DESCRIPTION GENERALE

In the corridor between the China and Japan galleries, Francesco Simeti presents a new site-specific installation that concludes the journey begun at the MAO with the first edition of Declinazioni Contemporanee.
Description Generale (A Historical Map of the Other) consists of wallpaper, a series of fabric elements, and luminous glass objects that accompany visitors on a journey that traces cultural history across geographical and temporal boundaries.
The work, acquired as part of the MAO’s permanent collections, offers a radical reinterpretation of the history of the Silk Roads, interweaving reflections on Orientalist appropriations of this ancient “Eurasian crossroads.” Description Generale (A Historical Map of the Other) draws inspiration from thousands of powerful, unconventional, and “scathing” iconographic sources taken from books, artifacts, sculptures, paintings, and prints that document the history of Western taste appropriating cultural elements from Asian tradition. The result is a mapping in which the other appears as the exotic, “judged” and “martyred” by the Western gaze that flattens everything and renders it in images of an imperialist self.
The luminous objects, created in collaboration with WonderGlass, take the form of pagodas through various techniques, from the Murano tradition of glass blowing, which gives them lightness, to more modern casting techniques, which accentuate their materiality, evoking the image of a suspended landscape that accompanies and amplifies the scenic dimension of the wallpaper and fabrics.