GIANLUCA MALGERI

Jonas Dahlberg’s videos Untitled (Horizontal Sliding) (2000) and Untitled (Vertical Sliding) (2001), feature empty interiors whose reality is both enigmatic and suggestive. The slow movement of the camera reveals one room after another, evoking archetypal spaces that look familiar and foreign at the same time. Light seeps from under closed doors, but there’s no reason to think anyone’s home, or rather, in their rooms. Appearances, of course, prove deceptive. Dahlberg’s sets are architectural models, built to a circular plan, and filmed with a centrally positioned rotating camera. What seem to be tracking shots are really 360° pans, describing loci that inevitably read as nodes in a labyrinth–a subtly scary one, since its vertical and horizontal extension implies the impossibility of finding an external vantage point.

Gianluca Malgeri & Arina Endo’s works, that include both collages and sculptures are part of their research about playgrounds that started in 2013. This attention led to an ample photographic documentation that was the starting point for a first series of collages that drafted the subsequent – and natural – shifting of the project to the third dimension through sculpture and maquettes, directly related to the images assembled in the collages. Whereas the first articulations of the project were related to more static and isolated structures, seen like impossible buildings or islands, through the years the works have shifted progressively to a more combinatorial and communicative dimension, where the single items can be easily identified as organic elements of a whole world.