Psycho Park
solo exhibition curated by M. Scotini, Galleria Facsimile, Milano

PSYCHO PARK is a performance setting created by Stefano Boccalini with the collaboration of students from NABA, a private art school in Milan. The story is familiar: a young woman, Marion, fleeing from Phoenix with 40,000 dollars, stops at the Bates Motel, a nearly deserted place where death comes to claim her that very night, in the shower.
In this work Hitchcock’s film becomes a pretext for the creation of a theme park, a nocturnal amusement facility inserted for five days, with a detailed audiovisual setting, in the historic gallery on Via Morigi. Suspense, the Hopper-like house in California Gothic style, the wax museum that, in the end, turns out to be Mrs. Bates, combine the motel of the film with a sort of haunted house attraction. Many traces of Psycho are scattered through the large space of the gallery, in different forms. Not only single frames or certain sequences, but also the soundtrack by Bernard Herrmann, and the graphics of the opening credits by Saul Bass.
The context is very different, though, because as in all of Stefano Boccalini’s projects, here too the otherness is not so monstrous after all. Like the horror cinema in “Auguri Monica” at the Bordone gallery, in PSYCHO PARK the thriller by Hitchcock becomes an icon of possible coexistence with the other, even in the extreme forms of the alien. The reference is to a normal domestic existence with the other, rather than a possible taming. So PSYCHO PARK (its mysteries, its atmospheres) turns out to be a place of entertainment, relaxation and socializing.
As in other works by Stefano Boccalini, here again sharing and participation become key parts of the design and execution of the work. While in previous cases other artists or persons from the world of work were invited to take part, PSYCHO PARK is the result of collaboration between Stefano Boccalini and students.