MEET ME AT THE CENTER OF THE EARTH
Studio la Città
Verona, Italy
We do not know if these fantastic clothes are the barbaric fruit of a culture distant in time and space, or the prophecy of a possible future. We do not know if Nick Cave comes from afar or if he sees far. We certainly know that through him, through his works, we meet the Other, and nothing is more fatiguing than this. It is necessary to exert all our educated curiosity and amiable indulgence in order to bear what he proposes. There is a double exchange: we see sequins, beads, tiny mirrors, all the panoply of what we consider to be exotic, because this is how it is proposed and offered to us; and we use only one sense - that of sight - to place this armament in a safe place, one guaranteed by the intelligence of sight. But for this very reason it is kept at a distance, out of reach of the hands, the skin, the body. We catalogue by looking, we perceive by trying. And so we cannot limit ourselves to looking (this seems a humanitarian exhortation destined for some Third World catastrophe...): we have to enter. In fact Nick Cave's works are nothing other than such an invitation: enter the work, move together with it, discover what labour is involved in "becoming the Other".
— Marco Meneguzzo
