Henrik Olesen, Danh Vo at Fondazione Morra Greco

Press Release:
liberty |ˈlibərte| noun ( pl. -ties)
1 the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one’s way of life, behavior, or political views : compulsory retirement would interfere with individual liberty.
bondage |ˈbandij| noun
1 the state of being a slave :
• figurative a state of being greatly constrained by circumstances or obligations.
The Master-Slave dialectic can be interpreted as an internal process occurring in one person, or as an external process between two or more people. It implies an end to the anti-thesis of subject and object.
We are used to thinking of power as what presses the subject from the outside, as what subordinates, sets underneath, and regulates to a lower order. But if we understand power as forming the subject as well, as providing the very condition of its existence and the trajectory of its desire, then power is not simply what we disagree with but also, what we depend on for our existence.
In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, the Master-Slave relation is portrayed in the meeting between two nervous beings, who engage in a struggle before one enslaves the other, only to find that this does not give him the control over the world he had sought.
As the slave creates more and more products with greater and greater sophistication through his own creativity, he begins to see himself reflected in the products he created, he realizes that the world around him was created by his own hands.
The Master, who as first appears to be “external” to the slave, re-emerges as the slaves own conscience, in the sense of right and wrong. The unhappiness of the consciousness that emerges is its own self-perception, the effect of the transformation of the master into a psychic reality.