“We do not work for gain,” answered the Fox. “We work only to enrich others.”
“To enrich others!” repeated the Cat.
“What good people,” thought Pinocchio to himself. And forgetting his father, the new coat, the A-B-C book,
and all his good resolutions, he said to the Fox and to the Cat:
“Let us go. I am with you.”
If we were to cut the strings of a marionette, we would see it collapse to the ground, abandoned to a posture no body would ever naturally assume. Its movement, deprived of the apparatus that sustains it, would reveal its dependence. The marionette is a paradoxical figure: it speaks through someone else’s voice and moves by external forces, and in this dependence it unsettles the distinction between object and subject, between the one who animates and the one who is animated.
Over the course of its history, the puppet has served different and at times seemingly contradictory functions. On the one hand, it embodies one of the most immediate forms of animism: an object endowed with a soul, a voice, an intention, to the point of producing the illusion of a subjectivity of its own. On the other, precisely through its artificial, caricatural and disproportionate nature, the puppet has been an instrument for the carnivalisation of the world. It can distort the character it portrays until its grotesque traits become visible, just as it can use its artificial body to mock the structures, roles and hierarchies that organise reality. In this sense, the puppet does not merely represent the world: it can carnivalise itself and, through this distortion, help to deconstruct it.
All together: “Goodbye Master!” moves within this double tension: animating the inanimate, and distorting through artifice whatever is being represented. The exhibition brings together artistic practices that question the relationship between command, animation and subjectivity, exploring what happens when an apparently inert object or subject is invested with agency, a history, a desire or a voice.
Opening the exhibition is Primal Fears, two large, monstrous, deformed ceramic hands by Anita Muçolli, resembling two giant spiders stripped of their web. The hand is where the body enters into relation with the world, but also the first tool through which something can be grasped, moved, built, commanded. Muçolli’s hands neither hold nor move anything: they are themselves the product of fabulation. A little further on stands a rocking horse, perhaps one of the animals most closely tied, in Western culture, to the idea of power: mount, military instrument, sign of prestige. Here it appears as a toy animal in reflective metal, taking us back to that form of childhood animism in which an object can become a companion, a steed, a living being. Beside it are the bridle and blinkers of a real horse: like the strings of a marionette, a device of command that restricts the gaze, directs movement and limits its possibilities.
