Micah Schippa-Wildfong

People Are Glorious
Triangolo, off site at Chiesa di San Luca, Cremona IT
May 17 — August 2, 2025

It must involve the destruction of civilian property. It must resist the intelligence agency almost successfully. It must be difficult to photograph. It must entail a private morphology of needle and cone. These are some criteria for stage design.¹

PARLIAMENTS OF THE LIVING

This exhibition is a film in which all the actors have no lines and must navigate their relationships through context clues and environmental storytelling. What I have done to promote the film is hire, on every block of the city, a man (in the gender neutral sense), to stand ominously at his own window, turning off and on again at varying, unnerving intervals, a single lamp, roughly equal to the actor's height.

(scene in which the theater destroys itself for no other reason than it must be empty)

If but one drop of how I feel were to have fallen upon him
it would lay waste all surrounding symbols, as one might become waste in the intestines of the sculptures, which are themselves merely a mechanism by which grief is turned
voluminous. If
but one drop of how I feel were to have fallen into Hell at that moment
it would henceforth be transformed
into Paradise.

How can we be neither living (client or agent of this whorehouse-world), nor dead (or too quickly lethal, particularly for oneself)? Proletarian gnosis offers a solution to this problem: be a living-suicide. A saint without any glory except some ravaged intensity much like the sovereign in his act of being. Go to the sea.²

EVEN THE DOGS HERE SING

I am paraphrasing Emil Cioran paraphrasing Catherine of Genoa on paradise, Hell, and transformation, but this is only noteworthy as it bears structural relevance to the spirit of iterative mutation, sublimation, the supposed Proletarian gnosis, and the desire for annihilation present in this body of work. I wished to dissociate from my past, since dissociation and destruction are hallmarks of the contemporary, not fully obliterating it, but to constantly restage it. It shouldn’t be lost, then, that the context of this exhibition taking place in a bygone cinema, is here engaged prosaically with the complexities of the work in relation to the exhibition site, while divesting from the romantic enclosure of exposition, assignation, identity and its statehood. Not to create a religion of one, but to create a symbolic disorder, or a symbolic foil stretched over the process; a private morphology of needle and cone, legible only itinerantly.

I realize now that the work I have undertaken since this restructuring of my inner and outer lives has been a sort of musical fugue enacted on the field of the mind; an iterative cycle where each previous idea feeds into the next, transforming it, informing its structure and predicting its variations. People Are Glorious is the next movement in that cycle, and takes on many previous ghosts in this reflexive process. The lights, which have been programmed to power on and off at various intervals, acted as cadaverous substitutes for traditional metronomes in There Does Not Exist, a microtonal piece of spatialized choral work devised for 5 vocalists and performed earlier this year in Chicago. The church pew is a continuation of an idea first presented in Vienna in 2024, engaging with the weighted provenance of liturgical objects in relation to performance and collectivity, but here it has been outfitted with a pneumatic device typically used in automating the doors of haunted houses. The various timekeeping mechanisms that have been dissolved in false tears and stomach acid come from the paranoid schizophrenic collection of my grandfather, who amassed enormous amounts of strange and broken objects, presumably as a salve to his condition. The clarinets were found at an abandoned school not far from my studio; I think of the way the air from their lungs and the saliva from their mouths interacted with the objects, how the world changed around these dormant, forgotten things, like the found Stradivarius violins I have previously used in my work, which eerily precedes and reverberates with the context of this exhibition taking place in Cremona. But also the history of the space itself, its previous life as Cinema San Luca, and the spectral echoes of Derrida’s theory of haunted ontology therein. In this regard, the new site sensitive works for this exhibition engage with the broken instrument and machine parts leaking false tears, which I manufacture myself, that contain the heavy metal compounds from the objects they originally destroyed. I have also ingested a photograph of my partner performing Preparation of a poisonous fish, a performance that debuted late 2024, collecting the resulting liquid my body expels as waste. These works are, in this way, my attempt to access the uncanny and the uncomfortable and to “turn grief voluminous”. Is it possible that to put something inside an exhibition is a way of passing through it, the way the photograph passes through my digestive system, emerging on the other side as something new or, preferably, topologically unrecognizable. X M.S.W.

¹Lerner, Ben, et al. The Snows of Venice. Spector Books, 2018.
²Gilles Grelet, source unknown

I
Parliaments of the living — lights collected from various locations of purpose, each set to an automatic incremental timer, dimensions variable, 2024/2025

II
the host / Music for Assembly— church pew gifted from Chiesa di San Luca, electronic motion pounder, prop control motion trigger, 145cm x 79cm x 93cm, 2025

III
CHOIR OF MAN / Parliaments of Stone I, II, & III — materials not listed, 50cm x 12cm x 9cm/67cm x 12cm x 9cm/108cm x 12cm 9cm, 2025

IV
First chamber of the house / the administration of plurals — clock mechanism from the collection of my grandfather previously dissolved in lacrimal solution (false tears formulated by the artist), various musical components, antique player piano sheet music cases, enamel, display cabinet, 151cm x 35cm x 32cm, 2022/2023/2025

V
Second chamber of the house / the administration of plurals— clock mechanism from the collection of my grandfather previously destroyed in a fire, found clarinets, plastic tubing with lacrimal solution, photograph of Alex Hovi performing “Preparation of a poisonous fish”, display cabinet, 151cm x 35cm x 32cm, 2022/2023/2025

VI
The digestive qualities of photography and performance / the pain / of others is a weapon of great skill / and pleasure — photograph of Alex Hovi performing “Preparation of a poisonous fish” ingested by the artist, the resulting urine of which was then collected in vials, vitrine, 26cm x 26cm x 26cm, 2025

Major thanks to Gaia Zani, Leonardo Caldonazzo, Ludo Baldrighi, & Alex Hovi for helping realize the installation of this exhibition. Photographs by Michela Pedranti.