The artistic performance by Raffaele Greco at Colla gallery, sponsored by Collectible DRY x Manintown
“What is immobile is the subject, in whose service the winged eye moves. And the metamorphosis of the eye, which concerns not only its form but its functioning, serves to spare modern man the tiring tactile relationship with things, which presupposes direct and immediate physical encounter with each of them”.
With these words yesterday, artist Raffaele Greco opened his performance at the Collectible Dry x Manintown event at Colla gallery, Milan, during the Menswear Fashion Week. Collectible Dry and Manintown present their special issue dedicated to gender identity. On this occasion, Raffaele Greco establishes a dialogue with his audience to stimulate reflection on our identities and our relationship with the body. Culture for Greco becomes a tool of resistance suitable for overturning the status quo. Gender identity is not something that is given once and for all. It is something that transforms and is subject to the relationship with the gaze of others. It encounters resistance, it goes through changes. And this is why Raffele Greco tries to push his audience to a reevaluation of their own knowledge and expectations. In a society that always aims at homologation, that would like to suppress differences, art and poetry become the tools for the development of a different, broader, more personal thought. Raffaele Greco’s performance becomes a political statement that compels the listener to pay attention. What tools to survive cultural and identity flattening? In order to find an answer, the special issue of Collectible DRY in collaboration with Manintown, presented in Florence, aims exactly as a reflection on gender. A space for cultural insights that encourages dialogue, and encounter. The event at Colla gallery wanted to give a participatory dimension to words written on paper. To do this, Raffaele Greco was chosen as a bridge between the community of readers and that of viewers. A window on the contemporary, an opportunity to reflect on the reality that surrounds us. After all, as the artist says “to call ourselves contemporary to a contemporaneity we do not live causes dissociation, apathy. Contemporaneity, due to too much articulating, recalling, and describing itself, is heavy and useless. It does not exist. I am contemporary to the air I breathe”.
Photo by Liu Yuxiang
Photo by Eric Tacchini
