ROOM 6. Memorabilia

We conclude this exhibition with an overview of projects that remained unrealised for reasons that are not easily classified, or that are particularly curious, bringing them together in a Wunderkammer, or room of memorabilia.

Among the examples of works that remained unrealised for curious reasons, we include Jeremy Deller’s Rejected Tube Map Cover Illustration (2007), which was rejected because it was considered misleading: not all London Underground lines allowed bicycles to be taken onto the trains, as shown in the image used for this first proposal. Deller nevertheless went on to create a Tube map cover together with the artist Paul Ryan, presented on 1 July 2007. It consisted of a portrait of John Hough, who was, at the time, the company’s longest-serving employee.

Finally, we recall Luigi Presicce’s La camera della morte (2012), a theatrical action conceived by the artist but impossible to realise. The work consists of a role reversal in which men take the place of tuna fish and, unaware of what awaits them, are prepared to participate in their own final moment of life, waiting to be slaughtered by other men in a mattanzareserved for them. The artist thus consciously chose to conceive a work that is not so much a utopian project as simply an impossible one, provocatively and subversively challenging common sense and established social norms.