On January 20, 2017, @ 00:01 The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Cards by Lanfranco Aceti was quietly launched in the maelstrom of contemporary tensions. This project is inspired by the complexity of contemporary society, its upheavals, crises, and turmoils. It is a project in which the role of the artist and that of the curator meld, generating confusing existential post-truths, ethical conflicts, truthful hyperboles, parallel realities, fake news, and alternative facts.
The project consists of Forty-Nine Cards that recount brief stories of contemporary times, using alternative narratives. The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Cards is not inspired by a revelation of the truth, but instead by the infinite opportunities that emerge from presenting possibilities, opinions, desires, aspirations, and dreams as facts. There is of course in both philosophical and aesthetic terms the fact that the materialization of an idea is indeed a fact, even if it is not necessarily the materialization of the object itself which is realized physically.
Lanfranco Aceti has worked for years on issues of reality and virtuality and their conflicting existential relationship. Issues of what is real, what is true, definition of virtuality have inspired his work, together with larger socio-political issues related to the struggle of people in eking out a living in the contemporary globalized post-capitalistic frameworks. As an artist, Aceti has done multiple interventions in public and virtual spaces over the years, both as an artist and as curator.
The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Cards is another such project in which the concept of the Fifth Column confuses the reality of ‘what is what’ to such an extent that the doubt may arise that this very project is actually functional to an Orwellian deconstruction of democracy.
Lanfranco Aceti will curate forty-nine artworks which will be placed on the Fifth Column of the White House. The artworks will be accompanied by a card that illustrates the project. For this project Aceti was named Curator Of The United States or COTUS by the Museum of Contemporary Cuts, blending the role of the artist and that of the curator.
These narratives and works of art will provide the opportunity to revisit contemporary art in a context not hindered by possibilities or impossibilities: but actually realized without any physical, organizational, and socio-political restrictions. The artist will work within the tradition of collage and contemporary digital borrowings, creating a landscape of parallel realities.
These parallel realities and narratives will be used to generate a catalog published by the Leonardo Electronic Almanac, MIT Press.
Below is a list of the artworks installations on the Fifth Column at the White House’s North Lawn.
September 21, 2017 – Card Number 6 aka War Pigs
August 4, 2017 – Card Number 5 aka Suppository
June 15, 2017 – Card Number 4
April 27, 2017 – Card Number 3 aka 100 Days Urn
March 9, 2017 – Card Number 2
January 20, 2017, Card Number 1 aka Finger to the US
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