1:1 STOPOVER

Per Stopover 1:1
al Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (+MSUM) di Ljubljana,
Isola Art Center presenta

Lab Fight-Specific Isola

curato da Camilla Pin e Bert Theis

con Antonio Brizioli, Tania Bruguera, Angelo Castucci, Edna Gee, Grupo Etcetera, Maddalena Fragnito, out-Office for Urban Transformation, Maria Papadimitriou, Dan Perjovschi, Steve Piccolo, Camilla Pin, Edith Poirier, Christoph Schäfer, Mariette Schiltz, Sašo Sedlaček, Bert Theis, Camilla Topuntoli, Nikola Uzunovski, Daniele Rossi, Wei-Ning Yang e altri.

"L'oggetto rigido, isolato (opera, romanzo, libro) non ha più alcuna utilità. Esso deve essere inserito in un contesto di vive relazioni sociali" Walter Benjamin, The Artist as Producer (1)

Isola Art Center è una piattaforma aperta di sperimentazione per l’arte contemporanea che prende vita nel quartiere Isola – Milano. Confrontandosi da più di un decennio con una situazione urbana incrociata da conflitti e trasformazioni globali, il progetto rimane “no- budget”, precario, ultralocale. Abolendo ogni logica verticale di lavoro, il processo di Isola Art Center coinvolge in modo rizomatico artisti, critici, curatori italiani e internazionali, collettivi di artisti, attivisti, architetti, ricercatori, studenti, gruppi e comitati di abitanti. Il quartiere milanese Isola è da tempo soggetto a processi di gentrificazione, politiche di territorializzazione capitalistica che minano direttamente il carattere sociale del quartiere stesso sempre più privato di spazi plurali e condivisi, minacciano le basi fondamentali del diritto all'urbano. Isola Art Center mette in campo una pratica istituente(2) che mette in atto vie di fuga alla logica neoliberista della speculazione finanziaria, fondiaria e immobiliare lavorando con l'arte come elemento spiazzante di svelamento.
Lab Fight-Specific Isola a Lubljana è un progetto live che si sviluppa a partire dai 13 anni di storia di Isola Art Center per arrivare alla sua pratica attuale, presentata in un formato 1:1. Il laboratorio è strutturato secondo tre componenti: le situazioni, le pubblicazioni e le materializzazioni. Le situazioni che proponiamo sono lavori collettivi dove intervengono artisti e curatori in modo orizzontale. Un laboratorio di produzione serigrafica, alcune pitture murali, momenti di incontro, il volo della nuvola Isola Sun-Cloud prodotta per ricreare un nuovo orizzonte contro la speculazione edilizia all'Isola, ed in fine la presentazione del volume “Fight-Specific Isola” che narra le lotte del quartiere. Le pubblicazioni presenti nello spazio sono, oltre al libro Fight-Specific Isola, alcuni prototipi prodotti da diversi artisti, mentre le materializzazioni sono opere fight-specific create nel contesto del quartiere Isola.
Con il laboratorio al MSUM di Lubljana, Isola Art Center intende condividere le specifiche terminologie ed i concetti sviluppati durante gli anni di lotta, con la convinzione che possano servire come armi in altri conflitti o mobilitazioni urbane. In particolare l’idea di operare in un dirty cube, rifiutando l’abbellimento snaturante dell’edificio occupato, la codificazione di un’arte fight-specific, che sappia trasformarsi a seconda delle necessità locali e la nozione di dispersed center, che permette di considerare il centro d’arte non come spazio fisico, ma come attitudine di mente e corpo.
Con Lab Fight-Specific Isola vogliamo scatenare immaginari di pratiche urbane, suscitare un altro inconscio e il desiderio di altre forme di relazione. _____________________________________________________

(1)Understanding Brecht, New Left Books, London 1973, p. 87.
(2) Secondo Gerald Raunig la prassi dell’istituire non è un' azione contro l’istituzione, ma una fuga dall’istituzionalizzazione e dalla strutturazione. Se il termine istituzione suggerisce una qualità statica, si tratta di sostituire la staticità con l’organizzazione di una prassi dinamica di organizzazione. Vedi Instituent Practices, No. 2. Institutional Critique, Constituent Power, and the Persistence of Instituting, gennaio 2007, www.eipcp.net/ transversal.
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GIOVEDI, 17 OTT 201
20.00 - 22.00: Lab Fight-Specific Isola
Situation 1. by Isola Art Center, Milan:
Screenprinting, sale of the prints, and wallpainting.

VENERDI, 18 OTT 2013
14.00- 16.00:
Situation 2. by Isola Art Center, Milan:
Occupying Horizons with the Isola Sun-Cloud,
a solar balloon by Nikola Uzunowski.

18.00 Lab Fight-Specific Isola
Situation 3. by Isola Art Center, Milan:
presentation and discussion of the book "Fight-Specific Isola",
published by Isola Art Center, edited by Archive Books, Berlin


>>Vai alla pagina della Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana MSUM
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CONCEPT
Not interested in showcasing art, 1:1 would be better called a stopover for art than an exhibition, since 1:1 art can never be wholly contained in the time frame of an event.
The focus of the 1:1 stopover is the relationship between art and life, and art and institution. When on a scale of 1:1, art not only describes life, it is one with it. This relation can be disrupted by the institution, which is often thought to divorce art from life. Not so, however, when the institution itself tries to establish a similar one-to-one relationship with art by no longer merely representing it, but instead treating it as a partner.
One of the major issues addressed by the 1:1 stopover is the relation between the event providing the framework for the presentation of art and the duration of the art. Because, 1:1 art can last months, years, even decades. 1:1 art follows the rhythm of life, finding realization in various moments and forms of its existence that not even the artists can always fully control. 1:1 art has a past, a present, a future, and sometimes also an end, a death (when the artist deliberately destroys his or her work). It is never a wholly finalized product, and this makes 1:1 only a moment in the duration of 1:1 art. When an institution acknowledges its own inability to represent the complex temporality of 1:1 art in all of its life forms, it can only offer a place where such art can become a public good, a place where its various users can come together. This point of connection is the place of common interests, where the roles of curator, artist, and audience are often swapped or overlap.
1:1 art refers to more than just art objects; above all, it refers to points of convergence of collective ideas and desires, of various vocations and various narratives. Conversely, everything produced on some scale other than 1:1 designs life, basically subjugating it. 1:1 art determines needs at the grass roots level, in direct contact with people and their ways of organizing, of uncovering the shortcomings and manipulations of planning. It can itself be a plan or potential for change, a corrective to the conditions of organizing and conceiving.
1:1 art proposes conditions that do not involve anyone representing anyone, conditions under which interpretations and translations result from actual, concrete collaborations. It combines theory and practice, art and science and technology, experts and knowledge from below, in order to impact specific socio-political circumstances and help improve future conditions. Such art acts connectively in society, devising alternative models of cultural and knowledge production, violating the existing economy of time and formal identity of citizenry, and even conceiving of human creativity beyond our planet. It advocates fairness in conditions of work and self-organizing at the level of local communities, and invents ways of trading in work and time that do not produce surplus value. Artists working on a scale of 1:1 build artist institutions, artist banks, even artist states. Or they fix the mistakes in, and stimulate the functioning of, the museum where they are exhibiting. They also think about a new art institution by observing the old one from a meta-position, as if as an antiquity, as though they were seeing it from the vantage point of the future.
By virtue of duration, 1:1 artworks avoid being wholly contained by the institution and resist the postindustrial dictate of constant change and quick adaptation. They oppose the culture of forever new events replacing one another as well as the kind of institution that presents temporariness as flexibility, failing to see that it has thus lost its own duration, its own time. 1:1 art is a glitch in the system of provisional states that result in instability and increasingly anxiety-ridden individuals with no free time and a low quality of life. Lasting and enduring, 1:1 art gives back their time to life and the institution.
1:1 forms part of the Three Orders of Time event organized by Maska between 15 and 19 October 2013 to celebrate its 20th anniversary (www.maska.si). Reconsidering the modes of contemporary art production, the event focuses on three periods: the early 1990s and the emergence of private initiative in artistic production (private institutes as the prevalent contemporary model of production in art); the present (art production that transcends the limitations of the project-logic); and the future (1:1 also includes the Archive-Reminder of the Arteast 2000+23 project, organized jointly by Moderna galerija and Maska in 2006 and presenting work-proposals by 50 artists for the Moderna galerija collection to be exhibited in 2023).
Zdenka Badovinac
 
Network partner