CITISSIMUM ALTISSIMUM FORTISSIMUM

One of the most fundamental characteristics of the world we live in is that nations, companies, people, the objects we consume, our actions and relationships, our bodies and our images all form part of a striking competition. This competition not only pits us against one another but, above all, confronts us with a goal, with a benchmark that can never truly be achieved and constantly demands more in the relentless pursuit of self-improvement.
 

Although the desire for improvement and progress has consistently been a driving force in Western modernity, it has become an unstoppable trend during the twenty-first century that has accustomed us to measure and compare ourselves numerically against an omnipresent and unattainable ideal of improvement – an ideal so imposed from the outside that we have begun internalising it ourselves. In the eyes of others and ourselves, we want to appear stronger, younger, healthier, more productive and efficient, and each of these attributes comes with an associated number, a figure that defines us, determines us and drives us to surpass it. Measurement has become a dogma.

In this context, it is no coincidence that competitive and mass sport has become one of the most popular and celebrated social phenomena. Sport permeates all aspects of our reality. It is the perfect metaphor for how we have come to understand the world. It is both the cause and the consequence. Sport waves a flag that is gradually losing its national colours and embracing corporate ones; sport invigorates and generates profit; sport rewards and punishes. But above all, sport expresses all these ideals through a set of effective measures. Effective because they can be objectively quantified and compared as part of a structured rationale of classification: scoreboards, cameras, heart rate monitors, thermal and biometric sensors, monitoring devices, pharmacology and anti-doping controls are orchestrated in a perfect composition of competitiveness culture turned into spectacle.

CITISSIMUM ALTISSIMUM FORTISSIMUM is an exhibition about a contemporary phenomenon that, despite radically affecting our lives, remains underrepresented in the art world: sport as a symptom of contemporary society. Through the exploration of concepts such as the body, measurement and performance, competitiveness, binarism and representation, the exhibition brings together various artistic pieces that use absurdity, irony and deconstruction to push the manifestations of competitive and mass sports to their ultimate consequences, inviting reflection on how we are all, in some way, immersed in the same rationale: competing through ostensibly objective measurements and, from this, contributing to the creation of a spectacle.