Plexus. Wondering a dream. By Alessandra Menesini

Plexus, a chameleon. It is not a movement but it moves and if only it skims you once, you can’t escape it. It was born in America by a Sardinian father and has adepts not always conscious in Senegal and in Australia, in Rome and Gavoi. All over the world. Sandro Dernini describes it as a triangle, with his vertexes in Australia, Africa and USA, but Plexus is more like an irregular geometric shape. It has many angles, derivations and derailments. It counts a remarkable number of events with regular title, date and place, events responsible of many collateral effects. Its artists are not divided in minor or major: moving a single little stick, unfurling a sail or heaping some ash often is enough to be Plexus. Forever. Anyway. Plexus the snake is aware to have to change his skin from 80’s to post 2000. At the beginning there was the cross between community and art-science. Vanished in the very quick following years and landed at a subject-concept with amazing implications: the erosion. May be they are getting old, may be they are sadly getting aware of their lost of identity (from food to brains), but the erosion measured with the metre at the House of the Slaves of Goreè is the erosion of little big individual and universal lost. Ocean is rising on the tragic double scale of the Maison des Esclaves, the No-Returning Gate where the black slave traders launched the ships full of the Afro-Americans who would later invent Jazz. Ocean is rising and every years hits away some centimetres of History and souls. Plexus used many metaphors and made many metamorphoses. It produced an intermittent and waving community, fed by temporary enthusiasm and eternal hates, admiration and contempt, tedium and passion. But, as someone writes on the walls, Plexus lives. You can’t find its definition on any encyclopaedia: born in 1982 in a loft of Chelsea and soon transmigrated in a burned basement of East Lower Side of New York City. Difficult delivery, historicized by Sandro Dernini ten years later in the dissertation of a Ph.D discussed at the New York University. Baptized with a long name: "A metaphoric and mythical journey on board of the ship of art’s slaves". They have been liberated immediately, because they ignore the market, art gallery’s openings and often critics. Started from the compression - the final synthesis of concept and object - studies (and fights) the erosion, for now. In practice, from a branched symbolism to the remark of a whole - not only material - impoverishment. Nuraghic towers, American natives’ simulacra, tribal masks, cans snatched by Andy Warhol, Buddha’s statues, everything has been compressed in the Black Box, like those in the aeroplanes, where to preserve myths, cultures, roots. A navigation that had utilized a real ship, the Elizabeth, rusty craft, with the hold full off paints and sculptures and the deck, stage of involving happenings. "In order to survive" was the starting course: it hasn’t changed and it still utilizes the wonderful logo designed by Fred Toller, draw manifests, organizes parties that become rituals. Metropolitan character, urban people. Painters and musicians, writers and scientists, academicians and dancers, poets and graphics that meet at the Nuyorican Poets Cafè, in Lower East Side, with spanglish singers like Miguel Algarin and Pedro Pietri. Everyone caught by the whisper and the spires of Plexus. Syncretism celebrated in unforgettable and ephemeral performances and installations, moments that rarely leave behind them concrete objects, but they create a sort of magic dust that sticks everywhere. The diktat of those years it’s the cooperation, a work without single signatures in a utopian collaboration often effective, documented by photos and video as it was a land art. So the lonely Sardinia brought to N.Y.C. its Mediterranean bronzes and its huge rocks. Thirty years separate the Culturas Unidas Aspiram Nuestro Destino Original from the rule that measures the disappearance of Maison des Esclaves of Gorè as an ineluctable bradyseism. Even if the navigation is zig-zaging it lands in the starting point. University professors meet the squatters that live those houses deserted that have to be demolished and they plant flowers in the ground; dancers danced on the mathematicians’ and physicists’ diagrams, for another previous bets of Plexus. Finding the match between art and science, understanding how creative are calculations and how scientific are the fanciful arts. It’s a galaxy that doesn’t distinguish insiders from outsiders, but swallows up protagonists and spectators, and also who passes by and stops. Maybe the reason for Plexus longevity is that it’s also elastic. Twenty-five years are a lot for contemporary art. Only those who change and frees them-self from old terms and old techniques and doesn’t cultivates nostalgia but curiosity can survive. Mona Lisa, the Celts, Goya, Eva (the one hunted from Heaven), the Nuraghic towers, tepees, fractals, Uncle Sam and Lorenzo of Medici, the Minotaur. There is an aesthetic of contents in Plexus that often, not always, that moved on a object aesthetic. Interesting works made by interesting artists. Good artists, probably, also out from Plexus but anyway lighted by his snaky flames. Plexus has waving, sometimes shaking, movements that are not looking for the world of art but the art of the world.

Alessandra Menesini