Matteo Gatti's Vodka Cola

Following the suggestions of these notes and themes, the artist presents unpublished works and fracture between epochs and ideologies, offering a historical reflection on places, work, social and political dimensions, confronted with the contemporary world.
Through his lucid and ironic gaze, Gatti explores the radical transformations that marked the transition from the traditional industrial world to the fluidity of contemporary identity. In this scenario, the boundaries between work, consumption and private life dissolve, imposing new forms of awareness and creativity to resist or adapt to a seemingly unstoppable progress.

The exhibition unfolds as a journey between the remnants of a past of factories and material boundaries, where economic and political domination appeared tangible and defiant, and a present in which the logics of production and consumption permeate every aspect of everyday life.
At the center of Gatti's reflection is an obsession with incessant productivity, set against a "heroic unproductivity": a space of subtraction and absence that becomes fertile ground for desires and passions, free from economic logic.

AVM: The song Vodka Cola is a key reference for the exhibition. What does this song mean to you and how has it influenced your research and the path of the exhibition?

Area's Vodka Cola is the last song on the album Gods Leave, Angry People Stay! (1978). The title itself is a provocative and forced synthesis of the ideological contradictions of the time: vodka, symbol of the Soviet bloc, and cola, emblem of Western capitalism, juxtaposed to denounce the growing homogenization between theoretically opposed systems. The release of the record came at a time of political and social transformation, marked by the end of the great revolutionary utopias and a climate of political tension in Italy. Area, with their experimental approach, were questioning the overlaps between capitalism and socialism, highlighting how both ended up exercising forms of domination over people. Their music had been able to timely capture the soul of those years; they called themselves the "International Popular Group" precisely to externalize the idea of the fusion of art and life. It seemed to me to be the reference soundtrack for this exhibition. It is also a song without words, only vocalizations, so it takes on a language that goes beyond the literal dimension, it becomes almost abstract.

AVM: It is precisely this song that seems to resonate in the drawing of the girl featured in the work on paper "They handle the gun as if they were making love," which in addition to being the exhibition poster is also placed at the entrance to the exhibition route. In the drawing, the figure is abandoned on the bed in the gesture of armed struggle, imitating a gun with her hands. It is placed side by side with "The Good Maiden is No Longer Recognized," a work in which the blurred hammer and sickle appear. This diptych represents a definite narrative incipit. Could you tell me about it?

MG: The exhibition opens with a diptych showing a photograph of the PCI symbol taken from a voter's card, with the hammer and sickle, which, as you noted, appear very blurred and in black and white. The blurring is intentional; from a distance some might recognize them as symbols, others might miss them. Next is a drawing of a female hand intent on making the gun gesture, reminiscent of one of the widespread gestures among a section of militants of those years. This hand, however, is made as a drawing on paper in which there is a very muted, monochrome and delicate color. The figure looks almost like a specter, a ghost, resting lying on a pillow with mussed hair. As if she is sleeping or dreaming.
The idea of the diptych reflects on the perception of these codes by leading people to look at these images and relate to them as if they were caught in myopia, in which vision is somehow sabotaged.

AVM: How does Vodka Cola's journey then continue?

MG: In the meantime, I would like to emphasize that the exhibition is the result of an intense and fertile dialogue with director Matilde Scaramellini, whose design and curatorial input was fundamental. Contrasted with the entry diptych, the exhibition ends with an image depicting my two children together with my partner, entitled Family Photo. The photograph was taken near a former level crossing in Pinerolo (TO), the spot where the two historical leaders of the Red Brigades were arrested in '74. These two works mark the beginning and the end of the exhibition, ideally investigating the margins of civilized living: on the one hand, the choice of armed struggle and clandestinity, and on the other, the bourgeois family. Between these two extremes, we have chosen to place a series of works that reflect on the theme of work, re-actualizing - in a semi-serious key - the operaist vision typical of those years. In the digital world, after all, we are all (unpaid) workers who contribute massively to the profit of large multinational corporations. The provocation lies in the fact that at least the workers of the past would leave the factory at the end of their shift.
The exhibition appropriates the symbols and codes of a period characterized by strong collective consciousness raising, juxtaposing them with dreamlike and grotesque elements such as ant workers or chrysalids.

AVM: This is the first work reflecting on political issues. In your previous works and exhibitions there has been a lot of reflection on social issues, including in your experience in experimental cinema. Could you tell me about the path of your poetics and what have been the transitions to date?

MG: At the beginning of my path I was mainly interested in multimedia languages, I had a very important and formative parenthesis in research cinema, with the production of documentary and experimental films together with Demetrio Giacomelli and Matteo Signorelli.
Later on I devoted myself more to visual art, producing sculptures and installations that oscillated between a seductive and a repulsive dimension, a pretext to address the theme of some social obsessions such as the relationship between man and technology.
During the pandemic I delved into drawing, gradually going on to define a personal stroke, often quite detailed.
In recent years, I have approached film photography, recognizing a certain continuity with drawing. I develop and print most photographs independently, as this allows me to control the workflow integrally.

AVM: Within the exhibition your photographic research becomes almost a visual method of notes, while the drawing is punctual and meticulous. Together they configure complementary universes. What are their visual indices?

MG: In the exhibition, photography invades the spaces of drawing and vice versa. I definitely use photography as a system of collecting visual notes, and at the same time I work on drawing with a photographic attitude, often starting precisely from photographs found or taken by me, into which I insert elements of imagination, metaphysical and, at times, surreal.
Photography gave me the opportunity to get out of the studio and confront the landscape of the Turin area, characterized by a belt formed by industrial zones that separate the urban environment from the agricultural one. I began photographing these industrial zones - in which the echoes of the ghost of the Fiat factory resonate - on Sunday mornings, the day of rest: a moment in which there is an alienating crystallization. Industrial architectures are of great interest to me because their appearance is such only in function of what they are supposed to contain: workers and machines. This results in a sense of disorientation because in fact, visiting these areas one realizes that they could be anywhere in the world. As if the forms associated with productivity tend to cancel out any tendency toward singularity.

AVM: The exhibition presents a total reversal of the perception of our social and political history presented in an ironic vein through your poetics. Could you tell me how you balance the historical, critical and social narrative with the ironic vein?

MG: The historical aspect focuses mainly on the experience of the labor and student movement from the 1960s until about the mid-1980s. This experience interests me first of all for family reasons, since I grew up in a family whose members were politically active during those years. Secondly, it represents the closest historical period in which a large mass of people became convinced that they could radically change their living conditions through a process of collectivization of struggle. Radical change of one's condition and the collective dimension seem to me the two elements most alien to the society in which we live. So one of the questions this exhibition aims to ask is: after forty years, what remains of that experience?

AVM: In a hyper-connected and fast-paced age stopping to consider an important part of our historical, social and political narrative, and telling about them through an exhibition is a way to give the tools for a quest for personal and identity resistance to its visitors. With a series of glossy, lucid, dream-like suggestions, along with bitter irony, Gatti derives time and space ne inaction, that is, non-action and not necessarily its denial. A free and unprejudiced productive exploration that becomes an act of resistance, albeit an unconscious one. I therefore invite readers to walk through this experience on display until March 24.