Page 113 - Art Review

Carola Bonfili 3412 Kafka

Smart, Rome 23 November – 23 February

3412 Kafka takes its title from an asteroid conveyed the boundlessness of the human machinery. It is characteristic of Bonfili that
discovered, in 1983, by US astronomers Randolph imagination and its capacity to transform the viewer is left without prompts to navigate
Kirk and Donald Rudy; they named it after worldly materials into something like heavenly this hinterland.
Franz Kafka, a writer so famous that he has bodies.In a separate room, six sculptural In the third and final room a single virtual-
his own adjective – Kafkaesque, used outside landscapes are displayed. Five of them, modestly reality headset features the six-minute 3412
of literature to indicate phenomena ranging scaled and placed on plinths, evoke scale models Kafka (2017), set to a soundtrack by sound and
from the complex to the uncanny to the bizarre. of alien landscapes. The pieces, again titled installation artist Francesco Fonassi. Following
The asteroid, which became known to the Rome- simply 3412 Kafka (2017), were made of resin the aesthetic of a first-person open-world VR
born Bonfili while researching the Prague-born mixed with marble, pigments and salt, and game, it takes the viewer through an earthlike
author, was used as the inspiration for two thermoformed using industrial processes used landscape, familiar yet somehow unsettling.
workshops for local schoolchildren she to mould plastic; they convey crude architectural The positioning of the sun follows an acceler-
conducted with educator Irene Bianchetti in features, evoking the dens of humanoid ated diurnal cycle, leading to a slight temporal
the peripheral Roman quarter of Quarticciolo creatures. Much like Kafka’s own works, they disorientation as the viewer is flown through
in 2015 and at Smart in 2017. rely on the audience’s innate ability to relate a seemingly postapocalyptic world of forests,
Drawings made by the attendees of these a scenario to their own experience and imagina- plains and, at one point, a broken industrial
workshops are shown looped on two projectors tive capacities. A sixth, rather larger work platform seemingly linked to mineral extraction
(Stellario #1, 2015, and Stellario #2, 2017) in one (3412 Kafka, 2017), made of wood and cement, or construction. We finally arrive at a lagoon,
of Smart’s three rooms, alongside a looped has a more terrestrial feel, being based on the an undefined glowing geometric form glowing
video displayed on a tablet, itself entitled 3412 artist’s personal language derived both from at its centre before the video comes to an end.
Kafka (2015). The latter work documents the memory and her imagination (as stated in an As Bonfili explains in the aforementioned inter-
culmination of the Quarticciolo workshop, in interview featured in the exhibition catalogue). view, she is interested in ‘the ability to recreate,
which the names of imaginary planets conceived Bombed-out or ruined warehouse-scale build- for just a few minutes, a temporal suspension
by the workshop participants were signalled ings, which appear postindustrial, are depicted that stops the user’s constant flow of thoughts,
in Morse code using automated spotlights almost empty, acting as a kind of tabula rasa to and above all my own’. Her confidence that
positioned in two adjacent apartment blocks, be occupied by the audience’s own dreamworld. her own personal dreamworld will speak to
beaming from top to bottom of their facades. One of these six modern ruins houses a number the viewer pays off, as the gaps between her
As the buildings thus appeared to converse of crudely rendered single beds in rows; others explicit references act as fodder for the viewer’s
with space, the Morse code performance contain what appears to be broken industrial imagination. Mike Watson

3412 Kafka (still), 2017, VR, 6 min 30 sec, sound project by Francesco Fonassi.
Courtesy Smart – polo per l’arte, Rome

January & February 2018 113