Alex Cecchetti
Tamam Shud
In Tamam Shud, a murder mystery artist’s novel by Alex Cecchetti, the narrator realises he is dead and decides to investigate the causes of his own death. In order to create the narrative, Cecchetti devised a two-year-long art project in which the present exhibition constitutes a central device in producing the upcoming artist’s novel. Tamam Shud will be published in early 2018. In other words, by visiting this exhibition, you are witnessing the artist’s writing process at work!
The exhibition’s performative nature is three-fold. First, a series of rooms contains pieces (dance bars, doors and cabinets) that, like music scores, are activated by the spectators’ participation. So please, don’t feel shy about interacting with the pieces when prompted. Some additional events, such as a synaesthesia concert and a dance performance, will take place at different times during the exhibition. The third performative aspect focuses on a couple of detectives who carry out their investigation, observing the events unfolding during the show, and communicating these to the artist who will use them as fodder for the writing of his novel. It is said that the detectives are in possession of a special key that can open and disclose secret parts of the exhibition.
- Detectives:
- – This job is killing me.
- – You mean waiting for something to happen?
- – I mean following, shadowing, putting together pieces of a life which is not mine.
- – No murder is perfect, we’ll end up finding the mistake.
- – What if it’s just his game? See? If no one knows, it never happened. Look how desperately he wants us to know that he died. Otherwise how could we ever know that he lived . . .
