Johannes Willi

Swiss artist Johannes Willi presents his project Chronic Pain Orchestra for the first time in Italy on the occasion of Milan Design Week. The installation will be exhibited in the Milanese district dedicated to the cross-disciplinary contamination of design with liminal creative fields.

Chronic Pain Orchestra is an installation that invites the viewer to confront the corporeal dimension of relationships, the urgency to communicate and the limitations of language when expressing pain. For Milano Design Week, the artist develops a concept that was initiated back in 2019, as a result from a six-month residency period alongside chronic patients at the pain clinic of the Paraplegic Centre in Nottwil, Switzerland. Willi will present in Milan a second version of CPO, which already had its first moment, with a different set of sculptures, in Switzerland.

The narration of pain is a fundamental component of the perception of pain itself. The omission of verbalisation intensifies the crisis in which chronic pain patients find themselves. With his work Willi gives form to a language of the incommunicable, through a set of percussive sculptures that can speak for the patients, narrating the condition of suffering without words.

The installation is finished via a performative act, in which the anthropomorphic gong-sculptures are "made to speak" through caresses, blows, scratches. The presentation of the work in Milan is an important step in completing the sculptures, because the audience will be invited to engage with the sculptures, contributing to their completion.

The therapeutic act of transferring the tactile sensation of pain onto the metal body of the sculpture, restores the form and specific vibration of a deeply personal and intimate experience. The act of sharing it with other people turns the performative into compassion, a word that derives from the Latin notion of ‘cum-patior’ i.e. sharing sufferance.

The need to re-appropriate the dimension of compassion, in its etymological sense, extends from the specific case of the condition of the chronic patient to the everyday crisis of the insufficiency of language in people’s relationship with each other’s. In this sense, the presence of Willi's work within an international event dedicated to design sheds new light on the median role of the object, as a catalyst for discourses rooted in human experience, as an amplifier of dialogue.

Chronic Pain Orchestra is tangible evidence of poetry’s inherent expressive capacity, and of the power of art to create bridges where there were walls, to generate beauty where there was pain.