The Ex Elettrofonica Contemporary Art Gallery and the Secondome Design Gallery are pleased to present the twiner # 4 – With or Without Wings exhibition, which will open on Friday 6 May 2016, from 6.30 pm in the lounges of the Corporate Hospitality of the Internazionali BNL d’Italia inside the Foro Italico.
With the usual irony, typical of contemporary language, With or Without Wings, literally with or without wings, plays on the often used metaphorical parallelism between athletes and birds. Sportsmen are compared to these animals for their speed, for the perfection of their gestures, for the proverbial elegance of bearing and for the audacity with which they launch into apparently impossible feats. On closer inspection, humans also share the nature of bipeds with birds, and in a certain sense also their wings, not physical but metaphorical.
Already Aristophanes, in 414 BC. in his play The Birds he had imagined an ideal city, Nubicuculìa built in the sky, where men and birds coexisted, and Giacomo Leopardi, perhaps the best known of our poets, in his Operette Morali (1824) wrote a Praise of the birds where these creatures are compare to men.

The exhibition has the quality of transforming the Tennis Center into a contemporary Nubicuculìa, a place where the contrast, corruption, frustrations of everyday life are overcome in favor of a utopia that is impossible to achieve, if not for a few hours. Thanks to our imagination and tennis, our mental wings will be worth more than the real ones of birds. Are you ready to look at the world from above?