Piero Steinle
The Triumph of Laughter
A sequence of different places, people and ages create a universal panorama of laughter. The spectator plunges into a world where laughter seems to be the a normal condition of being. Dislocation from the usually serious everyday life to the reality dominated by laughter is spontaneously perceived as a pleasurable and liberating experience.
In The Triumph of Laughter, the very physical activity of laughing evolves as the most absurd human language. With the weapons of contagious absurdity and marvel, laughter is celebrating in a very ironical way its global triumphs from young to old and from east to west over a world discouraged by problems. The associative story starts with Mexican kids laughing the wonderful laughter of childhood, and it ends with The Boat of Fools in San Diego laughing at the the spectators for no reason whatsoever…..It’s the definite victory of laughter over the rest of the world!
Piero Steinle….conducts us in his multiple video installation to a ‘panopticum’ of laughter. The Old and the Young are laughing, the Indians, the Japanese and the Europeans, they are laughing alone and in groups, they laugh especially, when there is nothing to laugh about. What in the beginning is contagiously amusing becomes surreptitiously oppressive. The laughter culminates during its ecstatic moments in an impressive borderline experience between pleasure and pain. [Angelika Affentranger-Kirchrath, NZZ (Neue Züricher Zeitung)]
