GIOVANNI MORBIN
Me
Giovanni Morbin, Me, 2010 – Performance, 25 Minutes / (RIGHT) Copy of “Profilo continuo di Mussolini” (Renato Bertelli, 1933)
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“Sitting on a revolving stool I repeatedly and unsuccessfully attempt to declaim Mussolini’s Declaration of War (June 10, 1940).”
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PERFORMANCE TIME: Saturday, 29 October 2008 – h 7.00 pm
“Me“, the latest performance by Giovanni Morbin, previewed last February at the Swiss Cultural Institute in Rome on the occasion of the “Censure and Self-censorship” project, curated by Maria Rosa Sossai and Cesare Pietroiusti, returns to the Galleria Artericambi as a new act, a new consequence of being.
The artist sitting on a revolving stool, rotating on himself until he is stunned, recites a speech by Mussolini (Declaration of war, 10 June 1940). Next to it, a copy of Mussolini’s Continuous Profile (1933) by the sculptor Renato Bertelli. The performative work, centered on the movement, the work and the acting of the artist, interrupting itself drastically at an unspecified moment, constitutes a failure, a sort of reproach of the body to the behavioral effort of the mind. When Giovanni Morbin begins to turn quickly on the stool, a metaphor and aesthetic condition of the work itself, his face appears similar to Bertelli’s sculpture. The loss of the figure, his incorporation into space until the dissipation of the features transform the artist into a nuance of himself that prevents at the same time the focus and the alteration of his own identity.
Giovanni Morbin’s research, focused on the investigation and experimentation of behaviors, recognizes performative practice as the ideal means for expressing one’s ideas through gestures, methods, forms, totalizing executive criteria. Parallel to his behavioral work, his research focuses on the construction of functional objects for daily action to which he gives the value of real tools: Fioriera, 2008; Ready-to-wear, 2007; Breathtaking instrument, 2006, etc.
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BIO
Morbin Giovanni was born in Valdagno, Vicenza, on 9 August 1956. He lives and works in Cornedo Vicentino. In 1982 he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice after following the painting course in Emilio Vedova’s workshop. Since 1978 his research has been linked to behavior and performance is the ideal means to express his ideas. Parallel to behavioral work, he is interested in the construction of objects functional to daily action and gives them the value of tools (Breathless Instrument, Social Sculpture, Card of apparatus and DNA). In 1993 at Ottomat he presented “Forms of behavior”. He is co-author and signatory of the poetic declaration ETHICAL EXPRESSIVE UNIVERSAL (EEU), published in the “Corriere della Sera” on May 8, 1994 and in the same year he invents the breathless instrument, a tool to communicate to oneself. In November 1995 he founded TOTAL SURFACE, the container of his actions. From that moment on, his performances are called Hybridizations. These are hybrid actions characterized from time to time by an animal partner, a plant or mineral building. Since 2002 he has been active as a portraitist (the outside world) and in interior design (the world seen from the inside) as part of the “I’m no longer in my skin” project. These are commissioned portraits made with the blood of the client himself.