Damnatio Memoriae

From the Latin, damnatio memoriae describes an act of erasure from the historical record reserved for
those who have brought dishonor to the Roman State. Employed as the most stringent punishment for
treason, damnatio memoriae physically razes all traces of an individual from society, typically through
the destruction a statue’s physiognomy or the abrasion of inscribed monuments. Throughout the past
two decades, Sassolino has developed a body of work that examines the relationship between industrial
machines and humanist impulses where viewers are meant to question how an sculpture’s kinetic
function aesthetically and conceptually allegorizes human experiences and cultural conditions.

LA SOCIETE DE LA PLACE DES SPECTACLES
FILE SAO PAULO 2015
Inspired from the live works of Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto (1933-) of meticulously ransacking large mirrors, Sorenson revisited the classical traditions of vanitas under the materiality of video, and generate his creative process from the destruction of consumer components.

Chronos XXI
Chronos the god of time, permanently destroys and recreates. He who symbolises evanescence and return, was the thematic point of departure for the creation of the kinetic media installation Chronos XXI. The piece is a ‘finger exercise on antiquity’ by our Creative Director Joachim Sauter and was created during his residency at Villa Massimo in Rome. A pendulum continuously swings in front of a monitor. This motion controls the slow synthesis and destruction of depictions of Chronos on the monitor. Chronos appears in various interpretations by painters of the late Renaissance, Baroque and Classicism – as a man who disrobes Veritas, as a performer of volatile music, or docking Cupid’s wings, or as children and crop eating, a scythe and an hour glass carrying, beardy and winged old man.
video

Mist Installation
An installation designed by Clap for Minsk, Belarus, that was built by volunteers from the city itself. For the concept of this installation Clap starts from the history of Minsk, a city that during the Second World War was devastated. The bombs destroyed 80% of the buildings and the city was not rebuilt until the 1950s. That is why the population of this city remembers these times as something unpleasant and many of them prefer not to talk about it. The design studio starts from a geometric volume that represents in a conceptual way the volume of a building. They imagine that the bombs fall on him destroying it, generating new openings and brand new volumes. These new openings result ingeniously in an entrance and a viewpoint on the top. The destruction gives way to the function generates grandstands, stairs and seats. From the inside, life makes its way in the form of a tree, exceeding the height of the installation itself.

The Splits (Rehearsal)

The Splits begins with the bisecting of various string instruments into two halves, cutting them along their length, creating two separate instruments. The two halves must then be played together to complete a tune and are, thus, for duets (or quartets, octets or dectets) only—pieces which she is creating in collaboration with musicians and composers. The act of splitting at once destroys the integrity of the instrument as an object, and disrupts the conventional process of aesthetic creation that the instrument traditionally permits. Splitting is not merely an act of destruction, however. Instead, it opens graceful passages for imagined evolution: the split instrument becomes a newly creative instrument, permitting the creation not only of new music, but new communities (visual artist, the composer, the musicians, and the audience). Ms. Benson has “split” two violins, a viola, cello and double bass: all, cheap, mass-produced string instruments made in China.