"Too Busy Sinking" A Dispatch From New-Cult Like Images, Milan
Essay / 9 July 2025 / By: Rebecca Isabel Consolandi
Dispatch from the opening of New Cult-Like Images or Come il patto tra adulti diventa un trattato di strategia affettiva, the Fifteen figures tableaux a show by the Italo-Lebanese duo, Desirée Nakouzi De Monte and Andrea Parenti, A.K.A Collezione Nancy Delroi and Wilhelmina Merante and Leyla Riggio.
New Cult-Like Images saw a staged scene, or tableaux, by Nancy Delroi alongside a series of debut sculptural installations by Merante and Riggio. The staged scene was the centrepiece, doubling as the set for a series of documented neo-realistist filmed moments involving the audience, premiering throughout the following week on a four-monitor CRT display. These unscripted films expand the ongoing film cycle of episodes, scenes, frames and dialogues launched recently by the duo, including You Kill Me Second & Anna Smoking Cigarettes.
On view by appointment until 9 July, it represents a pact between (four) adults, un trattato di strategia affettiva (a treatise on emotional strategy) a New Cult founded on the rhythm of wood, metal, FRP material and plywood. Today, as always, we celebrate despair by painting crosses and drinking red wine.
—
June 23 2025, 8 O’clock: Usual Monday evening, Milan is deserted. When walking down the streets, from the barely illuminated shop windows, mannequins dressed to the nines wink at passers-by; a couple of them look for a cigarette. I can't help but stop for a chat: a woman in military uniform and another individual in gauze, “Future”, insist on accompanying me towards the opening. I long for company - I also need a lighter.
Once there, beyond a wooden gate, a closed metal gate. Beyond that metal gate, more gates and wooden windows, and then, a room filled with undressed to the nines mannequins seated at a banquet table. Too busy alcohol-sinking, they do not turn around as I enter; their desolate body fat percentages are floating in a kind of ED arrogance permeating everyone’s pores and sanity.
The space is staggered by some cheap plywood furniture pieces, arranged as if there is something to hide: a body, a love affair, the true and ultimate meaning of Contemporary Art... for sure not the pornographic side of it, everyone in there is naked and careless.
On the walls, the works of Merante and Riggio, so-called “Metal Paintings”. Full and empty spaces signalling where to hold and where to release the breath: Greek Cross, Red Cross, Medium Shot of a Skeleton, A Rectified Rib Cage, Geometric idol, Rampant bird…
I need the lighter again, but, turning around, I no longer find my two friends: it seems the diners have grown in number, from 15 to 17; I read on the furnished paper sheet: Tableaux of fifteen figures, Every third thought shall be my grave...
I count up to three and Désirée appears, introducing me to the boudoir, specifying that in an hour there would be a performance where something would happen…finally. The Fiber Reinforced Polymer mannequin table seems now a bit inactive, plagued by appetite loss, the hunger drowned with previously overflowing glasses of wine and the lungs stuffed with too many smokes. Forks are lined up along the surface, untouched, like an obstacle course. Or a pew line.
A round, yellowish atmosphere sickens the room, sources of light are a resembling Bauhaus chandelier and a bunch of spotlights burning the air - I later notice a small rectangular skylight in the ceiling - perhaps where the Rampant bird entered from. 20 feathers counted, intact. Despite its flapping of wings, there is no breathing in there. Smells like Mephedrone.
In the previous room I had skipped initially four adults in black shake hands and prepare drinks blended with ice and berries. I wonder if they have agreed on it or it’s just mandatory for artists to wear total black outfits.
A row of unlit televisions reflects guests talking. A girl eating blueberries, then Andrea smoking a cigarette at the door. From the dark screens, the room multiplies, making me think about Borges' Labyrinth – I hope no one tries to enter the television looking for meanings.
After an indefinite period (punctuated only by the emptying of the wildberries tray on the central table), some real-life actors animate the inanimate room: dirty looks, bad words, and gratuitous violence towards those who arrived first and occupy the stage. Forks fly. It's cheesy.
The Ikea furniture of the early 2000s begins to exude squalor: we are all involved, but no one is there. We have lost our hunger and desire, too. No one feels like it but everyone crowds in, it's a feast of empty plates. An orgy of wet cigarette butts. The Rampant Bird gets a wing wound and flies away. The other sculptural paintings remain stoically unbothered,o not moving a muscle except for their tongues, with which they climaxingly spit out “pathetic yet deliberate compositions”.
The four adults are no longer taking part in the action: one for each corner they film the scene, silently sticking to their black clothes choice.
We are harming no one but ourselves; no difference between what was happening previously in the first and the second room: drinking, smoking, and talking about the guests on the opposite side of the wall. We sink together.
If I had not come with someone, I would, having being exposed, feel uncomfortable. LuckilyI recognise Militancy and Future, bending over the table, being bullied.
The latter is now missing an arm.
