On Sunday 27th of October at 10.30 am the exhibition opened of the Anotherview collective in the historical center of Alba (CN), in the splendid Coro della Maddalena, next to the 89th Alba White Truffle International Fair. Between presence and memory, contemporary immersion and experiential past, "The penultimate dinner and other stories" opens the doors - indeed the windows - on the wonders of everyday life in different scenarios of the world. Marco Tabasso, Tatiana Uzlova and Robert Andriessen, starting from different points of view and experiences in the world of art, communication and design, gave life to the collective and to the Anotherview project, which consists in the creation of "digital nomadic windows", each one of which tells a day in the life of a different place in the world.
Opened right after the event held between 13th and 14th of October on the long and lively convivial table set in a vineyard in front of the Unesco hills and the tower of Barbaresco, the exhibition stands in memory of the installation within which the theatrical staging entitled "The penultimate dinner - the Langhe Supper" was held. A performative and shared act, which for the first time enters the work of Anotherview, to celebrate the authenticity of the hills of Langhe Roero and Monferrato and the rarity of the White Truffle of Alba through the succession of twelve meals for twelve people and a master of ceremonies, seated on one side, following the iconography of the last supper. With a changing of scene every two hours for each new group of diners - from truffle hunters to members of the Nocciola delle Langhe confraternity, from presidents of medieval villages to nursery school children to personalities from the world of art, culture and enogastronomy - the long action of this participated theater has been filmed for twenty-four hours and will become object of the next work of Anotherview, a further "digital nomad window" that tells a day, in such case "theatricalized" and elevated to metaphor of the naturalistic beauty, of the Langhe culture and food and wine traditions, in perfect balance between tradition and innovation.
The memory of that event, on display, is entrusted to the six-meter long table conceived and created by the Italian- Swedish artist and architect Duilio Forte in the context of a visionary set design, which crosses the Coro della Maddalena. It is the memory of a cultural, theatrical and enogastronomic banquet that brings the signs, the traces of a collective experience animated by gestures, words, thoughts and tastings through the dishes, glasses and objects left.
The penultimate dinner at the Coro della Maddalena is suspended between the sacred and the profane. It inhabits the aura of the religious place based on sacred iconography of the last supper, reaffirming the human tensions between good and evil, as indeed happens in all the Anotherview digital windows. Because they narrate stories that are lived, observed, participated, that enter into the heart of everyday life to immortalize the identity of natural and man-made landscapes in the temporal flow of events, within which people play the role of concrete and real extras. What happens in that place will never be the same in any other day and the digital window rises to memory of a unique day! In an overall narrative that goes from places where festivals and parties take place that last all day, as in the case of the Langhe, to religious places, such as the Ganges in Varanasi, from landscapes in danger of extinction for environmental reasons, up to landscapes characterized by strong naturalistic poetics, such as the Okaukuejo waterhole in the Etosha national park in Namibia.
It is the latter, with the extraordinary passage of elephants, rhinos, giraffes and birds in the magical alternation of day and night, of animation and silence, to index the "other stories" affirmed in the title. Stories stretched between good and evil, of a humanity in search of a visionary elsewhere, which has the sacred taste of a reflection, of a conceptual, sensorial and emotional view open to daily existence as an act of prayer. A prayer that from the banquet table is catapulted onto the window open to Namibia, installed in the choir like an altar dedicated to the wonder of creation.
The installation in memory of the event that will be the subject of the new digital window in January 2020 and the "altar" dedicated to the African landscape, which characterize the exhibition in Alba, together with the other magnificent views of the world, will be part - as the artists affirm - "of a future catalog of 365 days of unique views selected following narrative criteria, facing problems and questions regarding the risk of the environment, the continuous and intense urbanization process in our civilization, but also simply trying to crystallize the beauty of a place at a specific moment in its history ".
The exhibition was created thanks to the support and collaboration of International Alba White Truffle Fair, the Piedmont Region, the Municipality of Alba and the Langhe Monferrato Roero Tourist Office.
SABRINA ZANNIER