Score // Please Try The Impossible

A ping-pong table with a net far higher than usual: Codice Ivan on the likeness between game and conflict. Winner of the Transart Prize 2011.

With Score // Please Try The Impossible Codice Ivan questions the similarities between game and conflict, and asks the audience to join in a more “athletic” way. The project won the first edition of the prize for young artistic creativity promoted by Transart, Museion and Südtiroler Künstlerbund in 2011. It had two parts: a multimedia performance at Alumix in Bolzano, and a mixed-media installation conceived for the project room of Museion, the museum of modern and contemporary art in Bolzano. The installation is now part of the permanent collection of Museion, Bolzano.

At the centre is a revisited game of ping-pong. The table is the ground, the place of the clash, the battlefield. The net, much higher than usual, magnifies the challenge, the effort, the overcoming of the obstacle and of oneself, in a time that stretches out in search of an extreme resolution of the conflict. Into this oversized booth Codice Ivan weaves a thin strand of byssus, the ancient and almost extinct sea silk: a precious thread that joins things and people and pushes them to win, or at least to try, the impossible.

How aware are we of the causes of our actions? Is it really so easy to decide who wins and who is bound to lose? Are we strong enough to try the impossible, to imagine other worlds and other possibilities?

• Transart Prize 2011