Almanac Inn presents WHIP DERELICT, the first solo exhibition in Italy by London-based artist Rebecca Lennon.
Developed in response to her residency in Turin last year, Lennon's starting point for this new body of work in video, sound, and text was a local anecdote: Friedrich Nietzsche’s sudden and ongoing voicelessness after an encounter with a whipped horse. Whilst most often the mythological story has focussed on the madness of the existential philosopher, this re-telling doubles down on his speechlessness in solidarity with the animal, and the poignancy of his reported last words "Mother I am dumb".
Ambiguous relations between metaphor and embodied experience unfold associatively, from mercury toxicity creating subjects mad as hatters to the complex allegorical and actual meeting points between bodies and architectural structures and bodies as architectural structures. Featuring connecting narratives of poly-vocal loops and rhythms, and intricate wax relief text drawings worked into collapsing shapes and displayed as banners; multilayered stories of refusal, withdrawal and vocal collapse conflate and coalesce with those of house dereliction, possession and dispossession.