti produced works of great international impact; such was the case of the soap Manipulite (2005), mage with fat extracted from the clinic that performed liposuction to Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. In the 80s, through the media, he appropriated several natural disasters including eclipses, earthquakes, as well as the Challenger spaceship explosion of 1986.
Other actions have a more political agenda, developing infiltration strategies, elaborating parallel nets and challenging the rules of vision. For example, in 1997, during the 53rd session of the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva, Motti entered as Indonesia’s representative, taking the delegates place. In the resolution period of the session, he stated the countries position defending ethnic minorities.
In 1995, he infiltrated the Neuchatel Xamax game, a first division Swiss soccer team, for the first game of the season. He entered the field in front of 11 thousand spectators and TV cameras, played with the ball a couple of times, in moccasins, before returning to the bench where the rest of Xamax’ s players were sitting.
In 1997, Motti traveled to Colombia and declared in front of the media he was going to force President Samper’ s resignation telepathically, and have to leave the country after all the threats he received.
In 2005, when the famous Abu Ghraib tortures were made public, Motti appeared in the VIP section of the stadium for Roland Garros semifinal, where Tim Henman and Guillermo Coria where holding a match in Paris, that coincided with President Bush’s visit for Normandy 60th anniversary. Medias caught him seating for the first 20 minutes of the match, with a paper bag on his head, as a sign of a pacifist protest against the tortures. The whole world watched Motti until the stadium’s security noticed his presence and removed him from the facilities.
In 2005, he made Miggs, a la recherché del Ante Motti, and was able to enter to the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the LHC tunnel, where particles are propelled at light speed in a 27 km underground circle located between France and Switzerland. For this occasion, Motti made a complete tour documenting, for 5’50” hours, the entire performance, making histories greatest traveling on a person and generating his personal search.
Summarizing him, Motti submerges himself in the art worlds: works outdoors, using art as a method to perceive the world.
As a guest for Of Bridges & Borders in Fundación Proa, the artists made known it was his first time in Argentina and decided to create a special work: First Step in Argentina (2011), shown as the beginning of the exhibition. Motti wants to immortalize his first step in our Argentinean territory, in reference to Armstrong’s first step on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission.
Upon his arrival at the airport, he made a mold of his footstep at the exact moment he steps on Argentinean floor. The footprint is on exhibition at Proa and will remain always in Argentina. Many artists have made works on “the man that walks” (from Auguste Rodin to Alberto Giacometti). Her is not about the man that walks, but about the “man that walked” – a type of sculptural performance-.
The piece is here, and so is its spirit, but the body is somewhere else. The place is, actually, an organization of tensions, openings, pass ways and barriers, limits and extensions. In its interior, there’s emptiness and fullness, and the artist makes the spectator feel through his body First Step in Argentina, but also the artist’ s first mark on earth.
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Gianni Motti (1958, Italy). Lives and works in Geneva, Switzerland. Works with the galleries Nicolaes van Senger in Zürich and Cosmic Gallery in Paris. Participated in important international events such as the Venice Biennale (2005), Moscow (2007) and Bussan, Korea (2002).