DO WHAT YOU LOVE
Mirror and Sound Installation
Work in 3 Independent parts, 2x1mt each.
10min audio in loop, Installation View at Tiziana de Caro, Napoli, 2022
D.W.Y.L. is the acronym of Do What You Love, but also of Don’t Waste Your Life. The title instantly reveals the subjects associated with Correale’s research concerning the present and future of work, cognitive and precarious forms of employment, whether immaterial or ‘reputational,’ as well as the relationship with the media and the critique of prevailing economic systems.
D.W.Y.L. opens with a series of mirrors equipped with audio devices from which we can listen to a sonic theater piece taking place in an apartment akin to the gallery space. In it, four characters talk about the sense of time and work, about ‘coming of age’ or its impossibility, the personal branding and its paradoxes, all alluding to the piece which the audience can already sneak a peek of in the next room of the gallery. By forcing us to look at ourselves, through the piece that welcomes the visitors, the artist establishes the position of centrality of the audience, suggesting a journey into a temporal and psychological dimension, leaving the past behind to consciously enter the present.
A theme that has always been an object of investigation by Danilo Correale is the relationship between work/free time/sleep and boredom. Sebastian, the installation-sculpture placed in the second room, could exemplify this relationship. Sebastian could be considered as the emblem of fatigue, of the “material effort needed to do a job,” but also as the exact opposite: indicating one who, deceived by the saying “Do What You Love and you’ll never work a day in your life”, now finds himself in a loveless labyrinth, poised between identity and the constant dissipation of cognitive resources.
The body of the piece is so heavy that its passage creates grooves in the floor in an unnatural motion, driven by external factors as if they were the unstoppable gears of an invisible engine in continuous evolution, drawing Sebastian’s indefinite path.
