“Western Simulacrum” by Emanuele Mengotti, audio installation by Enrico Coniglio @ Galleria d’arte Comunale di Faenza, Voltone della Molinella

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“Western Simulacrum” was born from the need to cross through the mirage — to understand how an image can become flesh, how a dream can turn into destiny.

The exhibition explores the West as a mental construction before being a geographical one.
It begins with an inherited memory: the West imagined by a father who never saw it and recounted it to his son, evolving through Polaroids taken in the most marginal and authentic corners of America by the artist himself. These images enter into dialogue with a selection of original postcards from the last century, featuring handwritten texts whose words feel more timely than ever today. The exhibition weaves together family intimacy, myth-making, national ideology, and what America still dares to dream of itself.

It is not an exhibition about the West, but about the desire for the West — about what remains when the myth falters yet keeps stubbornly beating. Between apparition and disorientation, a wounded symbol reemerges — the trace of a revelation that touches both personal memory and the American present.