Davide Sgambaro

Today has started the new series Too much and not the mood, a series of site-specific actions that investigates the role of the body. These actions will create an online archive. This project stems from discussions with Canadian writer Durga Chew-Bose, specifically through her 2017 essay entitled Too much and not the mood. This title is an excerpt from Virginia Woolf’s diary in a passage in which the writer vented against the constant editorial requests to readapt her texts, expressing with this sentence her dissent and hinting at a great feeling of incomprehension and loneliness.

Chew-Bose tackles generational problems with the lightness of a poetic narrative, almost epistolary and diaristic. That descriptive lightness does not, however, match the sensations described, and one senses that the individual fails in his own eyes, annihilating himself. The indoctrination to renunciation, therefore, annihilates the individual, transforming him into a hyper-performing body capable of concealing feelings and planning and replicating every action to optimize a temporality that is no longer private.

Too much and not the mood is a new series of works by the artist who, taking his cue from social streaming imagery, collects acts of resistance in response to generational issues in an online archive of short actions. With this series, Sgambaro creates over time an archive of actions that can be consulted online and returns to the exhibition only the installation set stripped of the performing body. In this way, the artist invites the viewer to investigate each gesture and to reflect on the superficiality and generosity of the attention given today.
In the case of Too Much and Not the Mood (Choosy), the exhausted body sighs after inhaling helium from a balloon. The action, which is intended to summarise a dramatic generational situation, is emphasized and made comical by the effect of the helium on the tone of the voice, thus making the sigh lose urgency and credibility and ridiculing the individual.

For each action, in addition to the installation, two series of photographic prints are produced for consultation on request: Too much and not the mood #1 (without you), photographic detail of the setting without the presence of the body, and Too much and not the mood #1 (despite you), photographic detail of the body while performing the action.