Francesco Jodice

Tosetti Value, Turin

March - July 2020

In the year of the US presidential election, "Perspectives. The economy of images "presents for the first time in Italy WEST project in progress by Francesco Jodice. Among monumental geological formations and symbols of Western civilization, the exhibition traces the main stages of the iconographic map traced by the artist and reveals the construction mechanisms of the American imagination. In her four journeys across the great West, Jodice condenses the "Rise and Fall" of the American century, a story between the beginning of the Gold Rush and the collapse of the financial system in 2008.

The series takes its cue from two events that marked the first decade of the new millennium: the attack on the twin towers in 2001 and the collapse of Lehman in 2008, with their burden of suffering and worries about the very future of the American model. Francesco Jodice takes his cue from these two dramatic events and their political, economic, cultural and social consequences for a personal reinterpretation of the reality and imagination of the United States.

West is an observation platform on the last great Western empire. Here we investigate the events and postulates of American history from the great rise of the gold rush to the recent financial catastrophe of 2008. "49ers" and white-collar workers are the main protagonists of the initial and final phases of this parable, populated by an endless theory of characters useful to tell its splendors and aberrations, from cowboys to Indians, from rock stars to actors, passing through explorers, gangsters, bodybuilders, intellectuals, artists, presidents and astronauts.

The American West, from the Pacific coast to the deserts, is the privileged terrain of this investigation. Jodice walks through it and photographs it, finding traces of a majestic geological antiquity (the Western Plateau is among the oldest plates to emerge on the planet) and those of the most recent colonizations (the crash of the Lehman Brothers, Hollywood, NASA, western films, militarization), specter of some of the most bitter contemporary contradictions.

All this is West: a journey to the end of the heroic epic of liberalism; a manual for reading and understanding the American 'long century' and a look forward to the era of post-Fordism and the post-West.