MILAN.- Love Stories A Sentimental Survey by Francesco Vezzoli is a new project curated by Eva Fabbris to be presented on
Fondazione Prada Instagram account from 11 May 2020. With this new project, the artist Francesco Vezzoli explores the emotional, psychological and sentimental status of a wide online community through social media language.
In 2004 Vezzolis work Comizi di non-amore, commissioned by Fondazione Prada for the exhibition Trilogia della morte, reivented the tradition of documentary and cinéma-vérité, contaminating classics like Comizi damore (1965) by Pier Paolo Pasolini and Lamore in Italia (1978) by Luigi Comencini with the television canons of reality shows. With Love Stories he takes over Instagrams communication strategies and, in particular, Instagram stories poll function to create a new space of sharing ideas, visions and impressions of love, identity, body, solitude, belonging, diversity, future.
In each story Fondazione Pradas followers and, more generally, Instagrams users will be invited to choose between two possible options, to take sides in favour of one of the two proposed statements, to accept the necessarily simplistic binary logic of surveys, to participate in an only apparently easy game.
The survey will include over 50 questions asked by Francesco Vezzoli and associated with images that create visual shocks and interpretative narratives. Each weeks surveys will form a thematic focus freely inspired by an aria from operas by Italian composers such as Vincenzo Bellini, Giacomo Puccini, Gioacchino Rossini and Giuseppe Verdi, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozarts Don Giovanni, in homage to Pasolini, who used this piece as a soundtrack in Comizi damore.
At the end of each week polls results will be commented by personalities of the worlds of culture, art, journalism and television. By using a text, a video or another creative contribution, each of them will try to decode the answers, to interpret the participants moods and emotions, to sketch a partial portrait of a community of people sharing existential conditions such as uncertainty, suspension and desire to restart in this historical moment.
Love Stories defies the ephemeral and instantaneous nature of Instagram transforming it into a virtual place of social investigation, artistic reflection and intellectual provocation.