THEY ARE COMING | PhMuseum

When is an idea able to disrupt someone's mind?

6 June 2012

During a dinner party someone at the table casually mentioned the latest news: an asteroid trajectory is about to be in collision with Earth on the 21 December 2012.

The news is quickly dismissed as highly improbable and laughed at by all the guests.

However, from that night and for the next six months, the dream of apocalyptic scenes, alien invasions and wars will disrupt Rosati’s nights as she developed PTSD, frequent panic attacks and social anxiety.

All symptoms ended abruptly with the non verification of the crash on the supposed date.

You can’t necessarily access someone’s dreams, but you can have access to their subconscious, where their most influential thoughts and ideas come from and where “inception” can, in fact, take place.

Creative luminaries have spoken over the years of the fear of death as a significant human and artistic motivator. This phenomenon, known as “terror management theory”, suggests that there are two main things we do in order to cope with the awareness of our own

mortality. First, we subscribe to a belief system that provides us with a sense of meaning and order. Then we strive to cultivate high self-esteem by living up to the standards of value that

our culture sets.

Exhausted and sleep deprived Rosati, during the six months prior to the fateful day, decides to metabolise her fears through art.

Rosati’s work spans the breadth of media, and THEY ARE COMING is a prime example of this.

An amalgamation of new and existing pieces, where she combines a vast mix of aesthetics a blend of photographic, text-based, video and computer graphic pieces, creating the feeling of

being projected thousands of years away from the present and to review our world as if it were a fossil.

The world which we have known, from the origin of humanity

to today, will appear to us as having already ended.

The main corpus of this art project has been realised in 2012-2013, and consists of images that are either built, staged or real, creating changing levels of abstraction and detachment

from the images and their content.

The MOTHERSHIP SERIES: portraying the alien spaceship landing on earth.

The AERIAL SERIES: a more abstract body of work where shades of colours at dawn and sunset are taken during different intercontinental flights at an altitude of 12000 feets.

The ATTACK SERIES: where war planes fly over the city of paris, confirming that war has started.

The DESOLATION SERIES: a subjective vision of a post atomic world, where we can spot a golden observatory standing in a burned land, the last outpost of an endangered society.

The BLOB SERIES: portraying some alien eggs left to hatch alongside a river.

The most recent pieces are produced in 2021-2022, almost a decade later, where Rosati revisits her fears in a mixed media approach.

The BREEDED SERIES: digital images created from a selfie, whose genes are disrupted and

modified to create the children, sisters and brothers of ROSATI, the new members of a dystopian world, where left alone on earth, she had to find a way to perpetrate the human species.

The EXPLOSION SERIES where she combines views from different cities shot from above during her trips with burning flames and explosion footage images.

Showing her state of anxiety in response to the vision of specific images, a compilation of famous movie scenes depicting meteorite collisions with earth or alien invasion. The short film, entitled “ANXIETY TRIGGERS”, shows the discrepancy between the embodied

experience of the traumatic event and its dispersal in the media’s collective reconstruction and exploitation.

Rosati asks us to make connections of all kinds – formal, thematic, spatial. She asks what the limits of the mind are. There are questions here about time, place, belonging, subjectivity, consciousness, perceptive alterations, society constructs and most of all death.

Since the mid-1990s we have lived in what has been variously called an “age of anxiety”, a “risk society” and a “culture of fear”. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman coined the phrase “liquid fear”to suggest the pervading and pervasive sense of insecurity, uncertainty and profound

anxiety that has now—in Bauman’s words— “settled inside, saturating our daily routines; it hardly needs further stimuli from outside, since the actions it prompts day in, day out supply all the motivation and all the energy it needs to reproduce itself.”

The fear of Death which incorporates all the other subcategories of fear, is a common theme in Rosati’s work.

Death, disaster and, to a lesser extent, notions of apocalypse are hardly new concerns in contemporary art, but all seem to be gaining a currency that chimes well with global uncertainties.

Modernity was supposed to be the period in human history when the fears that pervaded social life in the past could be left behind and human beings could at last take control of their lives and tame the uncontrolled forces of the social and natural worlds. And yet, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, we live again in a time of fear. Whether its the fear of natural disasters, the fear of environmental catastrophes or the fear of indiscriminate terrorist attacks,

we live today in a state of constant anxiety about the dangers that could strike unannounced and at any moment.

ALICE ROSATI (Milan, 1985)

lives and works in Paris.

Since the early 2000, her works have questioned existing values and hierarchies, pairing intimacy and playfulness with social critique.

Art as exorcism, consciousness investigation and visual paradoxes are expressed with ambivalent images, through a variety of mixed media: from early paintings and sculptures to photographs, video installations and performances.

Her most recent solo show ‘I am a mermaid’, which took place in 2020 at Gallerie Charraudeau in Paris documents a 5 year long performance that took place across 3 continents, where she gives herself to the world through her camera, alone, naked, inside of a

golden lamée mermaid suit.

Rosati‘s polyhedric artistic research proposes to us a dialectical vision of the absurdity of reality, pushing the observer to ask himself which is the real world that surrounds him. She reveals and dismantles stereotypes, debunking with irony contemporary art, fixed and

recognised in her conceptual anarchy. Rosati is a storyteller, building up constructed universes where her characters play different roles, creating visions where the known and the unknown have no more boundaries and exploring the tension between the casual and the

posed, the accidental and the fated.

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2020 “I AM A MERMAID” at Gallerie Charraudeau, Paris https://charraudeau.com/

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2019 “WHEN THE DREAMERS DIE WHAT HAPPENS TO THE DREAMS?” at Crux

Gallery, Athens https://www.instagram.com/cruxgalerie/?hl=it

2019 “ART ATHINA” Athens

2018 “IN-TOTO 6” at Fondation Ricard, Paris https://www.fondation-pernod-ricard.com/

en/event/intoto-6

2017 “IN-TOTO 3” at Joseph Tang Gallery, Paris https://www.galeriejosephtang.com/

SPECIAL PROJECTS

2020 ANDY AS ANDY, for "La Vie Numerique" an art project in collaboration with artist