SYMBOLIC<>RUPTURE [SARCOPHAGIC DISPLAY]_FOUND BOOKS, HOLES MADE BY A 12 GAUGE SHOTGUN_2023_

Damien Melchiori

Consider the exchanges and flows of power operating behind the scenes in the structuring of what we define as Knowledge; violent structures, theatres of the language-based symbolic order that historical narratives of progress attempt to maintain dominance within.

In our present time, the popular concept of Knowledge appears to be inextricably tethered to the lingering traces of a project from the past, a project that attempted absolute taxonomical categorisation and evaluation of nature, regardless of the cost. Perhaps the proposed achievements of the Enlightenment project could be reconsidered in the presence of our contemporary geopolitical disparities and looming ecological disasters.

Could we experience positive, productive potentials by reframing familiar considerations of binary oppositions such as: Knowledge/Non-knowledge? And could we therefore locate other ways of knowing – after all, knowledge does not necessarily illuminate the shadows of superstition; rather the light of knowledge might result in the casting of new shadows, and by extension, new knowledge.

In a polemic turn from traditional western techno-scientific ways of knowing, contemporary art could embrace unorthodox strategies for approaching new communicative forms, and transmit new intuitive and embodied knowledges for the present and beyond.

My practice explores mutually informing relationships between processes of creation and destruction in artistic production. Drawing upon a range of historical understandings of cultural-material production, it explores how complex socially constructed systems of influence and contestation productively interact in works of art. Of particular interest are works of art created through methods of radical material or contextual alteration, mutation, erasure, or destruction.

To qualify an action as creative or destructive is ultimately tenuous and culturally relative, for one person’s iconophilia might be another’s iconoclasm. My practice harnesses potentials for new communication through contradiction with a view to better understanding ways to creatively utilise the tensions and frictions found in contradiction. Ambiguity is central to my practice and as such, interpretation is multiple, narratives are able to be mixed and remixed, and the location of the art object is in a constant state of flux.

Speculating and generalising upon the history and identity of any given artwork can assume many forms and can lead to strange “eureka” moments. I refer to this speculation as “epistemic apophenia”—a neologism suggesting that new knowledge could be revealed through misinterpretations or cavalier syntheses of existing knowledges. It implies an uncertain relationship between knowing and not knowing. A suggestion is that proceeding with limited or incorrect knowledge, synthesising supposedly incompatible knowledges, and forming patterns at random could result in positive and productive potentials.

Informed by a longstanding interest in productive tensions produced through opposing forces—such as noise and silence, order and disorder, or the institution and the “underground”—my practice seeks a conceptual framework for better understanding the ways in which opposing forces are necessary parts of the same cycles of constant change. I do not as consider these oppositionaliities as simple binaries or dichotomies but rather as dynamic relationships which are complex, multifaceted, and multidirectional, and seeks to identify moments of rupture caused by tensions and conflicts in the overlays of opposites.

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Damien Melchiori is an artist working in Naarm/Melbourne. He completed the Bachelor of Creative Arts (University of Melbourne, Parkville) in 2009, and the Master of Fine Arts (VCA, Southbank) in 2022. Damien has performed an exhibited nationally and internationally since 2006.