RISORGIMENTO Milan Virtual Art Summer - a project hosted by Massimo De Carlo VSpace presenting exhibitions by the most interesting contemporary art gallery and spaces in Milano.

“At a crossroad he glimpsed the sky to the west, above the sea. There was Venus, wrapped in her turban of autumn mist. She was always faithful, always waiting for Don Fabrizio on his early morning outings, at Donnafugata before a shoot, now after a ball.”
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard

“Was there even the remotest chance of stopping the rise of the north? At all events, every capitalist development of this order seems, by reaching the stage of financial expansion, to have in some sense announced its maturity: it was a sign of autumn.”
Fernand Braudel, The Perspective of the World

Fanta-MLN is pleased to furnish a solo presentation of works by Noah Barker from six exhibitions over the past five years. “A False Belief in the Stars” constellates moments of teleology and the artist’s practice, under the auspices of the proclaimed Risorgimento.

Entering, users are greeted by the absent crowd of "Transparent. Open. Flexible. Crowded. Userfriendly", from “a room like any other”(1). The audio is an excerpt from the minute following the Pompidou Center’s first opening of its doors, January 31, 1977. Its title serves dually to describe the structure and as a distorted echo of slogans from the May of nine years prior.
(dispatch) sets a horizon retaining the original vinyl format of its exterior window installation when it interrupted a city view. The text is a diary entry from a site of didactic divergence in a futureless present introduced in the prior exhibition “Prologue: Divergence Motor/Albatross Alarm”(2).

It’s better to know where to go and not how than how but not where is above the horizon on our west wall. A second work with the same title exists but is not present, only distinct by its required installation on an east facing wall, completing the motif of first and last stars of morning and night. Quoting a line relayed by a guerilla of Jose Delores’s revolutionary band in Queimada! (1969), the phrase of the title was likely penned by the film’s screenwriter Franco Solinas. In the exhibition “More Spaghetti Please, Comrade”(3) the work accompanied Franco Solinas Constellator, a mutable montage of plots from the writer’s oeuvre, not unlike the current conjuring.

Beneath this beacon the sound of a piano lingers. Albatross Alarm is an automated rework of Fleetwood Mac’s 1968 single that scored a slideshow of images and text which, with altered lighting, composed the exhibition “A Projectionin the DDF”(4). Displaced from the pavilion of “We Walked Toward the Music and Away from the Party”(5), Untitled (Rhodiacéta reception) is set askew in the center of the room. The Bertoia network of its illuminated facade refers to both the seating at the screening of SLON’s (Chris Marker) Be Seeing You (1968), when its audience of workers criticized the film from which spawned Groupe Medvedkine, and Barker’s sometimes collaborator Wyatt Niehaus’s Common Assembly (2016). Rhodiacéta is the factory SLON filmed at in Besançon, a city Marker and much of the French left would visit several years later when the workers at the LIP watch factory set off on a self-management experiment and decade long struggle.

Adjacent to a view of some fictive exterior is one of two photographs excerpted from “Sometimes A Great Notion”(6), an exhibition as book review produced with Niehaus on a history of the LIP workers. For those who could hear them, the bells of the church defined the boundaries of the village and work day shares an axis with another photo from the exhibition hung opposite, With the technical object, we must do what we do with the aesthetic object.

(1) Air de Paris, Paris, FR, 2018
(2) First Continent, Baltimore, US, 2015
(3) Lodos, Mexico City, MX, 2019
(4) AndNow, Dallas, US, 2016
(5) Fanta-MLN, Milan, I, 2019
(6) AndNow, Dallas, US, 2018