Luigi Coppola: On Social Metamorphosis
Friday, April 20 at 6 p.m. On the last week of “Enacting Populism in its Mediæscape”, Kadist Art Foundation is pleased to announce the presentation of the new video by Luigi Coppola, last part of his performative work “On Social Metamorphosis”, previewed on the 18th of February at Mains d’Oeuvres, in the frame of the opening of the show. On this last public event in the parallel program of the project, the video is included in the exhibition, right when the life of this sui generis political bureau comes to an end. With this proposition where an emancipative aspect of the populist dynamic is analysed, the Enacting Populist ‘office’ closes, making a last statement around the idea of the ‘transformation of myths’ in the populist zeitgeist. “On Social Metamorphosis” springs from a collaboration between Luigi Coppola and the Belgian economist and antropologist Paul Jorion. Starting from a section of the famous blog of the latter, the two have worked on a text that gathers the propositions written by visitors of the blog, that collectively participated in the creation of a « realist utopia » – as the title of the section recites – together with texts by Louis Antoine de St Just, John Maynard Keynes and Franklin Roosevelt. The blog users were invited by Jorion himself to suggest their own ideas about the economical crisis and the subsequent crisis of democracy. Coppola staged this new script through the structure of the classical greek choir, so as to articulate a parallelism of demands and propositions around the issues raised in the text. While the figure of the hero/leader is absent, the voice of the choir, here interpreting the so-called “people”, is empowered by the use of neutral masks.