clemente ciarrocca

selected work

writing

information

IF TOMORROW’S SUN FINDS YOU WITHIN MY BOUNDARIES

Obelus 2, Berlin
with James Krone

26th April - 17th May 2025

press release and works list
Politics in the Closet - script, transferred to sound for If Tomorrow’s Sun Finds You Within My Boundaries
Contemporary Art Library
Preview - Reya Guts on Clemente Ciarrocca and James Krone at Obelus 2, Berlin

Photos by Max Eulitz


[…] If Tomorrow’s Sun Finds You Within My Boundaries brings together works by two Berlin-based artists sharing a common, pivotal interest: the at once personal and institutional process of subject formation that takes shape through sight. Working within the frame of the experimental project Obelus’ second location in the city, Ciarrocca and Krone interact to evidence the conventional viewing experience as a liminal system where looking has become a reciprocal exchange. […] What emerges is a critical meditation on how today's rapid-fire viewing practices have fundamentally altered the consequences of and around seeing.

[…] Emanating from a locked closet positioned by the gallery's entrance, Politics in the Closet with Enchanted Mirror (2025) provides the exhibition's theoretical and emotional ground. A collaborative piece, this is a 54-minute sound composition, also available as a printed handout, which visitors experience in the space as a disembodied dialogue emerging from behind closed doors, beyond a clear boundary. Featuring AI-generated voices transferred from text through neural text-to-speech models, this composition extends the exhibition's exploration of ready-mades into the realm of sound and personality. The artificial voices stage a conversation between five figures (identified only as A, L, G, D, and J in the transcript) who have locked themselves inside a closet "to get sober, forget the world (too big, too much anyway) and experience total darkness." Working as a sort of epic literary reference to the material world of the room, their dialogue weaves together etymological investigations on pornography, reflections on sovereign power, and intimate confessions, creating a dense theoretical fabric that both explicates and complicates the exhibition's visual components, in a fashion typical of Ciarrocca’s practice that Krone taps into smoothly.

[…] As one moves further along the perimeter of the room, a second set of biometric data encoded again as title for Ciarrocca's second wall work fully establishes a dimension at once institutional and personal, clinical and visceral to the exhibition's exploration of viewing and consumption. Representing Heart Rate, Respiratory Rate, Skin Conductance, and Pupil Dilation, these titles quantify physiological states associated with pre-action arousal and post- orgasm comedown. The data was predicted by a neural model provided with the artist’s physical, professional and emotional profile at the time of the works’ assembling. Such numerical codification of bodily responses hosts another cringe paradox in generating the feeling of an almost institutional intimacy, which reduces complex somatic experiences to data points while simultaneously unveiling the body's involuntary (or voluntary?) responses to stimulus. Upon close inspection, one realizes the bottom half of this second, post-orgasm work, Hr: 71, Rr, 26, Sc: 12, Pd: 43 (2025) overlays an image from the Piazzale Loreto events of 1945 (where Mussolini's corpse was publicly displayed and mobbed by the crowd, almost exactly 80 years prior to the exhibition's opening) over a stock image of a darkened, undone bed, set within the contours of a generic bedroom traced in graphite. Like all haunting images, this one manifests in the shape of a trap, or a trigger pulled through nuanced observation, creating an unsettling yet intuitive juxtaposition between political and intimate rationale, between historical momentum and personal libido, between liberation and the utterly compromising indulgence in violence and injury. Like any other ‘petit mort’, Ciarrocca’s overlay conduces pleasure and death drives along a single, throbbing bundle of rawness.

— excerpts from the exhibition preview by Reya Guts