È tempo ormai di dirti addio
The city of Gibellina in Sicily is one of the most astonishing open-air museums in the world. In 1968, the region was struck by an earthquake that completely destroyed the city. In the aftermath of the quake, the mayor called upon artists and architects to imagine the construction of the utopian Gibellina Nuova, about ten kilometers from the disaster site. Deserted by its inhabitants, the city today contains numerous open-air sculptures and architectural constructions as unfinished as they are improbable. Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs created a visual and sound performance staging the city’s theatre. Reproduced as a hyper-realistic model, this four-wheeled character roams the empty streets while broadcasting melancholic Italian songs. The performance is filmed and presented at the Biennale Images Vevey in the form of a video installation. È tempo ormai di dirti addio is shown in a room that offers a plunging view over Vevey.
Original performance presented in 2019 at the Gibellina PhotoRoad as part of a collaboration with the Biennale Images Vevey.
Raise the Bar
The work of Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs questions the notions of point of view and trompe-l’œil, by probing the ability of a photograph to transcribe a three-dimensional reality into two dimensions. In their shots, it is often impossible to define depth in the image: templates made of joists placed in the foreground take up the structural lines of the architectures photographed in the background. Extending this troubling play of optical illusion and perspective, their series Raise the Bar is exhibited in a park, on structures that evoke construction templates.
