A Spectacle of Ugliness is an exploration of how the freely accessible virtual space of review systems affects the representation and experience we make of real places, of how it is employed by a community as a re-affirmation of its own identity and a provocation of how limited and subjective the documentary can be. By taking the paradox of a spiritual place treated like any other commercial business, ASOU makes use of irony to create a surreal, suspended and fragmented universe in which judgments, images and ratings collide generating an unexpected conversation.
“My neighbourhood”, 5 stars, 1 year ago. This is just one of the 163 reviews that can be found on the Google Maps page of the brutalist church San Giovanni Bono, with an overall average rating of 4,2 stars out of 5. The church, built in reinforced concrete in the shape of a pyramid/sail, rises among the public housing of suburban neighbourhood Sant’Ambrogio, in the southwest of Milan.
Some people write cold technical reviews, noting the vicinity of the entrance of the A4 highway Milan-Genova or the possibility to park the car inside the parish (after having asked for permission from the priest). Others write intimate emotional ones, expressing joy, grief or recalling personal memories. Finally, some are simply bizarre and absurd, and ultimately end up being those that perhaps make more sense.
Some reviewers may be passersby, who drop their judgment and never come back, while others could be living behind the hundreds of windows surrounding the church, locals that were born to stay there. Every review is a person that we never met, but that we can play to imagine: altogether they form an invisible collection of portraits.
Reviews applied to a place of worship are a deformation of the feedback and quantification systems of contemporary society. A place of worship should be an intimate and spiritual place, free from the rules and competition of the market. Doesn’t assigning stars to a church mean comparing it qualitatively with all the others? Has spirituality become secondary to logistic and comfort factors? Even when the elaboration and the rating of the experience are emotional, they take the form of a brutal approximation. The review system offers the opportunity to vent frustrations, to take revenge against a place that has not given us what we expected. If we read the emotional reviews of a place without having ever visited it, we transform it into a confused, fragmented, and controversial image. The digital realm offers a new space for judgment to those that for centuries have only been judged. How does this freely accessible virtual space of expression affect the digital representation of real places? And how does our experience of these places change, since we’ve become used to experiencing them virtually first?
Reviews dialogue continuously with the images, while the stars give a rating, and thus judge, the photographs taken by the author. These photographs are another form of the looping sequence of virtual alter-egos that are subjected to scrutiny, judgment, and review. Where should we place the documentary in all of this? Where does it fall between the emotional and the technical? Did it finally rid itself of the false myth of objectivity, embracing the awareness that every attempt of documentation is a subjective approximation of reality?
Maybe as approximative as a person holding a phone in front of a church, just to type these words about it: “A spectacle of ugliness”.
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