From 5 pm on Friday 30 September 2022, Casa Morra. Archivi d’Arte Contemporanea in Naples will be hosting “Reverie” in the performative action Sogno 5: Icaro. The project, with a text by Piero Tomassoni, has been curated by Isabella Morra.

Concluding her cycle devoted to dreams, conducted over the years as a privileged alphabet of research, this Tuscan artist proposes a contemporary reinterpretation of the Icarus of Greek mythology, dedicating to the city of Naples her latest dream-themed performance. Initially suspended from a crane in the forecourt in front of the former chapel at Casa Morra, Reverie will re-enact for the audience Icarus’s fateful flight.

The mythological Icarus assumes the burden of disobedience to the world’s constraints, rules, and laws. It is a challenge to what is reassuring – the desire to surpass human limits, to look upwards and go beyond. But it is also the recklessness and impudence of a youthful idealist whose naïveté is transformed in Reverie’s work into a dreamlike experience that acquires a totally new and topical meaning.

Her Icarus is “contemporary”: a genderless figure with prosthetic arms whom the artist has also represented in some of her opere-indivenire. She will appear as a majestic red wax sculpture with a cast around her torso. To this are attached two wings and a World War II parachute, to which the incipit of the biography of this new Icarus, that is, the story that gave life to the work as a whole and to the performance itself, has been stitched onto a satin insert in the artist’s own handwriting.

The story of the project, as in all Reverie’s work, thus originates from the desire to construct collective dimensions and memories that become a sharing zone between artist and audience. In the open space of Casa Morra, the relationship between Reverie and the audience will be consolidated in a communion of emotional tension through an empathic relationship in which energies merge with the artist’s body.

The myth of flight, of touching the intangible, the sky, would not exist without its opposite: the fall. They are antimeres of the same root: the push toward the beyond, a journey that humanity has shared since its beginnings (Isabella Morra). The contemporary Icarus, however, takes his place in history in a new way, celebrating life with its difficulties, loneliness, burdens and sufferings; he is every human. For centuries, “Icarus” has been the therapeutic and sapiential song passed on from master to disciple, from plant to healer in the Amazon. He has now become the mantra of Reverie (Piero Tomassoni).

Sogno 5: Icaro
curated by Isabella Morra
with text by Piero Tomassoni
Casa Morra. Archivi d’Arte Contemporanea
Salita San Raffaele 20/c, 80136 Naples
Friday 30 September, 5 pm