Published by Damiani/Perrotin. Text by Elisabeth Lebovici, Françoise Ninghetto, Marc-Olivier Wahler, Jade Lindgaard, Fabrice Stroun, Anaïd Demir, Valérie Mavridorakis, Emmanuel Grandjean, Annemarie Reichen, Philip Ursprung, Gabi Scardi, Stéphanie Moisdon Trembley, Frank Perrin, Pierre Bal-Blanc, Isabelle Sbrissa, Pascale Jeanneret, Jerome Sans, Michele Robecchi.
Italian artist Gianni Motti (born 1958) creatively feigns responsibility for natural or accidental phenomena that far exceed the possible actions of a human being--an earthquake, or the explosion of the Challenger shuttle in 1986, for example. This publication documents these provocative and manipulative performances.
Gianni Motti (*1958) has celebrated his own funeral, masqueraded as a professional soccer player, spoken in the name of the people of Indonesia at the UN Human Rights Convention, claimed responsibility for earthquakes, and repeatedly referred to himself as a kind of terrorist infiltrating a system to implode it from within. The events he subverts, with surgical precision, can be of political, cultural, or social character. The audience and its horizon of expectation are not to be pandered to ñ Gianni Motti does not see himself as an artist who partakes in the culture of spectacle like some court jester, but as an activist who unveils the functions of different systems. Gianni Mottiís actions oscillate between the rational and the irrational, between irony and provocation, between rumor and misunderstanding. Which is why Mottiís events are experienced mainly through the narrative and illustrative potential of photographs made by onlookers or the press.This book brings together for the first time a large selection of images and documentation to provide an overview of Motti's actions. Published with the Migros Museum f¸r Gegenwartskunst, Zurich.
Gianni Motti