Amelia LiCavoli has been researching Aldo Tambellini and Otto Piene’s 1968 installation Black Air for more than a decade. This work is an electronic environment that was reconstituted from archive documents for the exhibition in the large room on the first floor. It was in fact only activated once, in 1968, in an experimental venue in New York called the Black Gate Theater. It plunges visitors into a semi-dark environment, illuminated by the light of screens projecting videos on the wall or on monitors, where abstract images are revealed (the gestures of a dancer wearing electric lamps, images of manipulated electronic signals). Around the video installation, inflatable trees raise their bare branches towards the ceiling, with a discontinuous breeze blowing through them. A light placed at the foot of these ‘trees’ turns the air inside them phosphorescent. This work takes its title from black air, a material that has no colour, luminosity or form, but which contains within it a pure potential, a raw creative energy.
This historic installation is the central and intellectual pivot of a body of work that also approaches this notion of black air, this immaterial and creative energy. Hans de Wit’s drawings evoke a cosmology, phenomena of explosions, events on a massive scale that go beyond the human scale while having an impact on it.
Nothing is Possible by Semiconductor. Photo: Andrès Lejona
Further on, the pierced and illuminated panels of Semiconductor’s interior have a very seductive aesthetic. They represent cosmic maps, galaxies recorded by scientists who map the universe on the basis of changes in electromagnetic radiation. These panels are therefore representations of expanding universes driven by dark energy, representations of places that we barely understand and that are difficult to grasp.
Finally, take a look at Max Kuiper’s installation, a multimedia presentation of z\w\a\r\t magazine nr.29- Black Air Issue. It’s a spatial installation made up of a succession of transparent polyethylene sheet modules housing images, videos, sounds and objects, as well as a performance and a publication.
Until 5 January 2025, at the Casino Luxembourg.
This article was originally published in .