Hybridisaction 5 a Spacewalk /NinapA

On March 18, 1965, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome launching station, the USSR launched the spacecraft Voskhod 2. On board Colonel Pavel Belyayev and Lieutenant Colonel Aleksey Leonov.
On the same day, Leonov was the first man to perform extravehicular activity in space. Leonov walked in the void for almost twelve minutes before returning, not without difficulty, to the spacecraft.
Regarding this performance there exist no original photographs because the camera was lost during the re-entry phase. The only photographs picturing the first ever spacewalk have been taken from television records,
On the 40° Anniversary of this event, Giovanni Morbin recalls it with a performance. For a whole week he will have his left hand embedded in a Globe madeof plaster and will be forced to “orbit” around this replica of Earth.
Thanks to this new condition, accomplishing his everyday activities (dressing, eating, washing, etc) will be difficult, at times verging on the impossibile, just as they are for a Cosmonaut in the absence of gravity.
Non professional reporters, informed in advance of the whereabouts and times of his daily routine, will produce photo and video documentation, which will reach the gallery via Internet as if they were data received from a space mission.
The project is completed with the publishing of a book by the Artist (a modified replica of a children’s brochure, from the seventies dedicated to space travel) and the exhibition of a photographic triptic composed of a photo portrait autographed by Leonov, a revised image of the artist and a reproduction of “Le Socle du Mond” by Piero Canzoni (1961) a work which, in order to be fully apreciated, needs to be seen from a viewpoint external to our Planet - i.e. that of a spacewalker..


Giovanni Morbin divided his time working between the Veneto and Slovenia i. e. in a territory that is both geographically and economically on the edge of the art world. His works (actions/performances, objects, photographs) aim at modifying the behaviour and percepiton of both the artist himself and the onlooker.
Spacewalk is the sixth in a series of performances called Hybridisaction. The Hybridisactions involved pose the problem of communication in a radical way, widening the concept beyond human communication to include all living things, and even inanimate objects. In the first action (Bodybuilding, Lubiana, 1997), it was in fact an old house that was the interlocutor: “hybridizing” his body with the fabric of the building (cementing part of his arm into a wall for eight hours) the artist provided the wall with an appendix capable of feeling, or, if we turn the concept upside-down, giving himself a new solid, inorganic body.
The subsequent actions had as interlocutors a group of people, a stone, and various forms of lettuce.
Decidedly unspectacular, even when they involve a degree of physical hardship, Morbin’s often solitary actions remind one of Renaissance pantheism or the corresponding Romantic theories to the world of Nature: “Universal Surface” (the name he uses to includeall his works) is that of a continuous fabric, within which creatures are distinct but not separate.

Hybridisaction 5 - Spacewalk
18.03. - 31.03.2005
http: //www.superficietotale.it


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