{"id":7873,"date":"2013-06-18T01:57:22","date_gmt":"2013-06-18T01:57:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/a-desk.org\/2013\/06\/18\/stories-art-and-periegesis\/"},"modified":"2013-06-18T01:57:22","modified_gmt":"2013-06-18T01:57:22","slug":"stories-art-and-periegesis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/a-desk.org\/en\/magazine\/stories-art-and-periegesis\/","title":{"rendered":"Stories: art and periegesis"},"content":{"rendered":"

Historically, Great Khan became a type of imperial rank, which was attributed to those who occupied the position of emperor in ancient Mongolian and Turkish culture. Italo Calvino uses this same figure in his book The Invisible Cities<\/em> where in echoes of Marco Polo\u2019s Book of Marvels<\/em>, he creates a story in nine chapters. Using his combinatory literary style, Calvino creates a story in which the Venetian traveller explains to the Tartar emperor, Kublai Khan, what the cities of his empire are like. The appeal of the book is the imaginative capacity of Marco Polo who invents and fantasises about all the details and scenes that only exist within his own imagination. Alluding to the act of writing and the narrative potential of the story, Calvino emphasises the way in which we can create worlds, project our own desires and wishes through the simple act of narration.<\/p>\n

This exhibition (open until 23 June), currently on show at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome in collaboration with the Spanish Royal Academy in Rome <\/a> also presents itself as an alternative travel story. It is a journey that takes place in several directions, setting out from different elements. <\/p>\n

Avelino Sala and Pelayo Varela, both from Asturias, together with Emilio Chapela, from Mexico, propose that art is always a kind of journey, towards the other and towards itself and in turn each of the projects creates a dialogue with works by Italian artists from the Renaissance to the 19th century.<\/p>\n

The exhibition, and once again that hermeneutical capacity of the project, revolves around three main lines. Each of them is situated in a different city: Venice, Florence and Rome. The three artists set out in the full sense of the experience based on the historical periegesis, from cities that have been the challenge for travellers of the Grand Tour but also cities that in history have been the scenes of events that underpin the 20th and 21st centuries. <\/p>\n

Avelino Sala presents the work Po\u00e9tica de la fuga<\/em> (Poetics of flight): a video that situates us just outside Rome, from where Ezra Pound escaped from the resistance. In the video, the musician Noem\u00ed de Haro plays the military piece, March on Rome<\/em> backwards. This action throws up questions marks about history and its contradictions, about Pound\u2019s anti-Semitism and about his escape. The title of the video suggests, not un-poetically, the non-implicit qualities: flight, journey, escape: words that describe how people can be dragged along by events. Sala\u2019s piece creates a dialogue with La Trasteverina uccisa da una bomba <\/em> (1850), by Gerolamo Induno. This female image points us to the video and something more besides. <\/p>\n