BIOGRAPHY
Danilo Correale (1982) is an artist and researcher based in New York City. In his works, he analyzes various aspects of daily life through the lens of time and the body, such as the relationship between work and leisure, and sleep and wakefulness.
He has presented his works in numerous exhibitions, including: Le Future Derrier Nous, Villa Arson, Nizza (2022), Utopia, Distopia, MADRE, Naples (2021); Real Italy, MAXXI, Roma (2020); Hyperemployment, Aksioma, Ljubljana, Slovenia (2019); 5th Ural Biennial, Yekaterinburg, Russia (2019); Broken Nature, Triennale Milano (2019); Istanbul Design Biennial, Istanbul (2018); Riga Biennal (2018); Work It Feel It!, Vienna Biennale (2017); 16th Quadriennale di Roma, Palazzo delle Esposizioni (2017); Kiev Biennial (2015); Per-formare una collezione, MADRE, Naples (2014); Sotto la strada, la spiaggia, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2012); and Manifesta 8 in Murcia/Cartagena, Spain (2010).
Among his solo exhibitions are: DWYL, Tiziana de Caro, Naples (2022); They Will Say I Killed Them, MAC, Belfast (2019); At Work’s End, Art in General, New York (2017); Tales of Exhaustion, La Loge, Brussels (2016); and The Missing Hour, Raucci/Santamaria, Naples (2015). In 2017 he was awarded the New York Prize for young Italian artists, as well as prizes from Art In General’s New Commissions Program and Italian Council He was also granted a research scholarship at Columbia University.
WORK ON DISPLAY
Cleanrooms, 2021
Installation: 5 audiocassettes on loop, 5 Walkmans, round table, seats, various dimensions.
The work is a selection of audio maps of a sound archive indexed by the artist during the Covid-19 pandemic. All the places featured in the archive share a corporate nature and a similar productive structure, as well as having been abandoned abruptly in the early months of 2020.
Over the last few decades, the process of dematerialization of the forms of production and economic financing has transformed whole portions of big cities into concrete casings suitable for hosting corporate jobs, wherein various and redundant forms of extraction secure the sustainability of the market before that of the economy or of the people.
The emptying of financial districts observed over the past two years of the pandemic demonstrated, in the words of the artist, «not only the already problematic link between new construction developments for finance and the volatility of real estate maneuvers—for which the former are actually being built—but also the growing obsolescence of the office space as a production model». Correale’s work consists of shaping a sound portrait of such spaces in different cities with the help of collaborators. By means of two different microphones—a traditional high-resolution one and one that can pick up electromagnetic fields otherwise inaudible (such as those of Wi-Fi nets, light sources and ubiquitous radio frequencies )—a series of 90-minute long recordings were made, later transferred onto audiocassettes. The choice of magnetic tape, something being worn out over use and time, is a material symbol for the erosion of the working space, as well as of the continuous metamorphoses of capitalism.
Cleanrooms is also a reflection upon the transformation of the city and of our way of inhabiting it. In fact, despite remaining empty, these financial districts continue impacting daily life and interrogate us not only about their uncertain development, but also, and especially, on the new fragmentation of space and work that has now completely invaded the domestic environment, exacerbating forms of precarity and inequality such as those related to class or gender.
