Sarah Revoltella
The Noise of Black Holes

Emergency, Venice (I)
April — July 2024

The Noise of Black Holes
Daniele Capra




The exhibition The Noise of Black Holes by Sarah Revoltella includes the work Stars and Conflicts and about ten works that document the performance I Fight, created by the artist in collaboration with the students of the Venice International University on the opening day of the exhibition. The project emerged as an intimate and necessary attempt to oppose the logic of violence, conflict, and dominance often at the basis of political and economic action and, once internalized, also of individual behaviour. The Noise of Black Holes – whose title suggests the distant presence of cosmic events capable of determining our existence – thus highlights Revoltella’s attempt to oppose the dictatorship of war by rebelling against the brutality of a history that seems already to have been written.

The work Stars and Conflicts originated from Revoltella’s random discovery that the planisphere with the map of local conflicts and the distribution of black holes (and binary stars) detected by NASA shows many topological similarities. War territories and stars at the end of their evolution seem to share the same geographical distribution, and their maps are perfectly superimposable. This poetic insight led the artist to imagine a large tapestry made by the weaving cooperative of Nule in Sardinia, which visually and tactually explicates this coincidence. The work thus becomes a continuous conceptual and emotional reference between the fate of the cosmos and that of humanity.

In I Fight, the artist staged a performance where nine university students of different nationalities interacted with perfect replicas of assault rifles, machine guns, and carbines typically used by armies and in many conflicts in recent years. The weapons were dropped to the ground but, being made of ceramic, they shattered loudly into a thousand pieces. In I Fight, Revoltella subverts the disruptive function of the firearm, turning it into a fragile and powerless element. In the action, the artist transforms the weapon into an empty, inefficient device that can conceptually be destroyed and reduced to waste.

Sarah Revoltella, Io combatto, 2024, performance, documentazione, stampa su carta blueback, foto Fratelli Calgaro