Look at Me is a temporary exhibition of one night, initiated by OTTN Projects and realized with the support of Fondazione Marcelo Burlon, that will take place at the Luxy Club in Corso Buenos Aires, Milan, during a regular working night.
Taking into account some of the elements that are pivotal to the discourse around a strip club, the project however aims to emancipate itself from the dialectic that centers around the exploitation of the body, the political battle of sex work or the attribution of meaning usually associated with places of sexual entertainment: Look at Me represents the simple attempt of acceptance of pleasure, of work as a possibility and as an aesthetic expression.
Looking beyond concept or reflection, beyond an emotional and political recognition, any artistic intervention features some kind of aesthetic satisfaction, expressed in various shapes and forms. The aspect of the show, seen as a moment where one undressed him/herself of meaning and remains in the simplicity of the appearance, is a feature that belongs to the strip club as well as to any artistic dimension: what changes between the two is the social connotation, the socio-cultural diversification of the public, the connected ideological legacies. What OTTN Projects wants to create is a simple meeting space between two worlds which, although different, are based on a same premise and above all a common need: the conscious enhancement of the senses.
Sharing together an aesthetic curiosity, a gaze full of whatever one possesses inside oneself unites visiting a strip club with visiting an exhibition. The dimension of the PUBLIC space, and public as SHARED, creates in both realities an opportunity for the free acceptance of desires and fantasies, sublimating them through different languages and formal expressions. The selected artists intervene on different nuances of this same concept: Michele Rizzo investigates the gaze, passing from movement and the repetition of bodily gestures, Giulia Crispiani reflects on the relationship between the body and the word, the pleasure of the senses that are articulated on and with language, the rumble made by letters while we pronounce them. Flaminia Veronesi invents a world of dancing sirens, beautiful in their sensuality, in an intervention between the fantastic and the real.
Intrinsic to the idea of the project is also the wish to create an opportunity for contact between two audiences: on the one hand the regular visitors of the strip club, on the other contemporary art lovers. Collecting the latter in a different context than the one they are used to stimulates a different vision both of the work of art in and of itself and of its mode of use: who says that an artistic intervention is best assimilated among the neutral walls of an institution? Why should the silence of the art galleries and their soft spotlights be considered as ideal condition to experience an art form?
On the other hand, the regular visitor of the strip club will be placed in the condition of coming into contact with another type of beauty, in a simple attempt to offer a layering of the aesthetic experience.
Look at Me is a simple gathering, a meeting of two worlds without pretentions or expectations, emphasizing the points of contact and simultaneously accepting with open arms the contrast that can occur when artistic interventions engage with the cult of the spectacle of the body. The intersection of these two dimensions in this exhibition is therefore, in conclusion, a free emancipation of the act of life, the will to populate the night with beautiful things, made up of encounters, clashes but above all curiosity towards the other.
OTTN Projects
Born in 2018, OTTN Projects is a non profit organization run by a female only team, which aims to facilitate the encounter between different realms of our society through the creation of new exhibition formats, cultural events, conferences or editorial projects, in the attempt of engaging with contemporary culture on a broad spectrum.
Accessibility and innovation are pivotal to the collective, the impact of which has managed to touch different realities thanks to the organization of multiple projects, ranging from the curation of exhibition to the creation of workshops or the support of emerging artists and independent spaces.
