Add Fire

Conceived as a compilation of 5 monographs, the catalogue for the 9th edition of Premio Furla constitutes a unique resource for discovering and understanding the work of each of the Prize finalists.

"Add Fire is the title – beautiful and destructive – that Jimmie Durham has dedicated to the ninth edition of the 2013 Premio Furla. In thinking about fire, countless images and metaphors immediately come to mind. The associations with this basic element are so numerous and so easy that it becomes paradoxical and difficult to put into words: fire that purifies, fire that brings light, the phoenix rising from its own ashes, the burning fire of passion, the initial fire of the Big Bang, the glow of volcanic lava, the lighting of bombs, fires and torches, the flame of a candle…
Jimmie Durham invites the award’s artists to gravitate towards one of the richest and most contradictory symbols of humanity: aiming for something new – for discovery and progress – it is unable to truly dominate with reason and science, the deepest and most elusive forces of nature. But we all know how much artists have always loved playing with fire. Add Fire echoes the need to start anew and wipe clean, characteristics of the Futurist years prior to the First World War. It recalls, as well, the informal research following the war, inspiring as both a vital force and a new means of technology: it is the flame that burns everything and becomes a fire; yet, it is also the flame that leaves traces of creation, from Klein’s “Monochrome”, Burri’s combustion, Cage’s silence, all the way to the total re-establishment of the Sixties and Seventies… I am thinking about Gruppo Zero and their way of resetting everything to escape the current system of common language and recognised forms. It is perhaps here that we find something belonging to the Add Fire proposed by Durham, something belonging to the urgency still felt today – the urgent need to carry out that which does not end in the creation of a work, but rather generates a flow of meaning able to spread beyond the work that has been done, re- emerging from the ashes, from the blackened fragments, from the darkness of the soot. Because, today, we long for the birth of something new. And rebirth can come from fire.
Perhaps, then, this is the profound, positive meaning inherent in that string of words, Add Fire, proposed by one of the most critical and caustic artists of the contemporary scene. With the flame of irony, he has turned centuries of presumption and Western colonial violence into ashes.
But doesn’t playing with fire ultimately mean playing with the origin of life?" (Chiara Bertola)