HO L’IMPRESSIONE CHE MI MANCHI QUALCOSA

“I Get the Feeling That I’m Missing Something” is not just a title, it’s also an invitation: an urging to repair something, to reflect, and to realign. The exhibition space is turned into a construction site consisting in marks, materials and surfaces that seek to piece the world back together again, in an awareness that every action we perform is an act of resistance, an attempt to rewrite our reality. The exhibition recreates the experience of a kind of vertigo, the kind that stems from an absence. Not a rhetorical absence involving nostalgia or idealisation, but a real absence, a fault line that traverses our present time, and that the language of art can probe with precision.
“I Get the Feeling That I’m Missing Something” declares a flaw in our perception. There is no absence of an object, but rather a lack of the ability to name the object. Magni sets out to give space to the impermanence of any state of completeness and totality. The date chosen for the opening, 25 April, Italy’s Liberation Day, has been chosen to highlight the importance of the search for something which slips away from us, no sooner than it has been given.
Thus the show personifies this state of suspended animation: walking along a floor of pink bubble wrap, the viewer already finds themself physically interacting with the gallery. This fragile membrane acts as a threshold and a filter: it retains as it releases, it absorbs as it reflects. In a space that is transformed in this way, the materials become loaded with meaning. Nails, magnets, sandpaper and lights are not mere components of construction, they are measuring devices, tools of friction and orientation.
In the works on view, viewing is a demanding practice. To quote Georges Didi-Huberman, “looking is never easy”. And it is never a neutral exercise. The works slow down and defy codification, they hover somewhere on the borderline between being there to be seen, and vanishing from sight. One gets the impression that something is concealed therein, and that they have something to say to us for that very reason. Each work is a tool for thinking, a means for questioning the present. It is not a case of seeking a resolution, it is about keeping open the possibility of transformation. Because that which is missing – that which we lack – is also a political responsibility. Omission is never entirely innocent. There is such a thing as a right to the invisible, the unspeakable, the slow pace of doubt. Accordingly the show constitutes a liminal space between the visible and the invisible, between document and outline, between what is left and what fades away. In this sense absence is not a defect, it is something that contributes towards producing something. A field to be traversed, not a void to be filled in.
Those who enter this space face a question, not an answer. And that question – “What do I lack?” – is perhaps the only one that is worth continuing to ask.