Tobias Kaspar: The Street

Cinecittà Studio, Istituto Svizzero di Roma, Rome, Italy

THE STREET is articulated in a 150-meter-long open-air studio, used in recent decades for numerous film productions. While some parts are recognizable architecture of the Lower East Side, others compose a mosaic of different places and times. The location, with its traces of houses, stores, restaurants, bars, and hotels reminiscent of streets in Paris, London, Rome, or Los Angeles, is the basic structure and backdrop against which Tobias Kaspar builds his street organized in various scenes, according to a time sequence from 1863 to 2016, where the artist's works combine with the pre-existing elements of the set.

 

A green storefront - near the entrance to the Los Angeles prison and a Vini e Olii store in Rome - is transformed into a working bookstore, where magazines, postcards and books are sold. In front of a recently closed tea room, snacks and drinks are sold. On the steps of a typical New York red-brick building, a group of teenagers gathers, while the equivocal entrance to an abandoned house across the street welcomes an illegal bar. A little further down, a "Western-style shack" becomes a denim store next to Studio 9, which hosts the opening of an art exhibition.

 

The set, used as an exhibition space open to the public, presents the film industry as it is, on this side of the filmic artifice. In a continuous game of cross-references and bewilderment, between pop imagery, mass culture and the theatricalization of the global art world, through an exhausting use of humor, self-mockery, imitation, syncretism, appropriationism, Tobias Kaspar stages the extreme fiction of contemporary art.