A fetish is a story masquerading as an object. - Robert J. Stoller

Galleria Milano presents Luca Vitone solo exhibition “Non siamo mai soli” planned and realized in 1994: the show consists in 7 objects and related pencil drawings showing the maps of the apartments where the objects were originally located. The position of the different objects in the room is indicated in red. All objects as well as the spaces belong to the artist’s memory: things he inherited or presents he received, apartments where he lived and grew up.

Among others a small red table and its little chair with the map of the flat in Genoa “Via delle Ginestre 24/14”: it’s a children’s piece of furniture located originally in the apartment where the artist lived as a child and which moved on with him from childhood bearing always different uses. “Industrial objects stand as candidates to universality creating a lingua franca” (F. La Cecla: Non è cosa. Vita affettiva degli oggetti - non siamo mai soli. “ Elèuthera, Milano 1998, p. 39). Vitone’s work intends to rescue them from neutrality. Therefore objects are no more impersonal, since they are charged with a surplus of meaning: mere objects, originally defined by their useand exchange value become fetishes, “as they will be charged with a social or intimate relation that does not originally compete them” (F. La Cecla, op. cit.p. 45) They slide from pure material evidence to an invisible investigation carried out by the subject. The maps are a bridge between private and collective sphere, objects and maps interfere in order to give the spectator a password to the artist memories. The table is no more a table, it becomes that table: in the age of reproducibility the aura will be found in uniqueness. Objects talk , they tell us stories, they are no more what they looked at first. Even spaces are the result of a much deeper complexity. “we have to learn again how to consider the space” , affirms Marc Augé in Nonluoghi. Introduzione a una antropologia della supermodernità, Elèuthera , Milano 1993,p. 37)

In later years in the serie Percorsi Privati (1994-1999) Vitone asked several people to draw what they remembered about the route they used to follow in order to reach a certain destination. “ To draw a route is a way to visualize an experience, an appropriation process which verifies the degree of knowledge we have about territory and about ourselves” (Vitone, text for the exhibition “Itinerari intimi”, 1999 and “Percorsi Privati”).

Against the “loss of topology”, i.e. the lack of relation contemporary human beings have with their environment , the artist, being privileged in communication, has the task reestablish the link between men and his environment by becoming an ethnographer.

On the other hand Vitone is used to interdisciplinarity: he worked with musicians (Der unbestimmte Ort, 1994), geographers (Il mondo come rappresentazione, 1992), poets (Memorabilia, 2002) gastronomes ( Prệt- à- porter 2004) and in case of Non è cosa-Non siamo mai soli with Franco La Cecla, anthropologist, with whom he wrote a book published for the first time in 1998. A revised second edition will be published on occasion of the show at Galleria Milano.

Luca Vitone is present at the 55th Venice Biennale – in the Italian Pavilion with a work “Per l’eternità”, realized in collaboration with the “nose” (a scent expert) Maria Candida Gentile referred to the dramatic effects of Asbestos dangerous pollution. The work is invisible, there is only a persistent smell invading the whole pavilion.

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