Our Vampires: Justin Fitzpatrick, Birke Gorm, Daniele Milvio, Sveta Mordovskaya, Marianna Simnett, Curated by Attilia Fattori Franchini

Vampires are night types, they cherish solitude and emo outfits. Music can vary but they listen to any genre containing the devil’s triathlon in it. There is no such creature as “The Vampire”, there are only vampires. Vampires dissipate trends and overcome the 9 to 5 paradigm. They question what it means to be normal and transcend the rigid structures of gender and identity, celebrating constant change and transformation. They are the Madonnas and David Bowies of narrative. Vampires blend into the changing cultures they inhabit. They are invaders of the normal and can be everything that we are whilst at the same time they are fearful reminders of the things that we are not. They embody seditious urbanity rather than dangerous intimacy. Beloved by the left, dread by moral witch hunters, they open a space of possibility.

Taking its title from Nina Auerbach’s famous book Our Vampires, Ourselves (1995), historically exploring and demystifying the figure of the vampire as an archetype embodying rhetorics and fear of otherness, the exhibition loosely embraces Auerbach’s desire to revalue the vampire as a symbol of constant change and transformation exiting any fixed category of existence.

To emulate a vampire is to be a spectator disappearing into a spectator: we listen, talk, watch, without touching or becoming. Because they glide on the margins of activity... writes Auerbach.

The exhibition Our Vampires, focuses on artistic positions interested in subverting conventional structures, favoring alternative forms of knowledge, playing with economies of visibility and opacity whilst negotiating questions of identity and self-representation.

Attilia Fattori Franchini