Recycle Group: Conversion

The Russian art duo Andrey Blokhin and Georgy Kuznetsov, otherwise known as the Recycle Group, staged an installation called Conversion at the church Saint Antonin, founded in the VII century.  At the ancient church’s sanctuary  Recycle Group presented the ruins of the XXI century. 

The project refers to the life of a modern man as it is in the age of the world web and new gadgets. Data transmission speed, constant data refreshing and availability with every seventh person on earth owning a smartphone have given birth to the cult of new technologies. The Recycle Group’s project compares the globalization of information networks to the conversion to some new ‘religion’ where the scope of information available in the virtual space is a new presiding deity.  It presents the all-consuming cult of Facebook as a real religion, complete with a sans-serif F cross and commandments based on the social network’s terms and conditions.

The show includes sculptures and bas-reliefs, in which figures of  ‘Neo-Apostles’ appear as the bearers of a new sacred knowledge manifested in the stream of virtual information. This  structure is sited in the traditional position of the church altarpiece. At the center is a giant Facebook ‘cross’.  Their sculptures and bas-reliefs take on the appearance of ancient monuments that display the ravages of time, as if artifacts from some lost and forgotten civilization. In the relief pictured below the ‘holy’ figures rise cell phone masts and by ironic coincidence there is an existing cell phone mast sited in the bell-tower of the church.

To make sculptures of the presumed ‘saints’, the preachers of the new technologies, as well as multi-figured bas-reliefs they made use of polyurethane, plastic mesh, rubber, polyethylene and new technologies.  Rubbish becomes art to be kept for future generations, while the artists seek to give their viewers an idea of the future traces to be left by the paradoxes of our own age, of what will go down in history.  The work is not merely a send-up of modern diversions; it explores how seemingly innocuous interactions with technology are mediating the way we see the world, as well as how our waste will one day communicate our reality to future generations. 

To make these reliefs they used a rubber mold taken from a live subject then cast it in a resin which they then cut apart.  You can check out a short teaser video of the creation of this exhibit  or look at other images online here.

Here are those mantis shrimp from the market earlier.

Time for lunch, halfway between Pointe di Rialto and Piazzo San Marco is Alle Testiere, a most unlikely part of Venice to find good food.  This is a classic osteria, only open on market days, food simply prepared from the freshest available.  Don't take my word for it, the novelist Donna Leon is a regular here, so must be Commissario Brunetti.

Gnocchi with shrimp.