Deborah Schamoni

The title chosen by the Milanese artist pays homage to an exhibition by Walter Albini in 1977 at the Eros Gallery in Milan, where the fashion designer chose to poke fun at fashion figures and at fashion itself, presenting a series of sculptures of dressed-up phalluses. The installation proposed by Davide consists of a series of marker drawings on paper, a corpus he has been working on since 2013, going back to certain subjects and accumulating various versions of them. In just a few strokes, the drawings sum up allegories between desire and body parts, penises that form the fingers of a hand, buttocks, mouths, smiles and swimming costumes, as well as evening gowns worn by phalluses. Accompanying this drawing project is a series of drapes evoking the atmosphere of PLANET SEX – the sex shop that occupied the gallery premises up until a few months ago – reconstructed through images found online, in which an acrylic curtain stood out leading down to the basement. For Davide, the drape serves as the key to the installation. It becomes a threshold, almost a portal leading the visitor towards the ‘other’, whether it is a bare space or the intimate and personal evocation captured by a drawing.

What follows is the transcription of a conversation at a distance between Davide and his friend the artist Tomaso De Luca. A tribute to the famous phone calls of Franca Valeri, in which each voice blends into the other and turns it into dialogue in a continuous flow of communication. 

Hello, darling – can you hear me?
I was just asking, you know, with all the concrete blocks in these Neubauten, the line comes and goes…
Listen, I still need your measurements… Yes, for the dress… Height, width, depth… Just as if I were taking those of a piece of furniture. You would undoubtedly be a nice console table…What?
What do you mean you haven’t got them? And do you not have a measuring tape to hand?
Ah…Well in that case, seeing as you’re in the norm, I could use one of those generic figures, those little bodies…
One of the Neufert men, you know? Or, better still, the highly detailed drawings by Mr Dreyfuss… No, don’t be silly, the Canon of Polykleitos is sooo out of fashion. We are modern after all, are we not?
Yes.
Yes, I’m telling you, Modern, with a capital M, no less! Haven’t you noticed that we have become more slender as time goes by? That the Vitruvian body has finally evaporated… Along with machines, a ghost was ushered in: a changeable being, made up of a line or two, no more than hinted at…
Yes, OK!
And of course that was essential to overcoming the shock of modernity, as soon as we realised we had been made obsolete… We felt we had to keep up with the times and shed weight… And after all, what better way is there to travel light than to cast out our innards and leave our features at home… We’re left with our skin, silky smooth, like a drape, accompanying us seamlessly into the new world… We had to keep up with the times, postponing our inevitable disappearance, while cars and objects became ever more sparkly…
Positively g-l-e-a-m-i-n-g!
And yes, darling, because you cannot say products did not undergo a quite Copernican revolution… All of a sudden it became clear that since our desire traced an elliptical orbit around a rediscovered centre of gravity –
i.e. things – that made us, at most, peripheral… c-u-s-t-o-m-e-r-s.
Desireful, desiring and much-desired Customers.
Yes, of course, first of all we were whittled down, becoming hypothetical figures in a hypothetical world, one suddenly all the more real than had expected, but then we regained form and structure once more, yet we had changed…
Are you still there? Oh, there you are. I couldn’t hear you…
Do you remember, darling? Of course, we were no longer generic but once more disciplined, albeit without the rules or restrictions of the past… The key to it all was enjoyment, of everything and everyone!
It was our ambition that guided us, the hope of finding ourselves, hidden somewhere, under the chair, among the folds of some garment, on top of a designer table, inside the wardrobe… It was the desire to find ourselves in things tingling under the… the…What was it again? Ah, that’s right: the skin…
I hope you’re taking care of yours, are you? I bought myself a cream… which works miracles!
Absolutely not!
No, darling – I’m not going to let you go to the opening naked… Calm down! Although even nudity is an interesting construct… Do they still tell that old wives’ tale that the body exists a priori and that it’s quite unlike objects? Doesn’t that make you giggle? That people might believe in a body without clothes, without furnishings, without switches? As if life did not revel exclusively in the continuous and vibrant encounter with things, as if it were to suddenly cease to burn in the lamp lit on the bedside table or in the armpit of young men…
You’ll call me a dirty old man, I know… But I’m right…
Because the customer is always right… And we, as undying customers, have learnt to desire everything that can tell us who we are… The more specific the object is, the better our soul is expressed in a new, unexpected form… And if we cannot but partake in this extenuating process of knowledge, if we can never be rid of it, not even when we are alone, at home, then perhaps we might just as well have fun…
Yes, that’s quite right… With those exercises of yours to stay in shape…
Making the drapes ripple like taut muscles, bending coat hangers are turning them into lovers, mistaking electric sockets for private suites with a view, portraying the Neufert men in their most prohibited activities, protecting light bulbs from venereal disease…
Of course, sooner or later it will be our turn, and luckily enough we can laugh about it!
And so if you’d care to give me the measurements of the jacket, or the staircase, or the mattress or the belt, that will do…
Yes, darling, because believe it or not, the body is also and above all this…
In this sense, the body is always there.
Even now, as I speak to you and you are neither here nor there.
Because, as would happen to Franca, there’s no one on the other end of the line.
But that’s not a problem, because it’s the telephone I’m speaking to, and it listens to me and answers back.
And if the object answers, you know as well as I do, this means it will all turn out for the best. Won’t it?
Ciao.
Clunk.

Text: Martina Simeti, Milan
Photos: Andrea Rossetti
Courtesy of the artist and Martina Simeti