Pietro Sanguineti

private property (I), 1999

Marcel Broodthaers had used palms for his exhibitions under the heading of Décors since they act as symbols of cultural intervention, appropriation and displacement. In private property (I) Sanguineti quotes Broodthaers’ Décors but moves the plants into the center of attention: a dense set of hydroculture plants framing a monitor. If one takes the concept private property literally, another reversal of the relations takes place as private property is frequently fenced in or monitored by video cameras. Sanguineti replaced the item worth being protected by the protective mechanism and the video camera (recording) by the monitor (replay). The plants screen off the virtual space for images in which the work’s title revolves around itself in gleaming letters and three languages. The appropriation, availability and interchangeability of real and virtual, private and public, political and economic spaces is transformed into precise pictorial terms.