The project presents a new installation devised by Jacquet especially for the Museo dellaFigurina continuing the research begun with engraver Fred Penelle for the artistic project Mécaniques Discursives (ongoing in Palazzo Santa Margherita until 20 August 2023). Among the thousands of materials housed in the museum archive, Jacquet’s attention settled on some nineteenth-century chromolithographic picture card sets featuring children creating shadow games with their hands. They reminded him of the “Finger Dance” videos posted on the social networks: the phenomenon, which derives from breakdancing, consists of creating hypnotic choreographies using the fingers and went viral among young people on the TikTok and YouTube platforms during the COVID lockdown.
The circulation of picture cards in the nineteenth century and the viral finger dances in today’s society show the lasting popularity of hand games: the means of distribution might change, but the activity remains the same.This endurance drove Yannick Jacquet to put gestures from different eras next to each other to build, make connections and generate collisions.His way of working is also evident in the Mécaniques Discursives project, in which the relation and collision between the Gutenberg era and the contemporary Big Data era gives rise to a surprising universe of imaginative iconographies. At the Museo della Figurina all of these things come together in a site-specific installation that places the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century picture cards in a dialogue with projections and videos, resulting in hybrid scenes that bring together shadow theatre, non-verbal alphabets, pre-cinema and contemporary social networks.
The viewer is captured by the hypnotic spiral of the finger movements, and is led to reflect on the social value of gesture, as well as the scope for expression and power of communication contained in the handsThe multiplied vertical image seems to point to viral social media trends, which can endlessly amplify ancestral bodily practices.In this way Yannick Jacquet invites us to meditate on the relationship with the body and external appearance in a moment in history when virtual interaction is everywhere. In order to create this exhibition, Yannick Jacquet involved various artists who have worked with him on an original creation: visual artist and photographer Laeticia Bica, composer Laurent Delforge and dancers Denis Inghelbrecht and Yamuna Kyamo Huygen.
There will also be an interactive virtual version of the exhibition contained in the Minecraft Museum Adventure.The project, developed together with Future Education Modena, is centred around the reconstruction of the Museo dellaFigurina inside the famous video game and is rebooted on occasion of every new exhibition.Hence, users can interact with the museum’s assets through a series of games of increasing difficulty which range from parkour to logic.
