Van Der and Stefano Riba are happy to be part of collective show Opening Reception in the frame of OFF circuit of Les Urbaines festival in Lausanne (CH).

Opening Reception deals with the practice of exhibition making and pushes its production to the edge of ephemera.  The exhibition moves from Italo Calvino’s novel “If on a winter night a traveller”.

“If on a winter night a traveller” is a meta-novel: a novel about the experience of reading, whose protagonists are both the fictional and the actual reader. Narrating the readers’ thoughts, difficulties (like the layout of the book) and happenings which occur while reading, Calvino creates a book that collects incipits of potential novels. Each chapter is a new beginning of a story that the readers will never have the chance to finish, because they do not exist yet -and never will.

Opening Reception works in the same way: it is a meta-exhibition, an exhibition about possible exhibitions and narrates the story of the beholder who is confronted with different narratives and subjects which might be on display, without ever completing their experience.

Click here to read or download Van Der-Stefano Riba contribution to Opening Reception.