Sunday 10th June – Palazzo Benzon: Jan Fabre – Anthropology of a Planet. Organized by the GAMeC (Galleria d’Arte Contemporanea di Bergamo) and curated by Giacinto Pietrantonio the Jan Fabre extended personal exhibition, Anthropology of a Planet, until September 23rd. is awesome. The display shows the Flemish artist’s research in its multiplicity, ranging from sculptures to movies, from drawings to installations. The imposing piece, I Spit On My Tomb, 2007, which takes up the whole salone on the piano nobile, consists of 250 gravestones of black and grey granite on which the names of living and extinct insects are engraved in Flemish with the date of birth or birth and death of artists, philosophers, musicians, writers, scientists, written beneath them.
A Detail: The man writing on Water, 2006. A sculpture made up of seven bronze bathtubs, where there is a sculpture-portrait of the artist seated in the second one, in the process of writing on the water with his finger. This act is also referred to in the poetry of the nineteenth-century Flemish poet Guido Gezelle “Het Schrijverke”, in which the insect schrijverke, a water dragonfly, writes God’s name on the water. Here, writing on the water in gilded bronze basins, in the container made of the symbolic color of gold, metal of spirituality and royalty, color of light that shines gloriously, expresses a will to survive towards the absolute and the eternity. That, in addition to being a biographical element, because Fabre has a nearly amphibious habit of writing and drawing at night while soaking in water in a bathtub, which for the artist is a coffin as recipient for the dead…