The Architecture of Simplicity

Speaker:
Domenico de Clario, Chair of the Arts Mildura Board and Creative Co-ordinator of the Museum of Innocence Mildura

The Architecture of Simplicity
The ritualized exchange between visible and invisible, form and substance, mind and beyond-mind forms both intent and outcome of four major projects I have undertaken over the last fifteen years: A Calvinian Architecture (2001); A Second Simplicity (2005); Slowly Walking Downhill (2015) and Tonglen: from the Opaque (2016 -). The content of each of these undertakings has been generated from memory (socialized and individual) and from an undecipherable origin of things, or the ’gorgeous nothings’ that Emily Dickinson reverentially elevated to the source strewn along our life-paths, usually overlooked by the traveller. The imagined spaces of such origins have been described and affirmed by the minds of luminaries such as Dickson, Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka, Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett, Giorgio Agamben, Helene Cixous, and Luce Irigaray.The tenuous architecture I have constructed in these works has resulted from such invisible ‘gorgeous nothings’ and from collecting evidence of others’ existences. This talk will address the gestation process and show how each project has evolved into its final form as an archaeological site. 
Wednesday, 19th October from 5pm to 7pm in F202

Cover image: A Second Simplicity, installation and performance, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne 2005