Under the spell of music, moved by an ill-fated gust of wind, bodies were set in violent motion: no longer dancing as if struck by ecstasy, but conversely led to enact a very last choreography of destruction. For a time-lapse, the skies appeared to have fallen on Earth, and the blinding spotlights on the horizon to be exploding stars in the galaxy of pleasure dome. The party had come to an end, and what was left behind were the sole testimonies of the crepuscule of an era.

Since the very beginning of her artistic practice, Vivian Caccuri has been playing with the invisible force of sound — or of music, if you will. Starting with the monolithic walls of speakers in her early installations; followed by the dizzying sound of invisible mosquitoes; and, more recently, their inaudible biting on her embroidered tule tableaux. Throughout her career, Caccuri’s work has been swinging from performative hedonism to colonial metastatic entrapments, and what could well be seen as an ode to ritualistic dancing soon becomes the silent whisper of ill omen (as in the case of the yellow fever mosquitoes, which arrived at the Americas through slave trading routes departing from Africa, depicted in her recent production).

Under the arch of the insidious sound waves emanating from her pieces, lie the living creatures, human or otherwise, affected by what has yet to be fully grasped by Western epistemologies: the holistic nature of life throughout birth, demise, rebirth, transformation, hybridization, artifice, insurrection, and death. Either by weaving sound into fabric, or colonial history into atmospheric conditions, the artist has crafted a universe where visible and invisible forces are enmeshed, and where matter and spirit interact so as to produce a feedback effect to disturb the single-threaded cartesian narrative the West has been sewing and foisting on other cultures across modern history.

This time round though, the artist plays yet a different tune: the muffled groans of pleasure, cries, and howls of a crowd whose imminent horizon is deceitful. After all, we live in a precarious world where disaster seems to have been lurking all along the line — when one expects to meet joy, happens to find pain altogether; and what was meant to be a joyous party might turn into an instantly flawed celebration. Indeed, this exhibition could be seen as yet another hedonistic epic event that has gone out of hand, and there have been plenty of those in recent history. Conversely though, this exhibition might just as well be understood as a powerful metaphor for the collapse of capitalism itself, of hedonistic mayhem, and of artifice over life.

The Invisible Hand is the first solo show of Vivian Caccuri dedicated almost entirely to drawing, a practice she’s been exercising while producing her signature embroidered panels, but which had never been fully developed on paper until now. Here, images acquire shape through the use of charcoal, chalk, and some pastel too; as a result, the bodies she draws emerge from the dust as fleeting souls in the manner of a El Greco painting, distorted, elongated, as if evaporating from Earth — “dust to dust, ashes to ashes”, as the biblical passage goes. In the maelstrom of anguishes and desires devised by Caccuri, the human and the so-called landscape become unified in a psychedelic driven deviation. Architecture collapses amidst a convulsion of bodies. The stage implodes, dancing routines become agonizing liturgies, illusion surrenders to the music concert debris.

Nonetheless, as a three-dimensional counterpart to the apocalyptic scenario devised by the artist, on the gallery grounds rest the precarious remains of a wrecked stage — a model of reduced size that only enhances the exoperspective of the public looking at it from above, in the guise of a God’s sight. The replicas of the megastructures of the gig appear as fraught and frail as the grand expectation surrounding such events, whose very scale of public anticipation is somehow bounded to be frustrated. Therefore, the ephemerous embodiment of such collective dream is analogous to the fleeting gratification from instant consumption — a spectral materialization of human desire.

The artist thus faces us with the epilogue of a dream whose idyllic beginning entailed a state of trance, a quest for transcendence, and an oblique sense of redemption. But what are the traps within contemporary tropes of happiness? This seems to be the elucubration lingering above this exhibition. The whole apparatus behind the entertainment industry entangled with the conundrums of human existence, whose myriad of fetishist inner machinations succumbs under material culture. And insofar as technology appears to be totemic, the depositary of hopes and fantasies, the collapse of such structures is akin to the death drive infused in human nature. Eros and Thanatos operating in tandem, as poles of the same magnetic field depicted in the abstract drawings of intertwined sound waves embracing the chaotic crowds.

While delving in Vivian Caccuri’s synaesthetic experience — a maelstrom of horror and beauty — we can hear the silent sound of a fall. No solace to redeem us all.