Cinnamon Heart: Classified
2017-2019
— "Inside these rooms, they decided to bomb Belgrade. It was in 1999…"
This is what a guard told me while entering the former NATO Command in Naples.
ACCESS LEVEL RESTRICTED
VARIABLES UNDEFINED
THIS IS A BRIEFING
INFORMATION INCOMPLETE
NATO UNCLASSIFIED
They’re just noise.
00:07:01,577 --> 00:07:03,418
They’re not real.
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What is real?
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That which is...
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irreplaceable.
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That answer doesn’t seem
to satisfy you.
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Because it’s not
completely honest.
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There is beauty
in what we are.
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The best way to hide the truth is to blend it into broad daylight.
OPACITY AS CONDITION
_Strange new light
can be just as frightening
as the dark.
OPACITY REMAINS
A guard once said:
“Inside these rooms, they decided to bomb Belgrade. It was in 1999…”
This is what I was told while entering the former NATO Command in Naples.
Everything was still there, exactly as it had been left: furniture, decorations, photographs, documents.
Among these objects, there was a heart-shaped box of candies labelled “cinnamon hearts”. This is where the title of the work comes from.
In the congress hall, an inscription read: “This is a briefing”.
As a child, I heard about this place as inaccessible. I did not know what it was, or what happened inside. What I knew was that you could buy peanut butter, marshmallows, Marlboros, VCRs, cameras, JVC stereos.
Now I’m older. I still don’t know exactly what it is.
—
True power is subtle, imperceptible. It mantles everything like daylight, though it remains invisible to the naked eye. Behind closed doors, with discretion, true power shapes humankind’s future. In those secret rooms, real men and women turn into variables, abstract ideas. As much as what we make of insects, which exist yet are barely recognized unless they get in our way. There are places where power gathers without almost anyone’s knowledge. These places are not known; no one has ever seen them. However, all of us can imagine them. Truth and fiction collide into a single vision.
As in an operation of controlled disclosure, Giovanni Scotti’s photographic series unveils a reality concealed for almost sixty years. The clock apparently stood still, as if waiting to be restarted the next day. Time and space seem suspended, like in a parallel dimension. It looks like the day after a sudden disappearance: all the people who inhabited those spaces have instantly dissolved, like dewdrops evaporating in the first rays of morning sunlight. The camera reactivates these places, performing an act of necromancy. The rooms return to life, though it is a false life, like that of zombies; they become more menacing after having passed. We then realize that these rooms could be anywhere in the world – or just a few steps away from our daily reality.
Diego Mantoan
Historian and economist of contemporary art
Excerpt from the critical text “The Rooms of the Necromancer”
Selected presentations and publications include:
EDRA50 Brooklyn, NYU Tandon School of Engineering
Getxo International Image Festival
Triennale Photographie et Architecture #6, Bruxelles