Elena Bellantoni

Elena Bellantoni. Ghostwriter

Curated by Fulvio Chimento.

Ghostwriter refers to a ghost from history, a sort of “re-evocation” of events expressed through symbolic figures of the human experience. This re-evocation is activated through the artist’s body, which invites us to reflect on the ways through which history can be recounted, remembering that “women are the unexpected bodies of history”, as maintained by Carla Lonzi.

Through the language of photography and auteur cinema, with incursions into sculpture and installation, the exhibition designed by Elena Bellantoni draws on the theme of the uncanny; it explores things that upset or alter social, physical or psychic nature, which disturb the human mind and soul, forces that are activated by leveraging ordinary fears, capable of creating conditioning, or even a “collective egregore”. It is as if history were being rewritten cyclically by the same hand, a hand that stays mysteriously in shadow, generating events that are an expression of perpetually opposing forces and infinitely replicable outcomes. Umberto Eco himself referred to “The eternal dimension of fascism” in his essay Eternal Fascism, not with reference to a specific historical regime, but to an archetype of thought and behaviour (Ur-Fascism), which is manifested today in camouflaged forms (in civilian clothes) through elements such as irrationalism, the rejection of criticism, the fear of diversity, machismo and populism.