Is it Sundown?

The spaces of rhinoceros, the spectacular building designed by Jean Nouvel for Alda Fendi, host the new exhibition-installation conceived by Raffaele Curi, artistic director of the Alda Fendi Foundation. With an exhibition itinerary disseminated with suggestions and quotations, the exhibition invites us to reflect on the great transformations taking place on a global level: the starting point is the crisis experienced by the show business world, with its deeper state of restlessness and change spreading out and invades society in general.

On the ground floor, visitors are greeted by the dialectical play between two projections, a scene from the film “The Fall of the Roman Empire” by Anthony Manne and a video-montage without sound about the terrible fire that devastated the Palisades area in Los Angeles, accompanied by quotations ranging from Juvenal to Stephen King. The 2009 performance of “The Sun is Down” by Yoko Ono and Lady Gaga is shown on the video wall. Gaetano Pesce’s “Sunset in New York” sofa “imprisoned” in an aluminum cage that prevents visitors from sitting down, symbolizing the denial of New York’s supremacy in the world, is exhibited on the first floor. An AI image of David Lynch populates the stairs: five suspended silhouettes of the director with tapes of negatives sealing his mouth and, in the background, the soundtracks of his films “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive”.

The exhibition route continues with the blow-up picture of Gaetano Pesce’s “Up” armchair and the famous design work positioned in front of the picture. Colour dominates the upper floors of the building: eccentric oversize T-shirts with the inscription “is it sundown?” hang from the ceiling with transparent threads tied to colored crutches. Then the eyes rest on a blow-up picture of Domitian’s Imperial Ramp in the Roman Forum in Rione Campitelli, with an overlay of an article from “The Guardian” newspaper in the center: “Tik Tok is part of China’s cognitive warfare”.