FMAV Fondazione Modena Arti Visive opens on 19 May from 6 to 8 pm at the Museo della Figurina Finger plays: from shadow theater to social networks , an exhibition by the French-Swiss videographer Yannick Jacquet , curated by Francesca Fontana.

The project presents an unpublished installation conceived by Jacquet specifically for the Museo della Figurina and in continuity with the research begun with the engraver Fred Penelle for the Mécaniques Discursives artistic project (ongoing at Palazzo Santa Margherita until 20 August 2023).

Among the thousands of materials preserved in the Museum archive, Jacquet turned his attention to some series of 19th century chromolithograph figurines depicting children who create shadow games with their hands and which reminded him of the finger dance videos spread by social networks network: the phenomenon, which derives from break dance, consists in the creation of hypnotic choreographies through the use of the fingers and has gone viral among young people on the TikTok and Youtube platforms during the period of isolation imposed by the COVID.

The diffusion of stickers in the 19th century and the virality of finger dance in today's society testify to the long-lasting popularity of hand games: the means of distribution changes, but the practice continues. This persistence has prompted the artist to juxtapose these gestures from different eras to build bridges, establish connections and generate collisions. A modus operandi also evident in the Mécaniques Discursives project, in which the relationship between the Guterbergian era and the contemporary one of Big Data generates a surprising universe characterized by imaginative iconography and temporal collisions.

At the Museo della Figurina all this will flow into a site-specific installation in which the figurines of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century will dialogue with projections and videos, giving life to a hybrid scenography that relates the theater of shadows, non-verbal alphabets, pre-cinema and contemporary social networks.

The viewer is captured by the hypnotic vortex of the movements of the fingers, and is led to reflect on the social value of the gesture, on the expressive capacity of the hands and on their communicative power. The multiplication of the vertical image appears as a reference to the virality of social media which allows for the infinite amplification of ancestral bodily practices. Yannick Jacquet thus invites us to meditate on the relationship with the body and with the external appearance in a historical moment in which virtual interactions are now omnipresent.