Gianni Motti

First monograph

Gianni Motti (*1958) has celebrated his own funeral, masqueraded as a professional soccer player, spoken in the name of the people of Indonesia at the UN Human Rights Convention, claimed responsibility for earthquakes, and repeatedly referred to himself as a kind of terrorist infiltrating a system to implode it from within.

The events he subverts, with surgical precision, can be of political, cultural, or social character. The audience and its horizon of expectation are not to be pandered to – Gianni Motti does not see himself as an artist who partakes in the culture of spectacle like some court jester, but as an activist who unveils the functions of different systems.

Gianni Motti’s actions oscillate between the rational and the irrational, between irony and provocation, between rumor and misunderstanding. Which is why Motti’s events are experienced mainly through the narrative and illustrative potential of photographs made by onlookers or the press.

This book brings together for the first time a large selection of images and documentation to provide an overview of Motti’s actions.

Published with the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich.

Only available by les presses du réel. Limited stock.