Curated by BHMF
Nos Voyages Immobiles is an installation by Maurice Pefura invested in cycles of mobility, architectural stockpiling and aspirations of good fortune. The work brings together the sculptural figuration of the artist with his architectural based 2D works. The urban landscape, and the allusion to the waters of diaspora embed the space with layers of the timelessness and of contemporaneity riddled with the continuities of social and geographical movement of people in the world. Pefura grants us the opportunity to refect upon movement frozen in the stativity of claims of investment in social “progress”.
The title, in reference to collective travel and immobility, ground the viewer in a implicated state of inaction. The reflective pool of the floor piece and the rhythmic layers of the wall transcend the figure sunken in the shallow water and close the distance between aspirations towards the collectivity of tenement style accommodation and the desolating isolation of travel. The ropes that traverse the space force and choreograph the viewers movement and introduce a metaphysical understandings of memory and cultural baggage. Fortune and luck are embedded in the support for the wall painting. Composed of used lottery tickets of failed attempts to-get-rich quick or cyclical addictions to gambling this wall is unsurpassable and all encompassing at the same time.
Created as a site specific installation for the V° Edition of Black History Month Florence whose theme for 2020 is OBBLIGATO, a meditation on social obligations and the need for alternative narrations, this work takes on a call to action and a desire for proactive engagement in dragging the transnational conversation on migration from its stagnancy into new territory.
Maurice Pefura was born in Paris to Cameroonian parents, he lives and works in Milan. He is an architect by training but has always centered his work on painting and installations. Pefura’s work has been exhibited in several solo and group shows in spaces around the world, including: MAXXI, FM Centro per l’arte contemporanea, Dakar Biennial and the Smithsonian Museum.
February 11 – March 14 2020
mon-fri 10:00 am – 9:00 pm – free entrance
SRISA Gallery – Via San Gallo 53r, 50129 Firenze; Studio 84 – Via San Gallo 84 Firenze
055 4627374 – 055 5000380 info@santareparata.org – https://srisa.gallery