Smallville #1 is an installation by Roberto Paci Dalò exhibited at Palazzo Poggi for the sixth edition of Bologna Art First.

The artist converts a 1940s tube radio into a model of an imaginary city. A vintage radio becomes a model of the city, a strange “smallville” populated by micro characters who live between its circuits and its metal structures, as if to evoke the scene of the famous film Metropolis by Fritz Lang.

Smallville#1, the “small town”, is placed on a wooden structure between the gears of the vintage radio and is protected by a glass case. The radio, still working, is activated to receive short waves on unstable and fluctuating frequencies. The sound is distributed in space thanks to an invisible sub-woofer – housed in the structure itself – which emphasizes the low frequencies. Roberto Paci Dalò plays with the temporal ambiguity determined by the unusual radio object. His contemporary installation seems to be an ancient piece of antiques that almost blends in with the other pieces in the Palazzo Poggi collection.

Microscopic things

“Smalville#1′s project is linked to my childhood obsession with microscopic things, the same obsession that brought me to create works on a very small scale during my career” says Roberto Paci Dalò, who will soon also be presenting a Smallville#2.

Smalville#1 is populated by many dark-looking characters, whom the author has painted in such a way as to make it look like metal. These little men are “frozen in relationships, in meetings or in dialogues”, as in a silent film. The author explains: “A frozen miniature cinema made of protagonists just over half a centimeter high: a sort of contemporary micro Pompeii where the characters are transformed into metal”.

The installation is hosted at Palazzo Poggi, a university museum dedicated to “the arts and techniques”. The museum preserves some used objects by Luigi Galvani, among which the showcase of Smalville#1 is camouflaged.

The project is the result of a collaboration between Bologna Art First and is developed through site-specific installations by artists who work with the galleries present at the fair.

Microcosmo di natura, the performance

In addition to the installation Smalville#1, the artist’s performance Microcosmo di natura (“Microcosmos of nature”).

Also set in the museum of Palazzo Poggi, in the room dedicated to Ulisse Aldrovandi. The artist’s performance is dedicated to the famous Bolognese scholar of the 17th century. Considered the founder of modern natural history, he collected, filed and categorized for his “Wunderkammer” (“Chamber of Wonder”) over “18,000 diversity of natural things”, including various objects and living species of the New World.

For the performance, Roberto Paci Dalò created a light/sound device to highlight some objects in the Aldovrandi room. Roberto Paci Dalò creates a narration that, through digital technologies, gives visibility (and voice) to the display cases. The performance lasts 10 minutes and is repeated in a loop during the White Night inside Artefiera.

The aim of the performance Microcosmo di natura is also to reflect on the extraordinary nature of archives and museums – of any type and size – as generators of inspiration for contemporary art. In archives and museums, the artistic practice of found objects or objets trouvés is possible more than elsewhere. This is how collections and sometimes forgotten places can also find new life in a fundamental practice of today’s art such as remixing.