PNF 08 – FOSCO GRISENDI. Stand your ground

Headline: Fosco Grisendi. Stand your ground
Authors / artists: Fosco Grisendi
Texts: Clare Serri, Emanuele Baistrocchi, Maria Cristina Robuschi, Sebastiano Simonini
Language: Italian, English
Translations: Fabio Colombo
Year: 2014
ISBN: 978-88-6057-260-8
Size: cm 16,5×23,5
Binding: paperback binding
Cover: cardboard
Pages: 64
Price: € 25.00

Also available in ebook:
ISBN: 978-88-6057-261-5
Format: PDF
Price: free download

The catalog is published on the occasion of the personal exhibition of Fosco Grisendi "Stand your ground", edited by Chiara Serri, Workshop of the Arts, Reggio Emilia, 10 January - 1 February 2015.

Stand your ground, that is, hold the position, do not take a step back. The new production by Fosco Grisendi is born from an American news event, aimed at investigating the fine line between truth and lies, between reality and fiction.
Trayvon Martin, seventeen year old African American, he is killed at the exit of a shop by a gunshot. The vigilante who shoots him is convinced that the boy is armed, but he only has a packet of candy in his pocket. At the end of a process that arouses many protests and raises racial issues, the guard is acquitted on the basis of the Stand your ground self-defense law, which allows an armed person to kill an alleged aggressor on the basis of the mere perception of danger for his safety.
A story that strongly affects Fosco Grisendi, leading him to investigate issues related to the excessive use of force and the abuse of power in Italian society. […]
Reality does not lend itself to a univocal interpretation. The critique of illusions goes hand in hand with a drastic distrust of the possibility of reaching an objective truth. So it is (if you like), Pirandello writes, alluding to the relativism of forms, to those masks, still current today, that correspond to the structures, to the conventions, to the roles imposed by common living.
Fascinated by the world of wrestling, Grisendi chooses this kind of struggle as a metaphor for contemporary society. A fight that has remarkable affinities with theatrical performance, from which he incorporates staging techniques, construction of characters and game of masks. It is difficult to understand the boundary between reality and fiction, difficult to understand how much the "resisting to the bitter end" of the wrestlers corresponds to sporting determination or spectacle.
interest in the natural element does not translate.