Date
Location Livorno, IT
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Stefano Chiodi
February 22, 2021

13. Stefano Chiodi

immagini da Lo sguardo dal di fuori. Nuove frontiere dello spazio e dell’immaginario di Alberto Boatto, 1981

50 minutes to retrace the role of a brilliant and isolated figure, of the Italian militant art critic Alberto Boatto. A few years after his death, the MAXXI Museum in Rome, dedicates an important focus to him with materials selected from his archive. Stefano Chiodi, curator of the exhibition, narrates for “Rubriche d’Aria” how critical writing experienced by Boatto, as an intellectual act alien to cultural strategies and policies, becomes a “gaze from the outside”, a glimpse of the shipwreck from outer space, thus, of someone who observes the world from an external, solitary, remote point, and captures a new and surprising physiognomy…

“… in the era of space travel … the image of planet Earth has changed thanks to the photographs of the satellites … this cosmological suggestion leads Boatto to think about what gaze is, what gaze entails from the outside, for the first time this gaze cancels human differences, the Earth is united … Boatto thus substracts himself from actuality, but pays a price which is isolation, loneliness, remoteness, as an astronaut in orbit, instead he gains an unparalleled vision of the world as a whole…”


Stefano Chiodi teaches History of Contemporary Art at Roma Tre University. He has published numerous essays on art and visual culture between the early and late twentieth centuries; his most recent book is Genius Loci. Anatomy of an Italian myth (2021). He has edited texts and catalogs, including Marina Ballo Charmet, Con la coda dell’occhio. Writings on photography (2017); Alberto Boatto, Ghenos Eros Thanatos and other writings on art 1968-2015 (2016). The exhibition he curated at theMAXXI in Rome, Alberto Boatto Lo sguardo dal di fuori will remain open until October 2021.