4 Workshops
Cesare Pietroiusti:
Museo dell’Arte Italiana in Esilio
15-16 September 2010
Tris Vonna-Michell: shoeboxes
24-25 September 2010
Dora García: Mad Marginal
27-28 September 2010
Alberto Garutti:
Three Attempts for a
Catalogue Raisonné
29-30 September 2010
The first workshop features, in the role of artist-professor, the Italian artist Cesare Pietroiusti (b. Rome, 1955). Pietroiusti’s practice is based upon the examination of the phenomena underlying our everyday life, from the relations that are established among people to the expression of their diverse personalities. The artist investigates in this same vein the rules that make up and “encompass” the context of art. The workshop aims at defining and organizing the theoretical and practical aspects linked to the foundation of a new museum, the Museo dell’Arte Italiana in Esilio (The Museum of Exiled Italian Art). This institution is, in the artist’s words, an alternative to the actual museum and acts as a research platform for analyzing contemporary art history in Italy, its own cliches and potentialities. Starting from a series of explorations – carried out by the participants – the singled out and archived works will acknowledge the activity of individual artists or collectives who carry out atypical, heterodox creative practices outside the media communication network linked to the art system, or active in troubled situations or in fields that are not defined as “artistic” ones, but that can be apprarently closer to politics, historiography, philosophy, environmental or scientific research. The investigation lays no claims to being a comprehensive or systematic study, yet it will act as an introductory “case-history” supporting the starting off of this possible museum and as an invitation to direct its future programme towards themes such as the concept of “relational” and its placement between psychological and artistic research, the artistic (self)censorship, the supposed gap between Italian contemporary art and ideological-political commitment. An “exiled” programme brochure devoted to this project will be published in 2011 by Fondazione Galleria Civica.
The second workshop will feature the British artist Tris Vonna-Michell (b. Rochford, 1982) and it will revolve around Vonna-Michell’s upcoming artist book based on his prolonged stay in the city of Detroit (2007-2008), co-produced by Fondazione Galleria Civica with Kunsthalle Zürich, Bergamo’s GAMeC-Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea and Halle für Kunst Lüneburg eV. The artist intends his workshop as a platform to “expand / perform / narrate” the book, as a setup related to the “live expanding of the book”. The audience will experience this book not as a fixed entity, but as a narrative construction developing in space and time, conceived as an in-progress tale using different expressive means (performance, objects, video and sound). Vonna-Michell is a memory traveler who runs through past and present. His installations and interventions are like architectural scores in which images, sound, light and the most ordinary objects – belonging to a more or less recent past that has been, in any case, removed – become the material of a totally individual experience. If, during the 1920s, Detroit was the model of the industrial development then underway, today that same city is a case in point for the global crisis of the car industry and a symbol of the Western economic changes. But for Vonna-Michell Detroit and its history become the foundation of a fluid experience in which reality and fiction merge, in which journey, memories and invention coexist. Involving the participants in his own multi-layered storytelling and linking collective history and memory, cultural references and psychological projections, the artist erases the usual distance between urban and mental space-time, artwork and documentation, live experience and its fictional account.
The third workshop will be run by Spanish artist Dora García (b.Valladolid, 1965). García’s work is developed around unconventional formats showing a conceptual background: texts, photographs, installations conceived for the specific sites of the institutions where she intervenes. Often recurring to participative art forms, García explores the relation between the artist, the artwork and the viewer and scrutinizes the varied nuances of reality, which reveals itself developed on multiple levels of potential interpretation and experience. The workshop will act as a first presentation of the ongoing project Mad Marginal and its provisional results: the film The Deviant Majority and the artist book Mad Marginal cahier #1: from Basaglia to Brazil, co-published by Fondazione Galleria Civica and Mousse Publishing, Milan. Defined by García as an “extended film project”, Mad Marginal brings the artist and the institution to expand “beyond” themselves and to explore a territory placed between “madness” and “marginality”. Acting as an introduction to the three main sections of the Mad Marginal project – radical politics, radical art, radical psychiatry – the workshop will enable a shared reflection on the instruments (public talks, seminars, the setting up of an ongoing archive, the first publication and the film) employed by the artist. Mad Marginal was inspired by the books of Franco Basaglia, the Italian psychiatrist and researcher who in 1978 promoted the “180 law”, by means of which Italy was among the first countries in the world to abolish mental hospitals. García’s intent is to investigate the tradition of the anti-psychiatry theories, and in particular the “Basaglia revolution”, as a prism to look at marginality as a possible creative position, investigating the relation between radical politics and artistic reflection. The Fondazione Galleria Civica would like to thank the other partners who supported the ongoing project: Saint-Lukas Hogeschool, (Brussels), Vlaams Audiovisueel Fonds (Brussels), Peep-Hole (Milan), Festival dell’Arte Contemporanea (Faenza), Nomas Foundation (Rome), Formcontent (London) and the 29th Bienal de São Paulo.
In his multi-author interventions Alberto Garutti (b. Galbiate, 1948) explores the narrative and immaterial dimension of public art, revising conceptual strategies in that romantic vein recently associated with historical Conceptualism. Garutti connotes streets, squares, buildings of towns and cities trying to investigate the numerous poetic aspects of the public space, to verify the modernity of aesthetical and economic topoi in public art – like the monument, the grave, the commission – and to connect his cultural action (and the role of the art institution) with the community it is addressed to. The book commissioned for the workshop examines the reasons why an artistic practice like Garutti’s one, founded upon real-life experiences and a “public” imprinting, actually leaves out the production of traditional artistic and documental formats, such as the exhibition and the catalogue, to adopt instead indirect aesthetic, economic, political and social modalities that are never too outstanding. Like the simple actions in our daily lives, which are immersed within a collective narration made of voices, opinions, mottoes, legends, commonplaces. Co-published by Fondazione Galleria Civica and Kaleidoscope Press, Milan, this book is a kind of hypothetical catalogue – more a (self)provocation and (meta)reflection than a true editorial object – in which three different authors (Chus Martínez with Ingo Niermann; Hans Ulrich-Obrist with Stefano Boeri; Luca Cerizza) have been invited by the artist to suggest three different possible books, which constitute together a multiple aporia, i.e. three possible approaches (a fictional account; an interview; a critical essay) to a monographic book that does not yet exist, and that maybe could never exist.
Trentoship/Trento.link workshops and seminars (addressed to emerging artists and cultural practitioners resident in Trentino) are organized by Comune di Trento-Politiche Giovanili in collaboration with Fondazione Galleria Civica di Trento, in the context of the “Sperimentazione Piani Locali Giovani” promoted and supported by Dipartimento della Gioventù-Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri in collaboration with ANCI-Associazione Nazionale Comuni Italiani and Rete Iter.
From 10 to 19 September 2010 the Fondazione Galleria Civica will also host the model of the “TRIDENTUM” permanent monumental installation, thanks to which artist Stefano Cagol (b. Trento, 1969) has won the competition for the artistic characterization of the new A22 Autostrada del Brennero SpA Trento Sud gate.
Coordination
Andrea Viliani with Francesca Piersanti and Nadia Antonello
Press contact
adicorbetta
email: stampa@adicorbetta.org
skype: adicorbetta stampa
t. +39 02 89053149
corso Magenta 10, 20123 Milan
Fondazione Galleria Civica-Centro di Ricerca sulla Contemporaneità di Trento
Via Cavour 19
38122 Trento, Italy
tel. +39 0461 985511
fax +39 0461 237033
www.fondazionegalleriacivica.tn.it
Workshops (Trentoship/Trento.link)
Via Belenzani 44
38122 Trento, Italy
Info: education@fondazionegalleriacivica.tn.it
