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AS SIMPLE AS YOUR LIFE USED TO BE
'As Simple As Your Life Used To Be' Description Four elderly Italian politicians are interviewed, and all asked about sacrifice. After a life in the public eye, each reflects on the choices they made, about the sacrifices, both intellectual and actual, they chose. They come up with a surprising range of visual motifs – for example, Oscar Mammi, the former Minister of Telecommunications of the mid-80s Craxi administration, locates sacrifice in the figure of the hermaphrodite. This, like the other visual motifs, is the basis of a series of sculptures, imagined for an under-performing school on the outskirts of Rome, made by Chris Evans as part of his recent project, ‘As Simple As Your Life Used To Be.’ An additional part of the project takes the form of a short film. We follow a doomed love story between two teenagers in a Roman school. The girl is besotted, the boy is distracted. But he has reason, for his mind seems to be in the control of an unspecified political agency. In her confusion our heroine turns to a friend for advice as to whether she should make her ultimate sacrifice – turning her lover over to the authorities. But then what other choice are you left with when your lover’s whispered sweet-nothings sound suspiciously like John Robinson’s 18th century text, ‘Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All Religions and Governments in Europe’? Whilst the film presents a poetic scenario of school children confronting real sacrifice, the sculptures embody calculated illusions of sacrifice envisioned by political leaders of recent history. If we imagine the school where these sculptures might appear, as functioning objects, we think of an environment and time where children become aware of the choices opening up in front of them. Bewildering, empowering, terrifying. Childhood was easy, eating food, going to the toilet, playing, fighting, sleeping. But now the future is less clear, the future is symbolised by an indeterminately gendered stand tap, in the form of an anthurium, that appears in your school mysteriously at the start of what seemed to be just another term. TITLES OF WORKS: Repeat Horizon Warm Hermaphrodite Portrait of Thomas Carlyle as a Climbing Wall
School Netball Uniform The School of Improvement
In collaboration with the British School at Rome, STORE Gallery – London, Objectif Exhibitions – Antwerp << GO BACK |
