Francesco Bonami is the artistic director of Pitti Immagine and senior curator at large of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. On the occasion of Pitti Woman Nº6, he offered this insightful, elegant prose to preface Haider Ackermann’s carnet de voyage, the inspiration journal created for A Carte Blanche called ‘Opium’.
Forget about me – The candle’s been snuffed.
The Emperor, the mesmerizing book by Ryszard Kapuscinski on the last days of Ethiopia’s last Emperor Hailie Selassie begins with those words borrowed from a Gypsy tango. Like a candle the old Emperor has been ’snuffed’ from History. The writer describes the sounds of footsteps echoing in the empty palace. The Emperor abandoned by everybody – alone. Power deprived of the powerless, it’s like an empty barrel.
Haider Ackermann’s deserted Palazzo is romantic, mesmerizing and terrifying at the same time. The abandoned building has been transformed into a ghostly place. Ackermann’s vision has the rhythm of a Gypsy tango and the sensual feeling of the hazy light of North Africa. A Fata Morgana, a mirage moving solitary within the walls of a Renaissance Palace. If you could imagine a person where the brain has been switched with the heart you could envision Haider Ackermann’s way of seeing, thinking, feeling. The heart is thinking. The brain is pounding. In Florence, the ghosts of Jean Genet, Hailie Sellassie and Arthur Rimbaud are getting together, surrounded by many Fata Morganas that float over the soft horizon of a liquid desert.
Haider Ackermann is celebrating the walk of shame of people whose days weighed over their nights. Again from The Emperor an image which mirrors Ackermann’s universe: “I see him now as he walks, stops, walks again, lifts his head upward as though absorbed in prayer. O God, save me from those who, crawling on their knees, hide a knife they would like to sink into my back. But how can God help? All the people surrounding the Emperor are just like that – on their knees, and with knives. It’s never comfortable on the summits. An icy wind always blows, and everyone crouches, watchful lest his neighbour hurl him down the precipice.”
A Palazzo that became a body. A Palazzo that felt like a person. The attic turned into a skull. The people moving inside like thoughts, nightmares, desires.
People wearing clthes, shedding their skins. Like in Fellini’s Roma women move like leaves, men standing like branches. Women and men with arms like fluttering wings – ready to fly somewhere else.
Another ride into another journey somewhere else. The Palazzo dreams of being a desert, the only architecture the dunes, decorated by a molding made of clouds.
Candles turning into stars. The steps become silent, no more echoing of the empty room. Emptiness starts filling the space. Silence searching for the shade.
Women moving into men. Men moving into women. Clothes like flags flapping into the wind. Nobody’s talking. Nobody’s pounding. Everybody’s feeling. Someone is walking in the Palazzo or is it just me, following myself?
Haider Ackermann sails up the river of fashion like the Marlowe of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, inside the jungle of moods, memories, tales and legends. Noises all around. They could be lovers hiding, they could be insects crawling. Leaves, bushes, hair, sweat and breath, fog.
Darkness, and again the light of another candle ready to be snuffed, ready to be forgotten again.
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