The Functional Fake Objects
2006 di Paola Anzichè

Functional Fake is a multi-facetted project developed from an apparently contradictory term relation. Which elaborates on a series of relational forms in between ideas of functionality and the ephemeral, as exemplified in the context of everyday domestic interiors and their surroundings. Through the staging of photographic works and occasional performances in actual space, I am constructing the appearances of a domestic enviroment, but in a stylized manner, typical objects as a sofa, a table, a book shelf or a bracket where can be seen.
Their formal and visual features do not look like most of objects alike. In their features, at a closer look, the viewers may recognize bodies which mime the referred "objects" assingled out, and at the same time, it may be clear how such corporeal presences are purposely involved in seemingly impossible tasks: they do stretch, bend, bow, adhere to walls, get engaged in a tension with a kind of practical functionality which is their main reference, and at the same time they do enter in a dialogue with the special perception, and engage our perceptual awareness. I started from reading and singling out what can be read not only as simple visual characteristics, already present in such objects, but from the interest and the motivation which are behind the manifold expressions concerned by our daily "living room environment". I got interested in investigating the conventional levels, the shades and the variety which
are the very foundations behind such objects and those codified situations. Precisely in those contexts I would like to evidence and test the dynamic tension, always present, and the kind of relation that different bodies engage and develop on regard to the same objects; while mimicking postures and functions, the represented human bodies do produce an evident contrast: they express a difference which is in between what they apparently represent and what they actually are. Taking the place of objects canonically defined by contemporary design, they come closer to incarnate and to reinvent not only a different ambient, atmosphere, but they modify our very perception, usually more static, in relation to an idea of functionality

Through an active reinterpretation of the classic semiological reading of the Sign in order to describe consumer goods and habits, and their related technologies and media, I am concerned with the possibilities of employing different and playful forms involving illusive and fantasy-like strategies to push the individuals forward, in order to overlook the established values and the consumerist ideology, in order to reinvest our surrounding realm with a subjective creativity, something that has been once defined as an active sign manipulation.(Jean Baudrillard)