I was lucky enough to have this shared with me today by Folders Arrangements.
Its a 2015 mural ‘Spirale‘ from Italian street artist Blu in an area; Ponte Mammolo in Rome.
An Italian street artist living in Bologna who began and flourished initially with a group of other street artists, beginning around the turn of the century. He has maintained his anonymity and only a limited interaction with the mainstream art assemblage. Described as nomadic, a significant amount of works have been undertaken in the last twenty years
Blu to me seems like an incarnation of ‘the artist’ at its most vital and affective, a maker of transformed encounters with elements that predominantly reside within constrained and fabricated conceptual limits.
He has also produced animation, much of which was for a music production entity called ‘ok no’. Again the group vector and the collaborative, this time amplifying and intensifying through alliance with sound and music.
This video is a reminder that sometimes one is struck by the affective sea-change of consistency in articulation, visual articulations as to the body-human and the human body, are these reverse colonisations by technology? The haunted dream-ether of a de-contextualised (or re-contextualised) image of humans as a sequence of momentary snap-shots in relation to transformed, localised instances of power-alien, or consistencies that demand a dreaming level of recognition as to these facialised boxes of consumption or the fate of the ape-like. Drowned in machines and the image of actions of colonisation and control. Viscerally revealing of mechanised, aggro-industrialised and robotic presences, that have emerged from the emergent from the animal-human.
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While having such a powerful use of colour, the depiction in Spirale is one of the things that I found most extraordinary while first seeing it. Sometimes an artistic piece can work in a way that recalls a clarity that doesn’t require to understand a hidden story – but brings out that which is evident within the communal story – embedded in our consciousness as a narrative of existence. For instance that humans have progressed and are above their antecedents. For me here, the spiralised is the most positive way of bringing the lineage of living and sentient circumstances into focus through a linked- phasing of eras and the disambiguation of animals and human-animals. The spiral in this respect is like the intent toward intensification and it gives us that this has still been the mode of the ongoing realisation as to this form of life. It does not for example, posit that some of the dramatic alterations to humans since the arrival of the agrarian and the formulation of cities (and other abstract changes) have been disasterous for the planet and in that respect (at the very least) the species… Not at least until the spiral begins to disintegrate, drained of colour.
It brings with its open hands to our eyes, the plight of possibility of Now, in its ruinous extent, while generating a visual story, a visual intensity. A realisation that spans in deceptive simplicity and without words, a series of concepts and understandings and alights to their extent with salient knowing, it is a pry to the mind and to the necessity beyond it.
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