Hunting the Baron

Hunting the Baron refers to a novel by Italo Calvino about a man, the Baron, who decides to leave the city to live in the trees. He soon discovers that he enjoys living in the tree tops better than living on the ground, so he stays there, communicating with people below but refusing to come down. He is detached from urban life, viewing it from a di erent perspective. Pettena will exhibit a video of the Baron leaping from branch to branch through the tree tops, followed by someone we perceive but cannot see, someone who is unable to catch up with the Baron. He will also exhibit his Jungle junction installation, a bar built from green saplings and planks, which will focus on the fascination people who inhabit an urban environment have with the natural environment from which they are alienated. There will be large format photos of scenes from nature, each containing a discordant note: in one case a super eight lm camera: to represent the recording, analysing, studying and eventually coming to the defence of the natural environment; in another a record player, to produce sound. This re ects the futility of trying to conquer nature, much as Herzog does in his iconic film, Fitzcaraldo: the Conquest of the Useless, where nature always wins in the end. There will also be a performance in which Pettena will entrap a young woman within a wooden structure. This again speaks of the ways in which we are trapped within the urban environment. This installation is a meditation on the relationship between the urban and rural landscape and our perception of them. Alongside photography, video-art and installations, his work includes performances and site-speci c projects involving other players besides himself, often hailing from the artistic underground in which Pettena has identi ed a potential and an energy that he transfers and channels into a variety of situations, sparking a short-circuit in his audience’s senses. His art can be both massive and “destructive”, like his excavation inside the Gum studio in Carrara, or minimal, like his insertion of a record player into the desolate panorama of the arti cial lake of Santa Barbara, entitled Alla conquista dell’inutile (Conquering the Pointless).