HEEBIE-JEEBIES

A12

“Heebies-Jeebies”, solo show, Pinksummer gallery, Genoa, Italy, march 2006

Heebie-jeebies is a work focused on the ailments of psychological origin (phobias in the most serious cases) related to space: heebie-jeebies is an English colloquial term that means anxiety, psychological distress. The term was coined around 1923 by Billy De Beck a cartoonist; in 1926 Heebie jeebies became the title of a successful jazz piece, performed among others by Louis Armstrong, eventually the term became common and formalized.
It is therefore a work on space, faced starting from its negation, or from what can be considered forms of “refusal” towards it. What interested us in this aspect is its substantial ambiguity and we did try to address these aspects without introducing the same ambiguity between space and subject into the work.
We have therefore created a series of objects, very different from each other, united by the fact that they function as “amulets” against phobias related to space, making use of mechanisms such as opposition, distraction, compassion, understanding.