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Winter Anticipations
Simon Pellegrini
Dear customers of Winter Anticipations,
Si dice “bettola” – in case you were wondering – of the «worst place in town”. Imagine the opposite of a white cube. Or take an exhibition space and grill food in it for decades, there you are. Yet, it is an adjective that I particularly like as it can be attached to any sort of spaceto discredit it, with love. In other words it means “special shithole”, the one that you really like to hang out at. No offence. Off the top of my head, I can think of two bettole (plural of bettola) worth mentioning when I look into Simon’s work, talking with him about his exhibition at La Placette, next to a railway in Zurich,as a train runs loud above us.
One is located at the intersection of provincial roads X and Y, coordinates 1.23456789°. A restaurant for truck drivers and townsfolk where they have good food. There, people say, you can still eat cat, a typical dish of post-war Piedmontese cuisine, when Italy was starving for real. La Bettola is a place where children are not welcome, unless they are held by the hand and with their eyes closed, a sequence of rooms to be traversed only through imagination. I grew up wondering about that smoky house for grown-ups, and the empty parking lot it left in my memory, the sounds of cars speeding down the high-ways of my peripheral neural connections.
Meow.
Then there is another bettola, in fact and not by name, this one is in Giambellino, suburb Z of Milan. My friend Luca, a fellow leftist with whom I studied architecture in the early 2000s took me there once. That bettola was the headquarters of a Red Brigades cell (BR was an Italian Marxist–Leninist armed militant guerrilla group), an informal place for late night meetings, wine and food, where they organised coups and kidnappings in order to create a revolutionary state. Bettola as a place of conspiracy and revolt behind a filthy wooden door.
Coming back to us, it seems that with the lapse of time, to date, eight generations of artists have come to Lausanne from various Italian bettole. More or less real (the bettole), more or less dreamy and furious (the artists), they have been more or less determined to show what they bring along inside them.
Simon’s poetic, light-hearted and introspective work is particularly dear to me because it seems on the one hand to remind us about the Italian creativity of Munari and Boetti, and on the other hand, with this exhibition, to take up a discourse that I also have fostered during the past years, a research on the mechanisms of perception, on how to possibly dissolve the work of art (or an entire exhibition) into a sweet, hallucinogenic, cocktail. A good kick.
There is something comforting in dark places, gloomy bars, foggy swamps, haunted castles, in the image of someone hiding terrified under the covers, in a summer blackout, in listening to goth music, in climbing over cemetery walls to watch wildfires, in organising a series of informal defences against the intrusion of bumbling thieves, like Kevin! does on Christmas Eve.
As the sound of the train dissolves behind us and our silent waiting too, Simon tells me that those are kinds of rituals, enacting evil to exorcise it. I get the impression that it has to do with a sense of shelter, and therefore a sense of place, in a broad spectrum, what they call «happy place» and we call Tower of Terror. A psychological location next to our guts with a falling elevator. Hey there, what if instead of you it is us watching from a place of darkness?
Simon’s bettola is a ghostly one, made of frozen shadows and discrete presences. From the street we glimpse a shapeshifter silhouette conversing with an investigative-minded basset hound. The interior space is lit by an elegant lamp that cast soft light in the direction of spiders who dwell in them like squatters. Storefront and lamp seems to share the same glow interrupted by the ice cold atmosphere of the exhibition space. At the center of the room a ghostly waiter stumbles into his own too long shirt sleeve causing the candles to take a blow. Yet simultaneously none of this is happening unless one narrows one’s eyes. Was the great bathhouse in Spirited Away (Aburaya, literally «oil house”) perhaps a bettola? Winter Anticipations by Simon is an invitation to smile when a gust of wind blows the door open behind you.
Gabriele Garavaglia
Photographies: Guillaume Python