“La Folla Oceanica (The Oceanic Mass)”
Kit Wise
10 Oct → 8 Nov 2014
La Folla Oceanica (The Oceanic Mass) is new work by Kit Wise exploring the crowd as panorama, using found footage of crowd scenes in times of disaster, ecstasy and political protest.
Fascist design of the early twentieth century, as found in the visual languages of magazines such as Rivista Illustrata del Popolo d’Italia (1920s), established a genre of crowd scene imagery called 'mass panorama', or la folla oceanica (the oceanic mass). Originating in the eighteenth century literary tradition of the revolutionary crowd, this graphic device expanded with the growth of photography and film as political vehicles. Its impact can be traced from modernism to the present through artists such as LászlóMoholy-Nagy, Warhol and Andreas Gursky.
La Folla Oceanica will use archival, open-source and commercial moving-image material to explore the wider social, political and cultural implications of crowd imagery. Engaging the sinister history of fascism and utopia with contemporary digital technology and crowd-theory, the work will attempt to consider the complex, visceral and euphoric condition of the mob.
Kit Wise graduated from Oxford University and the Royal College of Art with an MFA in Sculpture. He moved permanently to Australia in 2002, and completed a PhD at Monash University in 2012.