Eight months after the 10th edition of the Corso Superiore di Arti Visive of the Fondazione Antonio Ratti, led by the artist Jimmie Durham (a Cherokee born in Arkansas, USA, in 1940, poet, writer, and visual artist), Tracce di un seminario aims to verify, through an exhibition path, the process of artistic development of the individual participants: Riccardo Benassi (I), Marco Bruzzone (I), Alessia Chiappino (I), Vanessa Chimera (I), Rä Di Martino (I), Cleo Fariselli (I), Sophie Franza (France), Linda Fregni Nagler (Sweden), Mario Garcia Torres (Mexico), Romain Gillet (France), Tiago Giora (Brazil), Paul Leslie Griffiths (UK), Elizabeth Haines (England), Verica Kova?evska (Macedonia), Armando Lulja (Albania), Shannon Lyons (Australia), Federico Maddalozzo (I), Hector Madera Gonzalez (Puerto Rico), Domenico Antonio Mancini (I), Sebastiano Mauri (I), Eléna Nemkova (Russia), Eivind Nesterud (Norway), Antonio Rovaldi (I), Lucia Uni (I), and Nico Vascellari (I).

At the venues of Careof and Viafarini, the intertwining of experiences and creativity lived during the course is reconstituted, and the individual paths each of the twenty-five participants is undertaking emerge. A common element of all the works presented is the reflection — proposed by Durham during the course — on what it means to make art today. All of Jimmie Durham’s work challenges the idea of monumentality that underpins Western artistic tradition, through the use of stones, conceived as “non-monuments.”

For the occasion, the national premiere of Jimmie Durham’s video Stones Rejected by the Builder will also be presented. The video documents the daily performance the artist carried out in Como, involving the course participants by inviting them to bring the most diverse objects into his “Office for the Destruction of Objects.”

The XI edition of the course, directed by Annie Ratti, curated by Roberto Pinto, and coordinated by Anna Daneri, will feature Alfredo Jaar as the 2005 visiting professor (born in Santiago, Chile, in 1956, based in New York since 1982; an artist who, through various media, highlights the problem of the gap between the so-called Third World and the industrialized countries of the West).