The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève is proud to present the first public appearance of Morestalgia, an evolving environmental installation by Riccardo Benassi, at its Project Space (4^th Floor). After its exhibition at the Centre, the work presented by Xing will successively be shown at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Melbourne, ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medien, Live Arts Week/Art City – Bologna Stazione Alta Velocità and Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin.

For its presentation in Geneva, Morestalgia will be in dialogue with the new English version of Daily Desiderio Domestico, a media-sculpture in which Riccardo Benassi writes and transmits a text message every day of his life, each message only lasting for 24 hours, opening up the installation space to mutability and transience. Morestalgia is an environment based on sound, text and objects that has as pulsating nucleus a LED screen traversable by the human body. The project stems from a research into nostalgia and its social implications in an age where the internet is encroaching into our lives. It will take the form of a multimedia and multi-sensory work: a hyper-designed object. In keeping with Riccardo Benassi’s research pathway, it addresses the theme of displays in living spaces and in urban, infrastructural, and behavioral contexts, starting from an analysis that centers around the human being and its interrelations.

With the invention of the word “morestalgia” Riccardo Benassi intends to update the concept of nostalgia after the internet, investigating and cross-referencing different thematic fields such as memory and affects, migration and homesickness, phenomenology and interface design, history and futurology. According to the artist, the neologism “morestalgia” can be defined as “augmented nostalgia.” This is a specific kind of homesickness, whose sense of pain is similar to that caused by the feeling of envy, a feeling of lack – self-translated as loss – whose direct reference is experienced by others. Morestalgic human beings are those who have the desire to live an experience they have previously understood as a plausible one but who, instead of recalling it from their own past, supplant it with an immersive navigation experience offered by the web. The artist poses the question: how have social networks and online communities contributed to the unification and normalization of subjective pasts? Can digital empathy become a useful tool to remodel the future rather than creating an alliance around an apparently shared past? In other words, how can we transform a subjective feeling of belonging into a collective future?

Riccardo Benassi’s work has distinguished itself as a multidisciplinary approach that focuses on the impact of technology in our daily relation to space, mostly reflecting on how technological devices have radically altered the structures for living and organizing the real, from architecture to politics, to cultural production and consumption.

Riccardo Benassi (Cremona, 1982), lives and works in Berlin. His work has been shown in public and private spaces in Italy and across the globe. Some of his most recent shows include: ICA, Milan (2019), Galleria ZERO…, Milan (2019), Fondazione del Monte Bologna (2019); MAMbo Bologna (2018); Parc Saint Léger, Guérigny (2018); ArtLine, Milan (2018); ZKM, Karlsruhe (2017); Kunstraum Potsdam, Berlin (2017); Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (solo show) (2016); IIC – Italian Cultural Institute, Paris (solo show) (2016); Collezione Farnesina, Rome (2016); Museo Salvatore Ferragamo, Florence (2016). Benassi has been working as professor of Sound Design at the Accademia di Belle Arti Carrara in Bergamo since 2013, from 2014 to 2016 he was a professor of Creative Practices at dBs College in Berlin, and has been guest lecturer at NABA in Milan since 2019.

Morestalgia by Riccardo Benassi is presented by XING and is one of the winning projects of the 5th edition of Italian Council (2019), a competition conceived by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Art and Architecture and Urban Peripheries – an organism of the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities, to promote Italian contemporary art in the world. Morestalgia will be developed between 2019 and early 2020 in collaboration with several international partners. Presented in Geneva in collaboration with the Consulate General of Italy in Geneva on the occasion of the XV Giornata del contemporaneo.