On September 21, 2023, artist and Continuing Lecturer G. D. Cohen celebrated the vernissage of his solo exhibition, Onirogramas, at the Maison du Diable in Sion Switzerland. Co-produced by the Fondation Fellini pour le cinèma and the Fondazione Margherita per la cultura italiana, Onirogramas stems from Cohen’s recent discovery in the collections of the Fondation Fellini of a series of unusual and hitherto unknown documents. Comprising three small notebooks filled with strange drawings and cryptic, handwritten texts, the mysterious works are dated 1972, 1976, and 1978, respectively, and bear the signature of a certain Hermáfroditos, from the city of Villa María, in the Province of Córdoba, Argentina. In the absence of any conclusive evidence as to the identity of the obscure Argentinian author of the notebooks, Cohen has conceived his exhibition as a “forensic interpolation” into the Fellini Foundation archives themselves. Through a variety of media and conceptual approaches—from large alcohol ink works on vellum and intimate watercolor paintings to composite digital images and an experimental video—Cohen’s work unearths the entangled Argentinian and hermaphroditic threads of an “archival unconscious” related to the work and world of Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini.
The exhibition runs until December 17, 2023 and will travel internationally thereafter. More information (in French and English) can be found at: https://www.fondation-fellini.ch/fr/expositions/maison-du-diable/onirogramas-686 .
Review of the exhibition in Le Nouvelliste, 21 September, 2023: https://www.lenouvelliste.ch/valais/valais-central/sion-district/sion-commune/fondation-fellini-les-carnets-dhermafroditos-la-troublante-trouvaille-dun-artiste-americain-1324218