Penultimità (The penultimate)

Penultimità (The penultimate)
Shot in Super 8 mm/transferred to Pal DVD, length 1’30″/2009  –  photo: arazzo Jacquard. cm 200×300

Mauro Folci’s The Penultimate features once again the donkey from the film by Bresson Au Hazard Balthazar. This work consists of Super 8 footage transferred onto DVD showing the donkey’s last instants in a loopThe image of the animal’s last moments of existence, which through the expedient of the loop never actually comes to an end, is a way to treat exhaustion in its acceptation of a penultimate state, the one before the end. The Penultimate is a dangerous game played on the verge of death. Like Deleuze’s drunkard, who looks forward to his one drink before the last, after which he loses self-awareness.
In The Penultimate, Boredom and The Exhausted, Folci uncovers the will to positive assertion that can be found in the folds of that which is seemingly open to a devastating nihilism. It is a matter of finding, in figures who are nearing death, the most powerful stimulus towards a positive redemption. The penultimate is a concept that approaches the end but continues to postpone it in a process of different repetition: once again, it is not the last, but the possibility before the last extreme possibility, a differed and dislocated one. From the perspective of the penultimate or of the exhausted, the end is not a solution, but an opportunity which will engender new beginnings. The artist’s intention is to explore all that is related to the term exhausted: exhausting, wearing, used up, bored, dissolved, penultimate. His latest work reflect on death in order to dislocate it, to verify whether a residue of potential still exists in, or is perhaps the source of, something that has exhausted its meaning.