Altri discorsi. Attraversamenti dell'Archivio Video di Careof
PROJECT BY
Matteo Lucchetti e Chiara Agnello
CURATED BY
Valentina Angeleri, Arianna Carcano, Michele D'Aurizio, Anita Gazzani, GRID (Roberto Shwafaty, Paolo Caffoni), Matteo Lucchetti e Giulia Paciello
From 29.05 to 13.06.2009
1. I use roads that I don't own / di Valentina Angeleri e Matteo Lucchetti
video di: Maja Bajevic, Mircea Cantor, Danilo Correale, Ugo la Pietra, Martin Zet + Angel Nevarez & Valerie Tevere
2. La città orizzontale / di Michele D'Aurizio, Anita Gazzani e Giulia Paciello
video di: Keren Amiran, Luciano Celli, Mario Garcia Torres, Francesco Jodice, Ugo La Pietra, Deborah Ligorio, Marcello Maloberti, Alex Villar + Clemens Von Wedemeyer
3. Jeux sans frontières / di GRID (Paolo Caffoni e e Beto Shwafaty) e Arianna Carcano
video di: Maja Bajevic, Alexander Brener, Paola di Bello, Jaume Fargas, Multiplicity, Clemens Von Wedemeyer + Jakup Ferri
Altri discorsi is a project born from the collaboration between Careof and the young curators of the Biennio specialistico in Arti visive e Studi curatoriali at NABA - Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti di Milano.
Over the years, Careof has organized an archive with over 5000 artist videos – starting from the experiments of the early 1970s up to works by the latest generations – recently incorporated into the more comprehensive DOCVA Documentation Centre for Visual Art. The project Altri discorsi starts from a reflection on themes related to the archive and on the possibilities of highlighting new paths of interpretation of the material preserved at DOCVA. The “altri discorsi” are in fact those expressed by the selections made by three curatorial units of the MA at NABA, who worked as part of a critical research capable of activating crossings alongside the corpus of the archive's content. The project unfolds its research differently for the two involved spaces: Careof will present in its exhibition space an expanded version of the research through three simultaneous video lessons (each lasting about one hour), where a synthesis of the discourse carried out, through the selection, will be accompanied by an installation providing the public with materials useful for understanding the research. At the same time, fixed stations will be created at DOCVA where a larger number of selected titles can be viewed. Each curatorial unit has also selected videos external to the DOCVA catalog that could enrich the outlined path, planning the acquisition of these new materials, with the aim of a critical expansion of the archive. The possibility of reading the present through material from the past, updated in light of more recent productions, makes the archive, just as Foucault saw it, a tool for the critique of the present.
With the contribution of Fondazione Cariplo
Video lesson
(each path corresponds to a video selection of about 60 minutes)
I use roads that I don't own / by Valentina Angeleri and Matteo Lucchetti
videos by: Maja Bajevic, Mircea Cantor, Danilo Correale, Ugo la Pietra, Martin Zet + Angel Nevarez & Valerie Tevere
The temporality covered by the Careof Video Archive, in terms of artistic production, spans a historical period starting from the 1970s up to the young artists working today. During this timeframe, the concept of belonging and access to the public and private dimensions of social life has undergone more or less radical reconsiderations and readings. The spaces organizing collective experience are today subjected to progressive privatization, which has led to the need to construct public space as a result of open discursive confrontation among subjects, in opposition to the strategic and negotiative one of interests.
The selection thus attempts to trace the tension between public and private that finds in Michael Warner’s definition of “counter-public” the space of circulation where action becomes constructive: a sort of discursive infrastructure that constantly tries to provide new and different forms of sociality.
La città orizzontale / by Michele D'Aurizio, Anita Gazzani, and Giulia Paciello
videos by: Keren Amiran, Luciano Celli, Mario Garcia Torres, Francesco Jodice, Ugo La Pietra, Deborah Ligorio, Marcello Maloberti, Alex Villar + Clemens Von Wedemeyer
To fight iconic architecture and the panoptic structure of the city. To recover a creative attitude and reclaim urban space. To dismantle heterotopias. To rethink society it is necessary to pass through a redefinition of the anthropized territory; after all, the word 'civilization' derives from the Latin 'civis', citizen, as if to say that first the city arose and then civilization. Modernity planned urban space and often failed; post-modernity transformed the city into a voracious organism and assigned the built environment the role of reiterating the condition of unease on which current society is founded. Traversing the Careof archive, we will identify some nonconformist readings of urban space. Learning from the Situationists and their theories on the city; demystifying architecture like the Radicals. To return from being 'subjects' to being 'citizens.'
Jeux sans frontières / by GRID (Paolo Caffoni and Beto Shwafaty) and Arianna Carcano
videos by: Maja Bajevic, Alexander Brener, Paola di Bello, Jaume Fargas, Multiplicity, Clemens Von Wedemeyer + Jakup Ferri
Jeux sans frontières is a variety show born at the end of the 1960s as a television prototype of a European cultural identity. The ethical principles on which the game was based were the experiment of a federalism founded on moderate competition, politically sustainable by countries just emerged from a world conflict. But what is Europe today? What remains of European ideals? A protocollary form that defines criteria of inclusion and exclusion, made of symbols and media monopolies.
By engaging with the Archive, we attempt to identify those mechanisms and dynamics that constitute the continental brand, and at the same time mark forms of escape towards subjective productions of identity.
