On December 23rd 1980, Plastic opened in Milan, one of the foremost contributors to Club Culture in Italy.
FuturDome is pleased to celebrate the club’s 40th anniversary with a solo show by Niccolò Quaresima (Rome 1995) Dusk to Dawn, Fragmets from the Plastic Archive. A personal appropriation based on the finding of a series of torn and ruined slides that lay forgotten in milanese club’s basement.
The exhibition, postponed because of the pandemic, collects alongside the slideshow, documents, images and videos from the archive of Nicola Guiducci, club co-founder, art director, and dj, who has influenced generations of professional mixers with his visionary musical selection.
Dusk to Dawn retraces the radiant history, politics and groundbreaking esthetic of the most iconic Italian nightclub of all times, creator of a rare social amalgam, where different social political, financial and gender stratifications merged together, generating a micro temporary autonomous zone, creating a non-hierarchical system based on relations and on the infinite expression of sexuality. In order to allow this zone to exist, it must be concentrated all in the present and give everyone the possibility to free and expand their minds from pre imposed mechanism, unmasking the visible.
If universally, a club is a public space, at Plastic space is a sort of domestic extraterritoriality, being allowed in means being welcomed in our own homes, open to everyone but not exactly anyone.
The strict door selection at the entrance of Plastic, works according to a sort of social selection free of the capitalistic logic of a commercial space. Denying entry to a paid club is not functional to the cost, so it becomes an act of unilateral reim- mission in our common myth.
Quaresima’s work acts as a detonator in the underground spaces of FuturDome. The appropriation of dormant images in the comprised photographic film, ignite abnormal processes of energy and information transfers without physical or biological explanation. The apparent influence of thoughts and intentions on real independent processes, alters the relationship between parts that are still recognizable within the images and their compromised counterparts, suggesting a premonition of future events.
Within a linear time frame, the future is what has yet to take place. Quaresima’s work relocates the concept of un-repre- sentable, no longer divine law, but a principle to unmask the visible.
If for Lange every portrait is a “self-portrait” of the photographer himself, the images transferred here onto neutral supports -in order to freeze the process of deterioration and fermentation of molds and fungi- the faces we see dismantle the su- perstructures power has imposed upon existence, that inevitably implode. The universe, destined to contract upon itself, will eventually return to its origins and remodel the future.
Niccolò Quaresima (Rome 1995) is a visual artist, who mainly focuses on photography as a fluid language. His creative process is intuitive but formally rigorous: be it editorials or immersive installations, his work is always set to precision. He is interested primarily in themes that revolve around sexuality and nightlife. His research aims to push the boundaries of photography to explore always higher degrees of freedom.
He graduated in New Technologies for the Arts at Brera Fine Arts Academy and has an MA in Photography in Visual Design at NABA. He is a member of the duo F/Q.
