.:: IsolArtCenter ::.

08 02 2012
ART AT WORK. KINGS MAG/ZINE

ART AT WORK
Presentation of the magazine
KINGS MAG/ZINE Issue #2 - Orange

Monday February 6th, 2012, 19.00 / Isola Libri Bookshop, via Pollaiuolo 5, Milan

With contributions from Nicole Belle, Jacopo Benassi, Nan Goldin, Kings, Raymond Pettibon, Vincent Van Gogh, Amedeo Modigliani, Barbara Meneghel, Carlo Mollino, Fulvio Ferrari, Fornasetti, Carola Merello, King Leonardo Da Vinci, Daniela Bertazzoni, Mariangela Bizzarri, Pompei, Jean Tinguely, Andrea Lissoni, Kathy Grayson, Riccardo Bagnoli, Fabio Paleari, Alessandra Toni, Guia Cortassa.

During the evening the public can assist to graphic interventions in the Magazine by Fabbrizio Bellomo, Valerio Del Baglivo, Filippo Ballarin, Angelo Castucci, Maddalena Fragnito, Steve Piccolo, Camilla Pin, Luca Pozzi, Mirko Smerdel, Fernanda Uribe,
and a sound performance by ISOLA ART'S CLUB BAND 2 consisting of Elena, Isacco and Vincenzo.

The exhibition A Doll's House / Casa di bambola, is ending on Monday, January 6th.The show is curated by the artist Fani Zguro with videos by Rosa Barba, Regina José Galindo, Dora Garcia, Klara Lidén, Tracey Moffatt, Pipilotti Rist, Mika Rottenberg, Brigitte Zieger at the Isola Libri bookshop.

On this occasion, Isola Art Center will present the new edition of KINGS Mag/zine by the famous Milan collective Kings. The members of the collective are Federica Perazzoli and Daniele Innamorato, artists who realized the neon installation New Museum for Isola Art Center in 2006, a work of art on the roof of the Stecca degli Artigiani building. The new issue of the magazine is dedicated to LOVE: love, sex, eroticism.

Each issue of the KINGS Mag/zine, conceived as an art multiple and printed in a limited edition – 1.000 copies - is made in black and white with the addition of a fluorescent color. Each issue foresees 100 special edition copies, including gadgets and drawings. Thus, each copy becomes a work of art of its own.

The second issue contains a lot of new elements - one of them attached as a preview - to which artists and creatives have contributed and can contribute to the following issues through open call by sending their material to the editors: special projects, new works, works long abandoned, etc... All materials will be collected with love by KINGS - no strings detached!

For more information about the magazine and the collective Kings:
KINGS, Via Salomone 67/B - 20138 - Milano / www.kingsart.it / info@kingsart.com
_____________________________________________________________________

A DOLL’S HOUSE / CASA DI BAMBOLA
Rosa Barba, Regina José Galindo, Dora Garcia, Klara Lidén,
Tracey Moffatt, Pipilotti Rist, Mika Rottenberg, Brigitte Zieger
curated by Fani Zguro

c/o Isola Libri bookshop, Via Pollaiuolo 5, Milano
From January 30 until February 6, 2012
From Monday - Saturday10.00-14.00, 16.00-20.00

Isola Art Center in collaboration with Satellite Project with the contribution of NABA

27 01 2012
GREEN DESIRE

GREEN DESIRE / DESIDERIO VERDE

Isola Art Center and Associazione Sassetti Cultura are pleased to present the exhibition GREEN DESIRE
a project of Isola Art Center
curated by Valeria Mancinelli, Elena Mantoni, Camilla Pin.

Opening: Wednesday Oct 12th 2011, 6.30 pm
From Oct 12th to Oct 20th 2011
Opening Hours: Mon - Sun 10:30 am- 1.00 pm / 4:30 pm -8.00pm,
Sassetti Cultura, Via Volturno 35 Milan

Artists:
Emanuela Ascari (it) / Atelier d'architecture autogérée (fr) / Massimo Bartolini (it) / Stefano Boccalini (it) / Danilo Borelli (it) / Fuori dal Vaso (it) / out (it) / Pierfabrizio Paradiso (it) / Park Fiction (de) / Public Works (uk) / Mirko Smerdel (it) / Bert Theis (lu)

PROGRAM:

Wednesday, October 12th, 6.30 pm
OPENING - Buffet offered by Isola Pepe Verde

Performance by Pierfabrizio Paradiso, The Sleeping Beauty, so long reclining in her dainty bad, had risen up with a devouring desire. Undisclosed location in via G. Pepe, 5.30 pm

Thursday October 13th, 7.00 pm
SOCIAL ECOLOGY: NEW REPRESENTATIONS OF THE FUTURE.
From The Three ecologies by Félix Guattari.
A meeting with Tiziana Villani

Sunday, October 16th, 11.00 am
BUILDING A ECOBOX - Open Workshop
Action by Fuori dal Vaso, 2.00 pm

Tuesday 18th October 7.00 pm
GUIDED TOUR

Coordinator Lucilla Trotta, for Sassetti Cultura
Graphics by Daria Tommasi

GREEN DESIRE / DESIDERIO VERDE is born with the intent of analyzing the urgency of environmental issues.
Such issues have been debated, misunderstood and often manipulated by an empty productivism which has lost any purpose except that of mere profit and political power; the environment now seems to be the first among the concerns of our time.
The so-called relationship between man and nature can no longer be conceived as a hierarchical dependency; furthermore the anthropocentric attitude has long shown its weaknesses. We are currently facing a real ecological emergency, a green emergency which has immediate repercussions in social life. The displacement of urban green space, which we witness daily by living in the city, is a direct result of economical speculation within the building market.

Isola district in Milan has long been subjected to gentrification and to capitalist-placement policies that directly undermine the social character of this neighborhood (increasingly deprived of diverse and shared areas, like parks and gardens), and threaten the very foundations of the basic right of 'urban living'.
The need to customize these themes to the specific urban environment of Milan leads us to reflect upon the relationship between environment/territory/society. Green areas become intermediaries between architecture and citizens, they lie in between buildings, breaking off their continuity, and they are, therefore, a growing necessity for the inhabitants of the city. Within this context, Italian and international artistic research poses new ways of reading the complexity of environmental issues in the city by raising public awareness and presenting ideas for collective participation.

During the exhibition GREEN DESIRE / DESIDERIO VERDE one will be able to explore, through a variety of artistic experiences, concrete proposals to the needs of the community. In a time when capitalist system has transformed life and nature into economical goods, this exhibition presents non-speculative uses of public green. Far from the common conception of wilderness, this exhibition revolves around a more intimate idea of nature, a public nature for the public to use, share and always redefine.

Artists and works in GREEN DESIRE / DESIDERIO VERDE thus become messengers of a new perspective to everyday reality, seeking a transformation which doesn't necessarily damage the environment (here intended as the set of relations which determines the process of 'becoming'), but rather embraces togetherness, an horizontal relationship between man, environment and space. If it is true that we define the environment in which we live, it is also true that we are defined by it, in turn. The project GREEN DESIRE / DESIDERIO VERDE aims to contribute, with ideas, proposals and practical initiatives to the collective effort of the inhabitants of Isola neighborhood in conquering again their public green.

SOCIAL ECOLOGY: NEW REPRESENTATIONS OF THE FUTURE. A meeting with Tiziana Villani

BUILDING A ECOBOX - Open Workshop

27 01 2012
LOASI

LOASI
From May 27 until June 27 2011
Various locations, from 4 pm to 8 pm

Opening, Friday May 27th 2011, 18:00 "La Cantinetta" Piazzale
Carlo Archinto ang. Via della Pergola.

Are part of the temporary collective: Federica Annoni, Martina Antonioni, Zeynep Arinc, Valentina Brenna, Alessia Brizi, Naima Faraò,
Jung Kyunghwa, Elena Mantoni, Maria Adele Molica, Pierfabrizio
Paradiso, Martina Pelacchi, Camilla Pin, Claudia Sabbatini, Sara
Saini, Daniela Silvestrin, Fernanda Uribe, Davide Zanutta.

Loasi (i.e. the oasis, anagram of the name of the district Isola) is an artistic-curatorial project which is developing in the district of Isola in Milan. A group of artists and curators have developed distinct interventions in alternative locations which usually are not considered in the art circuit.
The title encloses the process of mimesis, which is at the base of these projects. The neighbourhood of Isola therefore becomes an apparent oasis.
Mimesis presents itself as a possibility by means of art, to go beyond; trying to find an oasis in an urban area that fills itself with more and more mirages.

LOASI, orienteering across a mirage land.

"If you press a stone with your finger, the finger is also pressed by the stone. If a horse draws a stone tied to a rope, the horse (if I may so say) will be equally drawn back towards the stone: for the distended rope, by the same endeavour to relax or unbend itself, will draw the horse as much towards the stone, as it does the stone towards the horse, and will obstruct the progress of the one as much as it advances that of the other.

The mutual forces of action and reaction between two bodies are equal, opposite and collinear. This means that whenever a first body exerts a force F on a second body, the second body exerts a force -F on the first body."
I. Newton, 3rd law of motion, 1687

After many years of uncomfortable bargains between private constructors and neighborhood associations, gentrification in Isola, Milan, has come to its maximum clarity. What, just a few years ago, were necessary camouflage strategies to hide the social and urban projects on the district, have now developed into glittering signs and advertising campaigns aiming to ingratiate the new people that will inhabit Isola. People whose figures and thoughts are being customized slowly, brick by brick, in construction yards - bearing thousands of vertical cubic meters just waiting to see the light. Everything which will happen, within ten years in this area, is already set behind real estate windows, glamorously advertised on the internet, and is already present in the dreams of the future inhabitants of Boeri's vertical woods.

With the support of Isola Art Center, and the financial support of NABA, a group of young artists and curators explores one of the most discussed districts in the capital of Lombardy. The temporary artistic collective is willing to find an answer to the recent developments in urban policies that are defining Isola. The exhibition takes its inspiration from an idea by Bert Theis (founder of Isola Art Center), whose work with the active population of the area has redefined the concept of public art.

On this soil LOASI acts as a hidden exhibition, turning the district into a display without altering its nature. Windows, shops, lawns and roads engaged in a silent dialogue, in which the echo of the artistic projects finds room to bounce, be amplified or to disappear. The group of artists and curators responds to the wild advertising campaign (which was set up to capture approval), with an equal and opposite action intended to bring balance to this problematic area. A map is the only guidance tool on this journey, it helps locating the works, and performances; but there won't be such a reliable compass
that indicates what is art and what is life, what was already there and what was installed, what to watch and what to ignore.
The thirteen works blend in with the pattern of the district, imitating its forms, its personality, its colors and voices aiming at
an extreme mimesis with the same object they're trying to represent.

During this time of apparent political changes, the group's intervention on Isola neighborhood takes a clear side. By not merely asserting a dry statement, the exhibition aims to show a process related to profound transformation, thanks to which a district becomes an exhibition space, a work of art transforms itself into an item for sale among many others, and a neighbourhood called Isola (Island) may appear as an oasis.

The temporary collective is composed by: Federica Annoni, Martina Antonioni, Zeynep Arinc, Valentina Brenna, Alessia Brizi, Naima Faraò, Jung Kyunghwa, Elena Mantoni, Maria Adele Molica, Pierfabrizio Paradiso, Martina Pelacchi, Camilla Pin, Claudia Sabbatini, Sara Saini, Daniela Silvestrin, Fernanda Uribe, Davide Zanutta.

From May 27th to June 27th
Various locations, opening hours: 16.00 - 20.00
Opening Friday May 27th 2011 h. 18:00 at "La Cantinetta" Piazzale Carlo Archinto ang. Via della Pergola

- - - - - - - - - -

LOASI
On a beautiful afternoon at the park of Porta Venezia, I winded up in the Butterflies' Oasis. When you enter, after a while there's a transparent cube made of plexiglass, filled with little small twigs and leaves. But no butterflies. Honestly, I would never have expected to get to know a frog there. It's name is Nasuta; motionless, it becomes one with the leaves; it almost seemed to be a origami made of leaves.

Who knows if Nasuta the frog is afraid of being squashed. If I would look like a leave, I would be afraid of being kicked or ripped. Once upon a time in my city, there was an old Magnolia tree on the square in front of the cathedral that had to be felled; to keep the beautiful tree in the people's memory, they put the cutted leaves into big plastic bags and gave them as a gift to them. Maybe the people would have remembered the tree better by actually seeing a tree on the square instead of seeing a leave in a bag. Now there are parking lots for cars at that point of the square.

I don't know how many bags full of leaves I've filled as a child in order to draw lines around them on a sheet of paper by Fabriano. The nun always told us to have some leaves with zigzaggy shapes and some with straight shapes. But when I brought pine-needles, she always said to me: "No, not these! You cannot draw them!". I ask myself why I could only depict the possible - what about the impossible, how could that be depicted? Now I realize that I don't know what kind of shape the leaves of a Magnolia tree have, and that's maybe because of the pine-needles. Maybe because they sting?

But what a huge responsability to be a Periwinkle! Being the only coloured element in a grey winter is probably not easy. Certainly not. Maybe the pines have needles instead of leaves to defend themselves from loosing them, a bit as if in the next moment they would be shaken, like you shake your head to say no. When I think of the pines in wintertime, I always remember a song by a band called Offlaga disco Pax, that talks about chewing gums and how times changed along with them. It says also that, when films were still black and white, everything seemed to be in black and white, except the little balls of chewing gum. And then arrived the technical trasmission-test… and along with it the "try again, next time you'll be more lucky".

I always took delight in thinking about a Butcher's Broom that chews bubble gum, and then I found out that it actually is a
plant. Phew.

I've always preferred animals to plants because they "give you more satisfaction", even when I was jumping on Gufram's Pratone ® I thought: "hurray, how much fun, even if it seems to be a plant it is real fun!". But it isn't real. And in summer, the Pratone ® changed into something so hot that you couldn't stay on it, so finally I understood that the moment had come to discover the grass, the plants, the gardens and the parks. But it was all black and white. The only Verde left in the city was the one of Gufram.

The Verde ®! What is still pubblic? We seem to stay inside an industry, sooner or later everything tends to be subsumed by labels, even the grass! But nevertheless there will be a way to sting! We'd need something like a collective production of imagery against a skyline of concrete.

We should put the frog Nasuta on the Pratone ® and watch the reaction. Would the frog be able to camouflage in the polyurethane? Would it like the smell? It's impressive how smells influence the perception of spaces and relations. For me, the smell of new cars is unbearable. The moment I enter the new car, I miss the old one… even if it had not been the newest version I liked getting in and realizing the smell of memories. Of course, maybe one day I'll also like this new car.. or maybe I'll just get used to it and start building new memories, because there's no choice. however, I don't think that the other one worked that badly. It may be stupid, but sometimes I really miss it. Maybe we just should have loved it more instead of replacing it with this thing that never fits into the parking spaces!

Have we really chosen? If it was that way, we should have been prepared for the laceration. Every election blocks the course of new opportunities and from it comes forth aguish. Maybe it’s the same feeling experienced by the pine tree by the impossibility of being able to blend in with other trees.

One time I met a Spruce Tree. Although called king of the forest, he was minute. Probably the tiniest of the world. Though I have always questioned myself, how is it possible for a Spruce to be so petite? Aren’t they supposed to be huge? In this case he was mini. He was there, in silence, perfectly hidden; it was a difficult for me to discover him. Yes, because someone had already spotted him before and had told me about the astonishing surprise that inhabited his piercing leaves. And to think that all I was looking for were those butterflies.

And it is this way that you layover, pause yourself and realize how important the journey was, the way in which you reached your goal. First you had the flickering in your head, now you feel it in your stomach. Yes, because the stomach is the oasis of our lives, our emotional brain. Now I dare anyone to marvel in front of a layer of cement. What you are experiencing is not marvel but anxiety. The same anxiety that is being cured by “nature in pills”… who knows if inside its ingredients exists some of that Spruce Tree.

Maybe pine trees at heart, have always been a bit odious. Maybe because they are so prominent, sad and so vertical? I prefer ginger instead of that pungent flavor, so horizontal and densely ramified; non-linear instead of pine needles. I would prefer if we were more like ginger, or if at least we behaved more like it. If we could only be able to establish connections in any direction.

Often, when you don’t cognize it, it can be very deceiving, ginger. Once, in a Japanese restaurant it had dressed up as smoked salmon filet. It was the first time I went there and I would have never imagined that the pink leaflet was the result of a tuber with that “decisive” taste. Then and there I thought it was soap. Things can assume the form of other things we have never imagined, or maybe not: specifically because we ramify them into our experiences, we imagine them not by how they really are but by all the forms that they can simulate.

(Text composed by multiple authors - who disguise between the participants of the exhibition - after a verbal exchange)

download pdf - Presentation LOASI

23 11 2010
Under Construction...

Architettando ...

November 27th to December 31st 2010

A project by Isola Art Center,
curated by Valerio Del Baglivo, Aria Spinelli and Elvira Vannini

AUFO - Architectural & Urban Forum | Fabrizio Bellomo | Gianluca Brezza | Nebojsa Milikic | Ferhat Özgür | Peti Park (Fifth Park) | Stealth.unlimited | Marco Vaglieri - out | Anri Sala (special project curated by Fani Zguro)

Bookshop Puerto de Libros, via Pollaiuolo 5 and Sound Metak, P.le Segrino 1
Opening hours Tuesday - Saturday, 16:30 to 19:30, and by appointment
______________________________________________________________________

Opening Saturday, November 27th at 6 pm
video screening and two musical performances by Collodel Alberto, Davide Lorenzon, Ivan Pilat / Cristiano Calcagno, Xabier Iriondo at Sound Metak, P.le Segrino 1

Monday, November 29th , 2010:
7 pm– Bookshop Puerto de Libros, via Pollaiuolo 5
No-Spot City – the status of construction
meeting with Lorenzo Degli Esposti (dir. creative AUFO) | Marco Biraghi | Ernesto D'Alfonso | Nicolò Privileggio

9 pm – Punto Rosso, via Pepe 14
How to build a perfect dinner
recipes by Francesco Careri (Stalker) | Gianni Pettena | Ana Dzokic and Marc Neelen (Stealth.unlimited)
______________________________________________________________________

The city’s right is much more than individual freedom of accessibility to urban resources: it is the right to change ourselves, in order to change the city. David Harvey

Isola Art Center continues with its cultural events hosted by the residents of the neighborhood, enhancing Architettando..., curated by Valerio Del Baglivo, Aria Spinelli and Elvira Vannini, which will be held from November 27th to December 31st , 2010. The term is here understood in its linguistic duality. The Italian word "Architettando" means both the activity of construction - in its physical and unrealistic sense – but also alludes to planning a deception.

The political mechanisms that control urban development and its imbalances, reflect a neoliberal economy, and have resulted, for some years now, for the Isola Neighborhood, as in a continuous fatal process of gentrification, which responds to the needs of an increasingly capitalized elite. The planners, property developers and politicians are plotting. The space that was once public is now privatized. The last agricultural and industrial architecture of the past left are now erased. Architects are planning, the cranes are dominating the skyline and new urban developments are visibly growing. They are almost all offices, shops or luxury homes, designed to radically change the nature of the mixed working class neighborhood. Mostly consisting in unavoidable antagonisms and political interests, the city is no longer an expression of the needs and demands of society, or of the neighborhood’s community.
Lefebvre has already pointed out that the physical form of the city is a product of the accumulation of capital, but also that the legitimacy of the same socio-economic powers gives rise to a potential subversive: resistance to the use of urban spaces and aesthetic opposition to incessant construction. In its complexity, Architettando..., therefore wishes to reflect on art practitioners, architects and documentary filmmakers who have taken the urban and social transformation as the focus of their research. The exhibition will open on Saturday 27th with a video screening of works by Ferhat Özgür, Nebojsa Milikic, Fifth Park, which tell stories and recount events of other districts spatially distant from Milan, but very close to its conditions and forms of resistance. The documentary director Gianluca Brezza (La casa verde - una storia politica) depicts the story of a house and its inhabitants swallowed by the new skyscraper for the Lombardy Region offices, built on the park area of of Gioia. Finally, AUFO (Architectural and Urban Forum) Fabrizio Bellomo and Marco Vaglieri -out, reflect on the hoax of unfeasible construction plans and the administrative bureaucracy that congests the city.

For the event on Monday 29th Lorenzo Degli Esposti (AUFO), Marco Biraghi, Ernesto d'Alfonso and Nicolò Privileggio will discuss the significance of the group activities AUFO, starting from the project No-spot City.

A self-funding diner will follow, entitled How to Build a perfect dinner. Artists and curators from Isola will cook recipes of architects Gianni Pettena, Francesco Careri and Stealth.ultimited, requested for the occasion. Reservations are required. Please call 347 126 4847.

Finally, the special project No Formula One No Cry by Anri Sala will be presented, a project curated by Fani Zguro already exhibited in many cities worldwide, and that will be visible only by booking a trip in a cab.

The project will develop in a dense program during two days –November 27th and 29th- involving artists and curators in the implementation of various events with the aim of reflect on the concept of gentrification, a process still scarcely recognized in the Italian context, but that has already involved many urban areas of its territory. The show will instead extend for two months, until December 31.

Info

Isola Art Center
339 6057 111 || info@isolartcenter.org www.isolartcenter.org

valeriodelbaglivo@gmail.com
aria.spinelli @ gmail.com
elviravannini@gmail.com

Download the programm

27 05 2010
Odds&Ends

Isola Art Center and NABA in collaboration with Millepiani and Punto Rosso present

ODDS AND ENDS
May25th - June 29th 2010
Puerto de Libros bookshop, via Pollaiuolo 5 / Punto Rosso, via Pepe 14, Milano

Opening: Tuesday, May25th, 18h:00

Odds and Ends, hosted by Puerto de Libros bookshop is a special project by artists and curators of the Master’s Degree in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies at NABA Milan: it brings together sixteen prototypes of publications by: Anna Caterina Bleuler | Enrica Casalicchio | Massimiliano M. Cucciniello | Bercin Damgaci | Sara Errico | Rosie Eisor | Dario Leone | Serena Marconi | Giorgio Massoni | Daniella Andrea | Isamit Morales | Alessandro Pezzati | Sara Porcari | Linda Turri | Claudia Ventola | Gianmaria Zanda supervised by Andrea Sala and Bert Theis.

During the evening will be presented the second issue of Millepiani Urban, the magazine made by the cultural association Millepiani, with essays by Leonie Sandercock, Mike Davis, Tiziana Villani, Ubaldo Fadini and others. Introduction by Tiziana Villani, Sabine Reiff, Nomeda and Gedeminas Urbonas from Pro-testLab in Vilnius.

On that occasion, Punto Rosso, Via Pepe 14, will show Isola Rosta Project 4: three projects on shutters made by Pasquale Campanella, Francesco Cerini and Rosetta White, professors of Caravaggio Art School in Milan together with the students Alice Boffa, Valentina Santinoli (2A); Margherita Canevari (2B); Niccolò Polimeno, Anita Rossi, Lucia Rho, Giulio Ferraro, Gaia Ciarla, Chiara Di Gennaro (3C); Susanna Castelli, Riccardo Sossella (5B), Daniele Rossi (1E). Take part also the Laboratorio Artistico with the students Giammarco Coato, Denise Mitidieri, Leo Valentini, Amanda Maffei, Alessandro Turchet, coordinated by Filippo Ballarin, Adele Bressa and Stefania Catanoso. The unrealized projects will also be shown.

At 20:30 Punto Rosso will host the screening of the film “From no man's land” about the transformation of the Bovisa district by director Elvio Annese (2009, 53 '). Since 1976, for more than thirty years, the filmmaker has documented the transition from industrial district to the University area, always working alone, and narrating the lives of people who have undergone the radical changes of the urban transformation.

Finally remind that at Puerto de Libros bookshop (via Pollaiuolo 5) and Tantrika Shop (via Pollaiuolo 2) continues until June 29 (Tuesday to Saturday 16.30 - 19.30) Horror Vacui - Occupying the Present, curated by Aria Spinelli and Valerio Del Baglivo. Artists Fabrizio Bellomo, Valentina Maggi, Maria Pecchioli and Mirko Smerdel confront themselves with the void offering new imaginaries for the Isola district.

Isola Art Center
339 6057 111
info@isolartcenter.org
www.isolartcenter.org

21 04 2010
Horror Vacui - occupying the Present

Horror Vacui
Occupying the Present

April 27th to June 29th , 2010

A project by Isola Art Center
curated by Valerio Del Baglivo and Aria Spinelli

Opening Tuesday, April 27th , 19:00

Fabrizio Bellomo | Valentina Maggi |
Maria Pecchioli | Mirko Smerdel

Bookshop Puerto de Libros, via Pollaiuolo 5 and Tantrika Shop, via Pollaiuolo 2
Tuesday – Saturday, 4.30 – 7.30 pm and by appointment
______________________________________________________________________

meetings and events, April 28th to May 4th 2010, 19:00

Köken Ergun | Granaio | Gerald Raunig | Oliver Ressler and Dario Azzellini | Sottobosco | Total Recall

Soundmetak, P.le Segrino 1 and Punto Rosso Via Pepe 14
______________________________________________________________________

Horror Vacui - Occupying the Present is a project that involves artists, curators and inhabitants in the implementation of various events with the intent to meet the aggressive speculation involving the Isola neighborhood.

The massive construction projects by desiring to fill each piece of free urban space seem to fail to coincide with the need to preserve neighborhood’s identity and to ensure effective livability of the concerned urban area. On a closer look, these physical modeling processes intervene radically and thoroughly on the area, and seem to be organized around an impulsive feeling of horror vacui (abhors a vacuum), rather than governed by a sensible urban planning. If the action of constant construction on one part is directed to fill the urban area, on the other produces a process of gentrification consequently creating fractures that in time become more difficult to assess.

There is another kind of emptiness that can be found between Isola neighborhood’s residents that has to do with the difficulty to relate with an ever-changing territory and hence the impossibility of recognizing the place where one lives. To address this absence Horror Vacui – Occupying the present proposes a two-way gaze on the one hand that traces a historical line, on the other that activates a temporary platform for creation, discussion and confrontation between different realities.

Artists Fabrizio Bellomo, Valentina Maggi, Maria Pecchioli, Mirko Smerdel, in order to confront the empty spaces, insinuate themselves in the interstices proposing a new imaginary. The philosopher and theorist Gerald Raunig will present Art and Revolution, Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century and his new book A Concise Philosophy of the Machine as Social Movement, both published by MIT Press. The new video by Oliver Ressler and Dario Azzellini entitled Comuna en construccion will be projected. The Venetian art platform Sottobosco presents Showdesk, a two-day event that gives young emerging artists the chance to present their work in public. The collective from Milan Bouganville promotes their well-known project Granaio, a brunch during which artists’ projects are voted by the participants and awarded with the meals’ profits. The young Turkish artist Köken Ergun presents a video archive project in collaboration with B'Tselem - The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. On the final day a neighborhood walk entitled Total Recall will take place, inviting all the artists who collaborated with the Isola Art Center over the years, to participate in a public ceremony with the inhabitants of the Isola district in order to rename the places most affected by processes of gentrification.

Horror Vacui – Occupying the Present has the ambition to invade the void and temporarily revitalize a neighborhood characterized by strong social dispersion and subdued to the evident signs of a crisis of identity, in order to contrast the aggressive building construction speculation. The project involves artists and curators in the implementation of various events for a week to trace the recent history and to critically rethink a future. The show will open until the 29th of June.

Info

Isola Art Center
339 6057 111
info@isolartcenter.org
www.isolartcenter.org

Valerio Del Baglivo
valeriodelbaglivo@gmail.com

Aria Spinelli
aria.spinelli@gmail.com

Program

.Tuesday 27 April,pm
Exhibition Opening: Maria Pecchioli and Mirko Smerdel - Bookshop Puerto de Libros on via Pollaiuolo 5
Fabrizio Bellomo and Valentina Maggi - Tantrika Shop on via Pollaiuolo 2

. Wednesday 28 April, 3-6 pm
Punto Rosso on via Pepe 14
The Art Platform Sottobosco was born in 2009 to promote young artists and develop artistic projects. Since March 2010 their Archive has been permanently located at the Galleria Contemporaneo in Mestre. For their event entitled Showdesk, Sottobosco installs a desk, a projector and a PC in a room where artists have the opportunity to present their work, to meet diverse audiences and to leave their portfolios for the archive. During Horror Vacui, Sottobosco promotes Showdesk at Punto Rosso on two different occasions.

Artists invited:

gruppo di ricerca artistica Trama21 | Andrea Kunkl and Giuseppe Fanizza | Katia Meneghini | Alessandro Nassiri | Thanos Zakopoulos

.Thursday 29 April, 7 pm
Bookshop Puerto de Libros on via Pollaiuolo 5
The philosopher and theorist Gerald Raunig will present his book entitled «Art and Revolution, Art and Transversal Activism long the Twentieth Century», which examines the links between art and activism. He will also introduce his new publication «A Thousand Machines. A Concise Philosophy of the Machine as Social Movement». Introduction by Marco Scotini and Bert Theis.

.Friday 30 April, 3-5 pm
Punto Rosso on via Pepe 14.
Showdesk by Sottobosco.

.Saturday 1 May, 7 pm
Punto Rosso on via Pepe 14
After the May Day parade, the new video work by Oliver Ressler and Dario Azzellini will be projected. Called Comuna en construccion, the video is on self-organizations at one of the most problematic districts of Caracas. For the first time in Italy, the video will be shown in the original audio with Italian translation - courtesy Artra Gallery, Milan.
Introduction by Nadia Riolo.

.Sunday 2 May, 12-5 pm
Punto Rosso on via Pepe14.
Since this past winter, the collective Bouganville organizes a very special Sunday bruncho once a month. During the meal the total from the profits of revenue minus the cost of expenditure is used to finance artist’s projects, voted democratically by a majority of diners. The cost of each brunch is 10 euros per person and the project is called the Granaio. For Horror Vacui, Bouganville organize a Granaio at Punto Rosso.

.Monday 3 May, 7.30 pm
SoundMetak on P.le Segrino 1.
The Turkish artist Köken Ergun is invited to present his video archive project in collaboration with B’Tselem - The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories followed by a discussion with Alterazioni Video, Aria Spinelli and other guests.

.Tuesday 4 May, 7.30 pm
Total Recall
starting point at Punto Rosso (red wine will be distributed) At the end of the week, Total Recall invites artists and inhabitants for a walk to those places most affected by the gentrification, and asks them to rename these sites through small public ceremonies. Many artists, who in recent years, have collaborated with Isola Art Center, will attend the event.

29 11 2009
ISOLA RANDAGIA – WANDERING ISLAND

ISOLA RANDAGIA – WANDERING ISLAND
3 december –19 december 2009

inauguration: Thursday 3rd Dicember 2009, 18.00h

Liceo Artistico Caravaggio,(Art school “Caravaggio”)
via Prinetti, 47 – Milano
monday-friday 9.30/14.30

A project by OsservatorioinOpera (Piero Almeoni, Paola Sabatti Bassini), Carmelo Mutalipassi, Valentina Maggi, Mila Popdimitrova, Kings (Federica Perazzoli, Daniele Innamorato), Barbara Frappi

After the events that ended up with the demolition of the Stecca degli Artigiani, of the Gardens and after the beginning of the works that are upsetting the deep nature of the Isola neighbourhood, almost wandering on its own territory (the places of meeting and civil sharing have been wiped out), Isola Art Center, together with the inhabitants is organizing itself in a new form to assert the rights of deciding their own quality of life, against the economic and political power of the multinational companies. With the installation at the Art School “Caravaggio” of Milan, Isola Art Center presents its new condition that marks the territory by reproducing one of the most important current and permanent actions that the artists realized on the shop shutters of the neighbourhood. Isola Art Center lives in the neighbourhood, so making its critical action visible through the different events that in this way define a path of information and reflection about the present state of things. To be wandering metaphorically means therefore to live in a new wandering, roving condition, out of the gang.

Isola Rosta Project

Rosta was the name of the soviet telegraphy agency that from 1919 used its windows to display posters created ad hoc by several artists including Vladimir Majakowski. Isola Rosta Project presents large format images by Italian and international artists painted on the shutters of the Isola district. This ongoing project is carried out with the help of professionals and international institutions as well as with the aid of the inhabitants of the neighbourhood.
Thanks to this permanent show on the shutters, Isola Art Center has a continuous presence in the streets of the district.
Between 2003 and 2007 the centre had worked in the former industrial building called Stecca degli Artigiani and in the nearby parks. There it started to create a Center for Art and the Neighborhood together with the inhabitants, before being drummed out of the building, together with the craftspeople, by the City of Milan and the American multinational Hines. Since then the centre has continued its construction hosted by local spaces, associations, shops and restaurants in solidarity with the opposition to the pharaonical real estate development plans, to speculation and to the gentrification of the district.

Bert Theis 2009
translated by Mara Ferreri

05 11 2009
We Do It.

WE DO IT
The Isola neighborhood in two inadequate descriptive systems

with
Adrian Paci
Andrea Sala
Bert Theis
Christoph Schäfer
Danilo Correale
Enzo Umbaca
Yang Jiechang
Maria Papadimitriou
Mariette Schiltz
Millepiani magazine
Museo aero solar (Tomas Saraceno)
OUT (Office for Urban Transformation)
Paola Di Bello
Stefano Boccalini
Undo.net
Wurmkos

curated by Marco Scotini
assistant curator Matteo Lucchetti

Kunstraum Lakeside

Lakeside Science & Technology Park
Lakeside B02
9020 Klagenfurt
Austria

WE DO IT.
The Isola neighbourhood in two inadequate descriptive systems.

The city is the privileged field for the exertion of power. Subjugation procedures are deployed everywhere (on bodies, on language, on places).But nothing is in itself political for the mere fact of hosting the exercise of power relationships, and yet anything, upon the right occasion, can become so. Over the last seven years, the Isola neighbourhood - both in itself and within the city of Milan - has become a “political” space. It has become a field of forces, tensions, resistance, desires and aspirations. Maybe as a heritage of its local past, the Isola has ended up representing a disturbing element for modern urban narratives: speculative projects, spatial police projects, gentrification.
Starting from 2000 the Isola neighbourhood, an isolated workers dwelling area in the heart of Milan, has been subject of a gentrification intervention through the realization of an urban plan committed to Hines, a Texan corporation. From that moment, the pivot of the antagonistic movement against the top-down plan of the municipality, has been an abandoned factory, leftover of the Milan industrial past, and occupied by several associations, that merged into the artistic project of constitution of an art and community center, Isola Art Center
Faced with the wicked conscience of planners accusing the neighbourhood's antagonist action of “stalemating”, Isola had nothing to show but a transforming reality, a new, multi-cultural social morphology, stories of progressive contextual adaptations, a collective and projectual intentionality based on self-organization. When accused of boasting for its community an originary ideological purity, Isola can and has to answer claiming the right to the city as a democratic, “radical” need, re-asserting the necessity - for both groups and individuals - of an active control and projectual freedom over their life. Isola Art Center was born in those years with the aim of catalyzing the neighborhood’s actions and forces. It is an open and indeterminate artistic platform, ready to host within itself a progressive investment of different subjects: neighborhood committees, volunteers, urban designers, philosophers, art critics, curators, besides - obviously - artists. Isola Art Center thinks of a center for and community life as an urban device: as an urban-scaled collective service actively supporting self-empowerment occasions. Isola Art Center, quoting Rancière, believes that “the logics of demonstrations [has always], inevitably involved an aesthetics of manifestations".
We Do It wants to present again a rearticulation, through a series of documents, of the protest lead by the antagonist movement. The project intend to illustrate at the same time, both the municipality plan (in the making), both the one by a parallel city planning the has been object of the opposition.

www.lakeside-kunstraum.at
Undo.net: Isola space

25 10 2009
L'INDIANO IN GIARDINO

L'INDIANO IN GIARDINO
project by Alek O. and Santo Tolone
in collaboration with Isola Art Center

Opening 29th October, 2009, 7pm
October 29th – November 1st, 2009
Starting point Bar La Cantinetta, P.le Archinto, Milan

with Pedro Barateiro, Dafne Boggeri, Marco Colombaioni, Camilla Candida Donzella, Alessandro Di Giampietro, Lucie Fontaine, Francesco Fossati, Matteo Rubbi, Manuel Scano, Mauro Vignando and Zhou Tao

A redskin indian is in a black-lined limousine. He’s naked, and the touch of leather on his body makes him shiver; a cloud of breath rising from his mouth mists the car windows. The indian pops out of the sun-roof and escapes. He next appears in a small courtyard clogged with abandoned neon signs. The indian slowly turns around, looks up and a geometric patch of sky shines over his head. He climbs the narrow walls around him, clinging with his hands and pushing with his feet, and goes away. Idly descending the stairs of a mezzanine workshop the indian appears once again: he’s blocking the entrance to the adjacent room. He smiles, his arms crossed: he’s forcing bystanders to coexist in a very small space, a single flight of stairs. At the crack of dawn, in a square surrounded by silent buildings, a bar with a bunch of red tables scattered on the sidewalk becomes the playroom we fell short of not having. The indian awaits, sitting, skimming the game’s wooden tokens. He leans on the wall his plume-clad nape and looks straight in the eyes of his playmate. Then, shaking his head, he rubs his legs to get rid of the cold. He gets up and runs away, stopping only in front of the window of a luxury car dealer, full of stretched-out silhouettes. Its gates are open, and reveal a whole carpet of cars, tightly cramped side by side. A redskin indian is in a black-lined limousine.

The indian is the subject of an innocent yet reckless fantasy abruptly entering our everyday; the spaces he appears in are anything but random.

The places’ disposition, however, appears unforeseeable: they could well be the displaced rooms of a blown-up museum. They concentrate around a bunch of streets, scattered in the Isola neighborhood, which the show’s two promoters – alongside other artists, some involved in this project – have already worked with.

The explosion of a hypothetical museum could also be the best metaphor to describe the new approach chosen for L’indiano in giardino. After disposing of the curator’s role, all that’s left is the organizational strength and the works of the eleven artists involved, some of which have never before worked together.

Manuela Ravasio

Opening hours
5 pm – 8 pm

Various seats, Isola, Milan
Piazza Minniti – newspaper kiosk
Via dal Verme, 2 – courtyard
Piazzale Archinto – bar
Via Pollaiuolo, 8 – garage
Via Lambertenghi, 25 – studio

Special thanks to Autoservizi Mariani, Bar La Cantinetta, Edicola Ambrosini, Falegnameria Clerici and Insegne Longoni.

Download the map

30 05 2009
Public Turbulence

Isola Art Center in collaboration with Naba
organized for inContemporanea, promoted by the Province of Milan, presents

Public Turbulence/Disordine in pubblico
Art, events and meetings in the Isola neighborhood, Milan
curated by Alberto Pesavento e Bert Theis

22, 23, 24, 25 May – 31 August 2009

Opening: Friday 22 May, 18h – 24h
Saturday 12h – 20h
Sunday 16h – 24h
Monday 25 May, 18.30h

Agenzia X, Stefano Boccalini, Park Fiction, Stina Fisch, Gaia Fugazza, Angelo Sarleti, Sašo Sedla?ek, HR Stamenov, Urbonas, Fani Zguro, Isola Art’s Club Band and many more.
Special project by artists and curators of the Master’s Degree in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies at NABA Milan: Valentina Angeleri, Paolo Caffoni, Arianna Carcano (with Igor Muroni), Michele D’Aurizio, Anita Gazzani (with Luca Puglia), Matteo Lucchetti (with the Milan complaints choir), Valentina Maggi (with Sofia Scarano), Giulia Paciello, Mila Popdimitrova, Beto Shwafaty, Lorenzo Tamai.

In the context of a finally sequestered construction site and ecologically un-sustainable urban projects, the people, artists and activists of the Isola neighborhood carry on their struggle against authoritarian projects and dangerous creative gentrification processes. They propose a critical perspective and an inappropriate use of urban spaces through the activities of Isola Art Center, a center for art and community life under permanent construction. From May 22nd to May 25th (and up to August 31st), an array of artistic interventions, meeting and performances will take place, conceived both for visibility and for harboring critical discussions, based on the conviction that public discourse shouldn’t leave its spectators silently, powerlessly facing everyday decisions.
A beggar robot roams the Isola, stopping to talk and panhandle, while a train mysteriously deviates from its track to appear between the buildings. A neighborhood street becomes a guide for an unconventional use of city spaces: bookshops become libraries, shops become places where you’re free not to buy anything; it offers examples of protests and defences against the privatization of public spaces, which could very well include a choir singing its complaints or a bench to be carried around to sit down and listen to a Club’s band ultimately identified as a simple inn. A logic of common disorder, a slight shift in usual meanings and social conventions.
Isola Art Center is a laboratory and open platform combining the activities and desires of the people of the Isola neighborhood with contemporary artistic research. Evicted in 2007 from the Stecca degli Artigiani, it is the result of a decade-long struggle, engaged by dwellers, artists, researchers and activists in defense of their neighborhood. A set of people sharing the assumption that the destruction of public spaces and their conversion into areas of consumption or real estate speculation can be stopped or limited, also by the use of unconventional tactics.

Today Isola Art Center is hosted by Soundmetak, Piazzale Segrino 1,Tantrika Shop, Via Pollaiuolo 2, Puerto de Libros, Via Pollaiuolo 5, Osterialnove, Via Thaon de Revel 9, Punto Rosso, Via Pepe 14, by the streets and squares in Isola and by Naba, via Darwin 20.
_____________________________________________________________________
info: 346 39 98 571 / 339 60 57 111 info@isolartcenter.org www.isolartcenter.org master@naba.it www.naba.it

download the program of Public Turbulence

05 05 2009
inContemporanea 09 Nr 3: Isola Multipla

8 th /9 th /10 th of may 2009

NOI SIAMO QUI
inCONTEMPORANEA '09 - Numero TRE
Triennale of Milano
Viale Alemagna 6
10.30/20.30

Isola Multipla
Isola Multipla is a sequence of videos presented simultaneously: voices, gazes and reflections of people who have lived or known the artistic, social and political facts of the Isola neighbourhood from within or from outside. The conflict between dwellers, real estate companies and political powers is still ongoing, as the politics of destruction and speculation against the neighbourhood has not been accepted. Isola Art Center has been working since 2001 side to side with the neighbourhood dwellers defending their public space and opposing gentrification, because art in the city can be something else than urban marketing. Isola Art Center is a local experience attracting much attention also from abroad, that needs to be documented and discussed in order to obtain a deeper knowledge of what has been happening. Contemporary art, in fact, can choose not to be a tool of decoration and persuasion of public opinion, used to change the social composition of neighbourhoods towards a reality of luxury residences and cool creative class.
Isola Multipla, in order to generate a “collective feedback”, presents simultaneously a large amount of video interviews with dwellers, artists, international curators and relevant figures of Milano’s cultural scene. We have asked everybody to tell their story and reflection regarding their personal experience with the Isola neighbourhood. These multiple voices create an important archive on the recent history of the neighbourhood and the city. The videos of the interviewed people also show images and scenes regarding the activities conducted in the neighbourhood during these last years. The interviews will be divided in groups and loop-screened on a series of monitors. Apart from the exhibiting event of inCONTEMPORANEA number 3, the project will also be presented on the weekend of the 23/24 may within the Isola neighbourhood, in order to reach the local dwellers who are not used to attend artistic events. The whole work of video recording and production will be collectively made by artists, researchers and dwellers of Isola neighbourhood and Isola Art Center.

UPCOMING EVENTS:
Public Turbulence
Art, events and public talks, curated by Alberto Pesavento and Bert Theis

22th /23th /24th of may 2009, Isola district, Milan

with Agenzia X, Stefano Boccalini, Park Fiction, Stina Fisch, Gaia Fugazza, Angelo Sarleti, Sašo Sedla?ek, HR Stamenov, Urbonas, Fani Zguro, Isola Art’s Club Band and many others, special project by Naba artists and curators: Valentina Angeleri, Paolo Caffoni, Arianna Carcano, Michele D’Aurizio, Anita Gazzani, Matteo Lucchetti, Valentina Maggi, Giulia Paciello, Mila Popdimitrova, Beto Shwafaty, Lorenzo Tamai.

Monday 25 th of May, 18.30: “ Attica Project – “Tactics of the liberation of space” #1, Naba via Darwin 20

Public talk between Park Fiction (Amburgo), Nomeda e Gediminas Urbonas ( Vilnius ) and Isola Art Center (Milano) moderated by Marco Scotini (Milano).

Supported by: EU Culture Programme 2007-2013, Education and Culture DG

18 11 2008
Taipei-Beirut-Madrid-Berlin-Isola

TAIPEI–BEIRUT–MADRID-BERLIN-ISOLA

videos by Kuang-Yu Tsui, Ziad Antar, Democracia, Nevin Aladag, Manuel Scano, Matteo Rubbi

Opening Saturday 22 November 22 from 6pm Tantrika Shop, Via Pollaiuolo 2
Soundmetak, Piazzale Segrino 1 25 November 2008– 28 February 2009
Tuesday – Saturday 3.30 – 7.30pm

Screening-round table-dinner
Sunday 23 November 23, 6-11pm,
Osterialnove, via Thaon de Revel 9

with Anna Daneri, Mario Gorni, Marco Scotini, UnDo.Net, Tiziana Villani

After the “Stecca degli Artigiani” in Milan has been privatized in April, 2007, Isola Art Center has not died. The Center still pursues its project of a Center for Art and Community alongside other Isola associations, within various public and private venues in the neighbourhood. After Tantrika Shop and Soundmetak, which have followed Punto Rosso in hosting Isola Art Center projects, a new address is now added to the list: Osterialnove will host the single screening of a film selection and a public discussion of it.
TAIPEI–BEIRUT–MADRID-BERLIN-ISOLA is a selection of films, most of which have been screened within the Taipei Biennial 2008 curated by Vasif Kortun and Manray Hsu. All participating artists experience new ways to come to terms with urban life, oftentimes reserving a special eye to musical and sound elements.

TAIPEI: Taiwanese artist Kuang-Yu Tsui's self-ironical videos, featured in Italy already at the 2005 Venice Biennial, portray him as a sort of present-day Buster Keaton, facing contemporary urban objects and landscapes. Often his works' titles and concepts are linked to the Taiwanese tradition. In Taiparis York, 2008, instead, the artist surprisingly deals with some occidental cultural symbols somehow grafted within his own country's public space, as the statue of liberty, the Eiffel Tower or the Paris Arc de Triomphe.

BEIRUT: Lebanese artist Ziad Antar's two videos, Wa and Tambourro, intimately deal with life as it can be within family walls. Their protagonists – two kids in the first, a showering man in the second – use rhythm and music instead of words to convey us their feelings.

MADRID: A wholly different story for the Welfare State/Smashing the Ghetto video, by the Democracia group (Pablo Espana and Iván Lopez), portraying the destruction of a Roma encampment just outside Madrid as if it were a show or a demolition party.

BERLIN: Turkish artist Nevin Aladag goes looking for Turkish squatters and has them spend the night singing their native countries' songs. Or drives through a suburb letting the wind play a harmonica. Or has model cars dance to the frenzied rhythm of Arabian music.

ISOLA: Italian artists Matteo Rubbi and Manuel Scano have lived in the neighborhood and worked with Isola Art Center for years now. The former's video attentively studies the American ambassador in Tirana's driver, while the latter offers us two of his video-performances, with their almost neo-dada liberating poetical drive, one of which is titled Festa in città (urban party).

A public round table will be held at Osterialnove on the evening of Sunday, November 23rd, with Antonio Ratti Foundation critic and curator Anna Daneri, video archive C/O curator Mario Gorni, critic and curator Marco Scotini, contemporary art network UnDo.Net directors Vincenzo Chiarandà and Anna Stuart, and philosopher Tiziana Villani.

info: 339 60 57 111
info@isolartcenter.org
www.isolartcenter.org

15 07 2008
International Guerrilla Festival in Milan

Milan 12-14 July 2008
Art, Society and Urban Space:
The Second Edition of the IGVFest comes to Milan

The mobile festival of video art travels to the zones of Corso Como, Chinatown and Isola. The videos of artists artists active in the area and international artists will be projected on the walls, streets, and squares transforming the city into a living screen.

The International Guerrilla Video Festival (IGVFest) is a migratory festival that integrates video art with the urban and social environment. The initiative was founded by the curator Jason Waite and had its first edition in Florence in 2006.

One of the aims of the festival is to create a continuous dialogue from the videos into the community, focusing on lapses in the current framework such as an absence of communication or invisible components of the area. Open to local and international artists, the festival widens the panorama of the discourse to include the perspective of communities elsewhere that have parallel circumstances.

The 2008 edition in Milan will be located in three different zones of the city over three evenings, starting at 9:30 pm. The festival begins July 12th in Corso Como, then transfers to Chinatown (via Paolo Sarpi) on July 13th and concludes on July 14th in Isola.

The International Guerrilla Video Festival (IGVFest) is a mobile festival integrating video art with the urban and social environment. The festival removes the technologically complex medium of video out of the institutional situation re-positioning it as open and reflexive in the public domain. The artworks have sitespecific thematic relations to the space where they are shown, engaging and reflecting upon the unique architectural, historical and interpersonal context of each area where the festival travels.

Artists: 3P=3Players, 21bis, Alterazione Video, Anti-Advertising Agency & Graffiti Research Lab, Zhao Bandi, Raphael Copper & Li Qiu Qiu, Wu Ershan, Shu Haolun, Qiu Jun, Labratorio Mobile, Zhenchen Liu,
Francesca Montà & Marthe van Dessel, Plaza Real Foundation, Mariette Schiltz & Bert Theis, Nadja Schrade, Jonathan Trayner, Marco Villani, Fiona Whitty, Chen Zhong.

A self-contained, transportable GPU (Guerrilla Projector Unit) facilitates the incursions into the public realm.
Transforming public space into a fertile ground for experimentation toward new possibilities in the relationship between art and society.
Festival Locations: The map with all of the festival sites and times can be downloaded from www.igvfest.com.
In the neighborhoods of Chinatown and Isola the festival will be accompanied by the trip-hop group ilmionomenonhaimportanza. The acoustic mobile set will intervene at the different sites with
contributions by musicians based in the area.
The IGVFest is organized with collaboration from Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto, Unidee-University of Ideas, Isola Art Center, La Pergola Social Center, Intelligent Alternative (Beijing)

Info: +39 333 7658678: e-mail: igvfest@gmail.com: website: www.igvfest.com

22 05 2008
inCONTEMPORANEA the art network. Third edition

23rd, 24th, 25th of May 2008
inContemporanea, the art network
Triennale of Milano
Viale Alemagna 6
10.30/23.00

New Museum
a project by KINGS
curated by Alessandra Poggianti

Isola Art Center, on the occasion of inContemporanea, the art event promoted by the Province of Milano, presents New Museum, a project by KINGS curated by Alessandra Poggianti.
New Museum is a 10 meters long writing made of neon, realized in 2006 in order to be put on the roof of the “Stecca degli Artigiani”, the place where Isola Art Center used to carry on its activities. The project is based on what Henri Lefebvre has once called “the logic of visualization”: besides communicating to the neighborhood the existence of an art center, thus legitimating its clandestine presence, the writing aims to make visible to the public the specific precarity of the place, overwhelmed by the arrogant dynamics of banalization and omologation of public space. Some months after having placed the neon writing on its roof, in fact, that precarious space (the “Stecca degli Artigiani”) has been destroyed and the New Museum piece had to start an ongoing period of “poaching”. Today, as a guest of inContemporanea, it is thus carrying out a new function: instead of indicating the existence of a place, it marks its period of transition, that is a special moment during which Isola Art Center is re-thinking its own tactics and strategies. Having lost its originary and representative place, now its activities are forced to move around the urban tissue of the Isola neighborhood. As a guest of other associations, shops and public spaces, Isola Art Center has ended up creating a solidarity network through which it tries to re-invent the relations between the individual and the social body, as much as re-conceptualizing the public space as a space of action, in order to start a process that can change the social structure into a generator of creativity.

Presentation of a flyer created for inContemporanea 2. Curated by Mariette Schiltz. Graphic design: Tommaso Garner. Text: Alberto Pesavento, Marco Scotini, Bert Theis, Vincenzo Latronico, Luis Miguel Selvelli, Alessandra Poggianti. Translation: Vincenzo Latronico, Luis Miguel Selvelli. Photo: Simona Barbagallo, Stefano Boccalini, Kings, out, Alberto Pesavento, Tomas Saraceno, Fabrizio Stipari, Bert Theis. Photo poster image: Maria Vittoria Trovato and Urban Blooz Project, “Interferences”, "subvertisement" act carried out for the Situazionisola exhibition, Isola Art Center, Milano, 2007.

Sunday 25th of May 2008

Picnic, Art and Music in a one-day garden
since 11am – Minniti Square, Milano

The Isola Forum in collaboration with Isola Art Center organizes a day-long event dedicated to the collective creation of a temporary garden, in order to celebrate there a pleasant picnic. During the day there will be the opening of an exhibition by the young artists of NABA at the Tantrika exhibiting space of via Pollaiuolo 2, and a guided tour of the Verde Permanente / Permanent Green exhibition.
Moreover, a surprise music event!

06 04 2008
Permanent Green / Verde Permanente Opening Sunday, April 13th, from 11 am

Isola Art Center e Forum Isola present
VERDE PERMANENTE/PERMANENT GREEN
April 10th and 13th – July 31st, 2008

Art around the streets of Isola
supporting the neighbourhood parks
Works on shop shutters, videos, open-air performances.

curated by Bert Theis

"Verde Permanente/Permanent Green" is an exhibition conceived in various friendly venues that, after the gallery’s original space was torn down alongside the Stecca degli Artigiani, have agreed to host the Center through a network of mutual support. "Verde Permanente /Permanent Green" thus hits the road, using over twenty shop shutters to display art projects, in cooperation with other international art centers.
This series of interventions starts shaping a project whose title evokes the neighborhood’s only public green, a necessary breathing lung that was recently privatized. The exhibition collects a wide variety of artistic experiences each in its own way taking a stand with respect to the environmental issues recently raised by the reckless urge to build.
Such an issue deeply concerns both the whole of Milan and the inhabitants of the Isola neighborhood, still fighting for the “Parco Possibile”, an alternative development project allowing to save the park and create a Center for art and community life. Our struggle’s first positive results have been obtained in the neighborhood council, in the Regional Administrative Court and in the Italian Supreme Court. The “Temporary green”, as the city council once referred to our park, must become a “Permanent green”.

Video

Fikret Atay, Kurdistan/Turchia: “Tinica”, video 7’32”, 2004
Minouk Lim, Corea: “New Town Ghost”, video 10'28", 2005
Sound Metak, Piazzale Segrino 1
tuesday-friday, 3.30-7.30
Opening: Thursday, April 10th, 2008, from 6.30 pm

Both videos have been premiered at the 10th Istanbul Biennial, in 2007, and try to capture a frantic urban growth that leaves no room for the individual inhabitants’ lives and desires. This is true of Batman, Turkey, of Seoul, Korea and of Milan, Italy: skyscrapers and concrete invade all green spaces.

Shutters

Alek O., Kristine Alksne, Stefano Arienti, John Armleder, Dafne Boggeri, Michelangelo Consani, Stina Fisch, Gaia Fugazza, Kings, Peter Kogler, Maija Kurseva, Gabriele di Matteo, Osservatorio inOpera, Adrian Paci, Luca Pozzi, Matteo Rubbi, Marco Vaglieri - out, Werkstatt, Fani Zguro

Via Thaon Di Revel / Via Lambertenghi / Via Pollaiuolo / Via della Pergola / Piazza Minniti /Via Pastrengo / Via Pepe / Via Borsieri / Via Sebenico.
Opening: Spazio Espositivo Tantrika, via Pollaiuolo 2, Sunday, April 13th, from 11 am.

Isola Rosta Project’s second edition is an event taking place in various streets of the Isola neighborhood. Both Italian and international artists have conceived big format drawings on the shutters of over twenty shops and cultural associations. The project has been possible thanks to the help of professionals and international institutions as well as the neighborhood inhabitants.

Special Project
Con-senso by Luciana Andreani curated by Giacomo Bazzani
Sunday, April 13th, 1 pm in Piazza Minniti

An artistic event seeking to involve the Isola neighborhood inhabitants in the public discussion of contemporary ways of consumption and their impact on urban design choices. Access to the Isola neighborhood park has been barred and the Stecca degli Artigiani was torn down. The neighborhood lacks room for the inhabitants to aggregate, thus forcing them to meet and develop their relationships on the streets.

Acknowledgements: Latvian Center for Contemporary Art, Riga / Mamco, Ginevra / Casino Forum d’art contemporain, Lussemburgo / Galleria Chantal Crousel, Parigi / NABA, Milano /Vasif Kortun, Istanbul / Manu Park, Gwangju.
supported by the Province of Milan
__________________________________________________________________
info: 339 60 57 111 info@isolartcenter.org www.isolartcenter.org

14 03 2008
OUT (Office for urban Transformation) at Galerie Erna Hecey, Brussels

BERT THEIS
Platforms and Aggregations
15 February 2008 - 5 April 2008
Tuesday to Saturday from 2 to 7 pm and by appointment

Erna Hecey Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition Platforms and Aggregations by Luxembourg artist Bert Theis (°1952; lives and works in Milan and Luxembourg).

Bert Theis constructed his system of artistic thoughts and actions entirely on the enquiry of the relationship between art and public space, between the “art object” as a personal proposal to the public space and the intervention of the public through their active participation in the making of the final sense of the work. In the meantime, Bert Theis’ proposal has always been specific – site specific and, in his words: “audience specific”, while a big picture of the position of public art in urban space has developed. While urban spaces are gradually privatised due to the introduction of both global capital and new technology, Bert Theis seeks to propose alternatives to balance out such a tendency and hence revitalise urban life itself.

The exhibition Platforms and Aggregations will present an assembly of models, photographs and video of Bert Theis’ interventions, often adapting the form of platforms, in various public spaces and art institutions throughout the world. These platforms are painted white, expanding into public spaces, embracing the interventions of the public. They are tangible and physical, results of deliberately planned occupations of urban territories with strategies of minimalist and even immaterial transformations of the given conditions. They are discrete, firmly anti-spectacular. They provide, in turn, the best spaces for spectacular events ranging from meditation, games, dances, concerts to all kinds of everyday activities.
However, these activities have never been planned and organised by the artist. Instead, they are improvised and realised by the public with passion and spontaneous inspirations. This is particularly remarkable because it incarnates perfectly the logic of self-organisation and self-governance: the most decisive element in the creation of sustainable urban societies which is at the very centre of Bert Theis’ artistic concept. Besides he likes to call his work philosophic. They are systematically informed by philosophic works and guide the audience to reflect “philosophically” on life.

In addition Bert Theis presents his photomontages of the city, a place that is our essential Umwelt, but at the same time completely denaturalised. A different city is nevertheless possible. In these photomontages Bert Theis operates an ecologic deconstruction of metropolises like Paris, Milan and Münster. These cities are completely invaded by dense vegetation, except for skyscrapers, church steeples, monuments, etc. As such it seems that Bert Theis converts the modern metaphor of the urban jungle.

Also included in this exhibition is the research institution OUT - Office for Urban Transformation, created by Bert Theis and his colleagues of the Isola (Art) Project Milan. The aim is to look for solutions of “sustainable urbanism”. They have come up with the notion of “Telecity” intending to substitute the conventional image of the city as a “concrete jungle” with an innovative and humane “digital jungle”. More significantly they put forward, alongside with new technologies and ecology, new administrational forms - new communities along with self-governance - in order to make the new urban life really relevant and hence sustainable.

This is Bert Theis’ third solo exhibition at Erna Hecey Gallery.

Bert Theis has realised some remarkable projects at the Venice Biennial, Venice, Italy (1995); Skulptur Projekte, Münster, Germany (1997); Manifesta 2, Casino Luxembourg, Luxembourg (1998); the Gwangju Biennial, Gwangju, Korea (2002); the 5th Shenzhen Public Art Exhibition, Shenzhen, China (2003); the 2nd Tirana Biennale, Tirana, Albania (2003); BOZAR, Brussels, Belgium (2005); MUDAM, Fondation Musée d’Art Moderne, Luxembourg (2006); Busan Biennial, Busan, Korea (2006); Domaine départemental de Chamarande, France (2006/2007), the 10th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey (2007) and MAMCO, Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland (2007).

For more information on Isola (Art) Project and OUT – Office for Urban Transformation, check www.isolartcenter.org

Per informazione:http://www.ernahecey.com/

29 01 2008
Street by street

Isola Art Center
www.isolartcenter.org
info@isolartcenter.org
info: 339.6057111

hosted by
Associazione culturale Punto Rosso
Via Pepe 14, Milano, MM Garibaldi
Friday February 1st, 2008, hours 19.00 – 22.00

STREET BY STREET

After years operating within Milan’s Isola neighborhood, amidst a lasting urban conflict between inhabitants, politicians and private realtors which eventually resulted in its spaced being erased, Isola Art Center keeps offering attention and visibility to artistic and theoretical research projects aimed at discovering crisis patterns and new possibilities of urban living, seeking a new beginning on the streets themselves. Street spaces, subject as they are to control, are paradoxically the first to offer opportunities for innovative forms of action. To open the 2008 season, Isola Art Center proposes a special event:

- a meeting with Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa
- the presentation of the new issue of philosophical journal millepiani
- the screening of Fani Zguro’s video “Street by Street”
- an extension of Isola Rosta Project 1 on Punto Rosso’s shutters, until March 1st, 2008.

> Carlos Garaicoa
The meeting with Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa will be attended by curators Roberto Pinto and Marco Scotini.
Thanks to NABA, New Academy of Fine Arts, Milan.

“A place’s history is engraved in its streets. You don’t have to read books to know what’s been happening. The main question I ask myself then is: how do you discover a city?” Carlos Garaicoa was born in Havana, in 1967, where he still lives and works. His research has been centered since its start on architectures and cities. He’s been known on the international scene after he took part in the Havana Biennial, Cuba (V, VI and VII), São Paulo Biennial, Brazil (XXIV and XXVI) and Documenta XI (Kassel 1997). Since the early Nineties his work has been presented to the public in a vast amount of solo and groups shows in important institutions: Centro Wilfredo Lam and Fundación Ludwig de Cuba, L’Avana; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Kunsthalle, Vienna; Museo de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid e Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada. In Italy his work has been shown at Castello di Rivoli, Turin, at Galleria Continua, San Gimigniano, in 2005’s Venice Biennial as well as in Isola Art Center, Milan.

> millepiani 33
For a political ecology, against all economy of value.

Presentation of millepiani 33 dedicated to André Gorz with Tiziana Villani and Alessandro Rudelli.
The crisis in the sphere of contemporary subjectivity has brought before us an undeferrable task: the need to consider in all their breadth the conditions of impoverishment and debasement to which existences are now subsumed. The hegemony of an ideology that takes man to be but a means to produce wealth, the deceitful insistence of those who keep eulogizing the primacy of business-mankind, whose “self-valuation” ability would be spendable only within the prodution-goods-consommation circuit, unambiguously explain the sadness, vulgarity and violence unmistakably marking our present time.
Technological, social and economical transformations are – as we have seen over many issues of millepiani – “meaning transformations”, requiring not only a critical analysis, but also new modes and practices of interpretation.
millepiani 33 has texts by André Gorz and contributions by Christian Bernard, Giacomo Bazzani, Davide Calenda, Saverio Caponi, Ubaldo Fadini, Luca Greco, Roberto Marchesini, Patrizia Mello, Luca Mori, Daniela Piana, Stefano Righetti, Felix Stadler, Simone Vertucci, Tiziana Villani. The cover picture is by Bert Theis.

> Fani Zguro, “Street by Street”, video 9 min, 2007

The video, on Italian premiere, has been shot on the streets of Tirana. With this work, Albanian artist Fani Zguro has won Onufri Prize’s fourteenth edition, held by the Tirana National Gallery in 2007 and curated by Ervin Hatibi and Rubens Shima. “What strikes me the most when I come back to Tirana is how much my city is different from the places I arrive in. The first thing that gets you is the sunlight’s incredible strength. Each movement in Tirana is made possible by everyone’s reflexes; when a muezzin is singing the belfry also gives its best… when stray dogs are scratching non-stop, the tourist can find a good meal…” Fani Zguro lives and works in Tirana and Milan. In 2007 his work has been shown in Milan (MiArt, Galleria Unorossodue), Modena (“Lo Schermo Ansioso”, curated by Matteo Chini and Bruno Muzzolini), Tirana (National Gallery of Arts, Tirana Institute for Contemporary Art, 5th Tirana International Film Festival) and Pristina (Mulliqi International Prize, Kosovo). On the same year he has also taken part in “Absolute Beginners” (Isola Art Center), a group show featuring also Jakup Ferri’s, Armand Lulaj’s and Anri Sala’s earliest works. He is the director of Tirana Art Center, which on February 18th 2008 will be hosting “museo aero solar”, a solar energy hot-air balloon created and designed by the inhabitants with Tomas Saraceno, originally realized by Isola Art Center in the district of Milan.

> Isola Rosta Project 1 extended until March 1
Marco Colombaioni, Dan Perjovschi, Andreas Siekmann, Marco Vaglieri

Rosta was the name of the Russian telegraphy agency which, from 1919 on, had been using its window displays to show posters created ad hoc by artists such as Vladimir Majakowski. Isola Rosta Project 1 displayed big format drawings on the shutters of the Punto Rosso cultural association. The works were centered on the risks the Isola neighborhood has been facing, owing to the urban design projects Saskia Sassen has recently summarized with: “Too much displacement, too much power casting the weaker away”.

...and Isola goes Tuscany

Strong end weak end nella città che sale curated by Pierluigi Tazzi.
Dryphoto arte contemporanea, via Pugliesi 23, Prato, January 19th – March 14th 2008.
After partaking – with contributions by Luciana Andreani, Alberto Pesavento e Rafaela Trevisan – to the round table held in Florence on January 18th at Gecekondu Networking event 2006-2007, Isola Art Center will be presenting its work in DRYPHOTO Arte Contemporanea, Prato. Some of our video works will be shown: Mariette Schiltz’s Isola Nostra, 2007, premiered in the 2007 Istanbul Biennial, and the video documentation of two projects by Italian artist Stefano Boccalini: Stone Island, 2007 and Wild Island – Archivi 2.0.2002. There will also be a presentation of the Center’s website www.isolartcenter.org.

23 10 2007
Isola Rosta Project 1

Isola Art Center
www.isolartcenter.org
info@isolartcenter.org
info: 339.6057111

Monday, October 29th 2007, 6.30-10.00 pm,
Associazione Culturale Punto Rosso
Via Pepe 14, opposite Via Carmagnola
Garibaldi MM2 Subway

After having lost its spaces at the second floor of La Stecca, where artists, curators, philosophers and neighborhood associations have been working for 4 years, Isola Art Center moves out, and considers the whole Isola district as its working field and exhibition space. This season’s first event will be hosted by the cultural association Punto Rosso, which has agreed to offer its shutters to Isola Art Center as a public exhibition space, and its conference hall as video projection room for the italian premiere of “Isola Nostra”, a documentary outlining a sketch of recent history some people would happily ignore. Isola Rosta project 1 will be opening on closed shutters, both as a form of protest against a policy aimed at effacing places and in the attempt at concealing a social and artistic project of international scope.
Isola Art Center and Forum Isola present:

Isola Nostra
A film by Mariette Schiltz, 2007, 60’

An italian premiere will be held for the video on the Isola neighborhood shown at the Istanbul Biennale 2007. The film narrates six years of Isola’s history, and is divided into six chapters: The district, its public space with the parks and the former factory, the urban transformation projects, the neighborhood associations’ reactions, the role of contemporary art in this process, the conflict between the Milan city hall, the real estate companies and the inhabitants of Isola, and last summer’s final events. The film makes a clear stand in favour of the district’s demands and collates for the first time a lot of unpublished documentary footage.
Starting from Tuesday, October 30, the video will be visible online at the following address: http://undo.net/eventinvideo/63

Isola Rosta Project 1
Marco Colombaioni, Dan Perjovschi, Andreas Siekmann, Marco Vaglieri (out)

Rosta was the name of the Russian telegraphy agency which, from 1919 on, had been using its window displays to show posters created ad hoc by artists such as Vladimir Majakowski. Isola Rosta Project 1 will show big format drawings by Italian and international artists on the shutters of the Punto Rosso cultural association.
Marco Colombaioni’s prophetic drawing representing La Stecca’s demolition had been on public display for the first time in march 2005 in the out–office.
Marco Vaglieri, too, in a 2005 drawing made for out, anticipated an outcome reached only in 2007, when a project has been set forth for two high rise buildings on the Isola parks.
In 2005 Adrian Paci, as curator of the “Revolution is on hold” show, transferred on the walls of Isola Art Center’s cafeteria a series of drawings by Bucarest artist Dan Perjovschi. Those drawings and several other art works have been destroyed when the construction firm hired by real estate company Hines demolished La Stecca’s inner walls. Isola Rosta Project 1 will feature new drawings by Dan Perjovschi, who’s been among the artists invited for this year’s Venice Biennale and has held a solo show at the NY MoMA. The project will also include two graphic design projects by Andreas Siekmann, the only artist featured, last summer, in both Documenta 12 and Sculptur.Projects Münster. His works will tackle the gentrification undergone by working-class neighborhoods to turn them into highbrow communities: such is the risk posed to the Isola district by the urban design projects Saskia Sassen has thus summarized: “Too much displacement, too much power casting the weak out”.

09 08 2007
Made In

Isola Art Center hosted by AssabOne
www.isolartcenter.org
http://www.assab-one.org
info@isolartcenter.org

via Assab, 1
20132 Milano

“Made In”

New Works, Plamen Dejanoff
in collaboration with Hubmann&Vass architects Vienna

Body-Without-Organs, Daniela Kostova
in collaboration with Dj Joro Boro

Curated by Katia Anguelova

Opening– Monday, 28th May 2007, 7pm

29th May– 28 June 2007
Assab One (piano terra)
Via Assab, 1 20132 Milano
(from Tuesday-Fryday -3pm-7pm)

Isola Art Center runs the risk of losing the spaces in which it has operated since 2003, and no suitable alternative space in which to continue its activity has been proposed.
Temporary Isola Art Center is hosted by AssabOne, an exhibition space founded by Elena Quarestani that produces and promotes cultural and art projects. Isola Art Center has worked with 1500 square meters of exhibition space on the second floor of the industrial building known as the "Stecca degli Artigiani", owned by the city. The space contains a permanent collection of artworks inserted in the architecture of the building by international artists like Marjetica Potrc, Tania Brughiera, Seamus Farrell and Italian artists like Michelangelo Pistoletto, Stefano Arienti, Luca Pancrazzi, Massimo Bartolini, Gabriele Di Matteo, Vedovamazzei, Loris Cecchini and Bernardo Giorgi.

For this event Katia Anguelova has invited Daniela Kostova and Plamen Dejanoff –residents of NY, USA and Vienna, Austria respectively. The two artists share a common Bulgarian origin that also acts as a starting point for their projects.

Plamen Dejanoff’s project originates from the relationships between art, culture and economy, issues that the artist has been investigating for some years now. In Planets of Comparison Dejanoff explores the relations between the systems of art and of economy. Here he acts simultaneously as artist, manager and collector.
In the nineties Dejanoff bought seven houses in Veliko Tarnovo (a city in the centre of Bulgaria) to be restructured by Plamen Dejanoff in collaboration with a number of architecture studies (Kühn/Malvezzi, Vienna, Berlin, Grüntuch & Ernst Berlin, Gruppo A12 Milano, Cocktail Lyon) and afterwards used by institutions, galleries and museums for cultures activities. The project started with MUMOK, the Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation Vienna, where a bronze statue representing a part of the first realised house was exhibited in the spring of 2006 (the project was realised by Plamen Dejanoff with the Austian architects Wiederin/Konzett and Hubmann &Vass). The project will then move to Veliko Tarnovo where MUMOK will be establishing a space in the Balkans for the next years.
Plamen combines strategies of art and business in a similar way to how Andy Warhol combined Pop and Conceptual Art.
For this exhibition Plamen Dejanoff presents a new phases of the project on MUMOK house in Veliko Tarnovo, designed together with architects Erich Hubmann & Andreas Vass from Vienna, featuring drawings, maquettes, and a new objects branded ‘dejanoff’ that are actually realised in collaboration with bulgarian craftmens and “made in Bulgaria”.
This project, playful and economically rewarding at the same time, transforms the existential experience into a sort of joint venture which is typical in the real economy, thus continuing his investigation into art and economy.

Daniela Kostova uses her documentary video, Body-Without-Organs, as raw material for an installation, especially designed originally for Isola Art Centre, composed of a series of ‘social environments’. The passage through the installation invites viewers to reflect on the issues of emigration, travelling and music as a point of integration.
The title of the work borrows the concept of “body-without-organs” from Gilles Deleuze. The expression “le corps sans organs” may seem obscure, but its definition is quite clear. It means conceptualizing the body without reducing it to an organic form, not a body deprived of the organs, instead a body on its way to differentiation. The body without organs is therefore in-organic life and, as such, a power of individualization not yet turned into an organism.
The exhibition becomes a means for cultural dialogue and confrontation between geographical places that are different yet near. Inspired by the New York music scene of ethno-mesh and gypsy-punk the installation describes the Bulgarian Bar ironically named the Bulgarian Cultural Centre in New York City seen through the eyes of those recently emigrated there.
Bulgarian Bar is not a “cultural center” but rather a cultural imaginary and an area of converging opposite tendencies: on one hand the institutional representation of the National Cultural Center and on the other the essence of the nomad spirit expressed through the gypsy-punk music.
Dancing in the Bulgarian Bar transcends the usual bodily function, overiding it with new possible meanings provided by the orgasmic fusion with music.
The experience in the Bulgarian Bar becomes an anthropological metaphor that shows plurality of culture. The work of Daniela Kostova becomes the search of one’s self in the human community, where spiritual values are the consequence of collective adventures. It is not by chance that DJ Boro says of gypsy music – “the gypsy idea works very well, because they don’t have a state. They are continuously nomadic”.
In short, the party depends on the people’s possibilities and on their capacity to forget their own identities.

For further information please contact the curator of the exhibition, Katia Anguelova, zebonski@fastwebnet.it

For image material please contact info@isolartcenter.org

Thanks to Elena Quarestani and

Supporting body: European Cultural Foundation

the project is supported by: Province of Milan

____________________________________________________________________________
Save Isola Art Center! - Non chiudete Isola Art Center! - Save Isola Art Center!

08 07 2007
Laws of relativity

Isola Art Center hosted by Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo

Laws of relativity
Curated by Anna Colin and Elena Sorokina.
26 mai - 29 july 2007

Alterazioni Video | Anamaria Bresciani | Paolo Chiasera | Claire Fontaine | Formazero | Norma Jeane | Elena Nemkova | Anapaula Pasarini | Andrea Salvino | Shoggoth (Paolo Pennuti in collaboration with Lorenzo Pazzi and Gianluca Stazi) | Mario Spada | Lupo&Burtscher | Eugenio Tibaldi | Italo Zuffi | and more artists to be confirmed

Laws of relativity brings together artistic work that reflects on the tensions between legal and illegal in Italy and abroad. The project sheds light on practices which query the way constitutional laws as well as unwritten rules function, their stability and rightfulness both on the short- and long-term. The relativity – ensuing from cultural, historical, economical, political and geographical difference – of the very notions of legality and legitimacy are being put forward for thought and comment in this exhibition.

The works and projects presented provide different takes and strategies to address this topic and to navigate the spaces in between legal and illegal. Several research-oriented projects point to concrete cases in the recent past, when the legality of the State's actions became questionable and strong opposition arose.

Using film, documentary, audio recording, photography, drawing or installation, some artists adopt a sociological or journalistic approach (Elena Nemkova, Mario Spada and Eugenio Tibaldi) – sometimes one that reinterprets the subject under scrutiny (Shoggoth). While, a few artists make use of metaphorical modes of address (Paolo Chiasera) or represent events according to the modern tradition of societal portrayal (Andrea Salvino), others opt for more direct means of action such as provocation (Italo Zuffi), the realisation of an illegal act (Claire Fontaine) or the denunciation of arbitrary governmental decisions (Formazero). In the latter case, this can be done through providing structural support to the group of people affected by these decisions, or, in the case of Alterazioni Video, through giving legal support. Here, what is known as legal action – respectively evicting sans-papiers squatters from a building and suing demonstrators for the physical damage they’ve caused during their opposition – is presented as defendable (or is defended) by the artists who dispute the verdict.

If in many cases the artists choose to treat or refer to a specific context – illegal buildings in Naples or the power structures of the art world, for instance – the works’ main reading is often a commentary on the relevance and meaning of such topics on a global level and within other realities.

Laws of relativity will be designed by Studio Lupo&Burtscher, which will also devise a design solution for the archive compiled by the curators together with Jimena Acosta during their research throughout Italy this Spring. Composed of audiovidual material and publications including catalogues and artists' books, the archive’s content relfects upon the issues treated in both exhibitions, while opening it up to wider possibilities.

07 04 2007
situazionIsola. A New Urbanism

Press release situazionIsola. A new Urbanism

Isola Art Center
via Confalonieri 10A (2nd floor), Milan
info: 339.6057111
www.isolartcenter.org
info@isolartcenter.org

situazionIsola. A New Urbanism

curators Marco Biraghi, Maurizio Bortolotti, Bert Theis
with the support of NABA and Forum Isola and the official support of the Province of Milan

Special Event
Saturday 14 April 2007, 11.00-18.00, Giardini di via Confalonieri, Isola

Tomas Saraceno:
Think global, act local! (project curator Maurizio Bortolotti), for the creation of the first flying museum: Museo Aerosolar. Construction of a solar energy hot-air balloon with the inhabitants of the Isola neighborhood, and flight test. The Argentine artist and architect Tomas Saraceno has developed this project during a long residency, in close contact with local residents and the young artists of Isola Art Center. Hundreds of people have collected thousands of plastic shopping bags to create this group work. The project is being developed on a global scale with the collaboration of other institutions. The collection of plastic bags has also been done at: Sharjah Biennial 8, UAE United Arab Emirates, La casa del encuentro cerca a el museo de Antioquia- Medellín, Colombia, Flugzeug Hanger, Flugplatz am Burghof 55 Bonamese/Kalbach- Germany.

Collettivo 3.2.1.:
Workshop on the construction of paper balloons, for children of the Isola neighborhood. This is the second appointment after the success of the event held on 24 March. The project of Collettivo 3.2.1. is connected to that of Tomas Saraceno and has also made it possible to get local children involved, a fundamental factor for the construction of the Center for Art and the Quarter in the parks of the neighborhood, Isola-Q’ART, the workshop activated by Forum Isola.

Exhibition opening
Monday 16 April 2007, 18.00-21.00, Isola Art Center

16 April – 15 May 2007
Thursday and Saturday, 16.00-19.00 and by appointment

Tomas Saraceno, Argentina, FlyingCity, Korea (project curated by Marco Scotini), Paola Di Bello, King’s (Daniele Inamorato and Federica Perazzoli), Marco Colombaioni and Bert Theis, Steve Piccolo with Xabier Iriondo, Donata Clovis and Manuel Scano, Luciana Andreani, Christophe Bouvet, Brice Della strada e Giovanni Giaretta, Mara Ferreri, Alek O., Alice Pintus, Luca Pozzi, Anja Puntari, Collettivo 3.2.1, Love Difference, Osservatorio inOpera, ufficio out, Forum Isola, Design Course of the Nuova Accademia di Belli Arti (NABA) in collaboration with the Parents’ Association F. Confalonieri (“Piedibus”)

The exhibition tries to explore the cultural and social value of an experience like that of the Isola Art Center, in the Isola neighborhood in Milan, as well as the desire and interest of the local residents and a number of artists to produce a gathering place inside a neighborhood with a relatively unified social fabric. The show reinterprets the Isola Art Center phenomenon in relation to the ideas of the Situationist International in the 1960s, a movement that had a particularly active section in Milan.

The question taken as a starting point was “which Situationist ideas still survive today, and how many of these ideas still respond to the needs of contemporary life?” In this perspective, “to what extent does an experience like that of Isola Art Center now represent a form of ‘new urbanism’, based on a different way of thinking about urban space and the social ties that form inside it?”.

To develop the Isola Art Center project in the light of Situationist ideas, situazionIsola has three closely interconnected parts.

- A historical part on Situationist ideas and materials, especially writings, presented in a different way to indicate action-concepts.

- A part on the projects completed by Isola Art Center together with local institutions and residents, projects that in some ways reflect the modes of implementation and experimentation of the Situationist legacy.

- A part on contemporary artists, with the participation of Flying City and the special project “Think global, act local” by the Argentine artist and architect Tomas Saraceno, produced in collaboration with the inhabitants of the neighborhood and the young artists of Isola Art Center.

To underline the timely pertinence of the Situationist movement, the exhibition attempts to evaluate how many of its ideas have become part of the behaviors and modes with which people experience the city today.
The possibility of connecting parts of the city neglected by the everyday functions active inside them becomes an interesting point for identification of forms of spontaneous aggregation, offering a different interpretation of urban space.

The projects will be placed inside the Isola Art Center and in the nearby parks, or precisely in public spaces that are threatened with demolition due to the city’s plans for the transformation of the area.

Curators:

Marco Biraghi teaches contemporary architectural history at the Milan Polytechnic. He works with a number of architecture magazines, and is part of the editorial staff of "Casabella". He has written and edited many books on 20th-century architectural culture and criticism. He has lectured at Columbia University and Cooper Union in New York, the Faculty of Fine Arts of Toronto and the Berlage Institute of Rotterdam.

Maurizio Bortolotti is an art critic and curator. He contributes to Domus magazine and the online magazine of the University of Leeds, “Seconds”. Curator of Art Experience for Domus Academy. He has recently been curator of the following projects: "No Vitrines, No Artists, No Museums: Just a Lot of People", with Rirkrit Tiravanija, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno (2004); "Modelmania", with Olafur Eliasson (2005), Venice; with Marco Scotini "The Utopian Display Platform" 2003-2006, Milan; "Yona Friedman. A Project for MART", 2006, Mart, Rovereto. He is now working on projects for Istanbul, Venice, Luxembourg and Birmingham.

Bert Theis. Born in Luxembourg, resident in Milan since 1992. He has worked on contemporary art projects at the Isola since 2001, as an artist and subcurator. In 2002 he created OUT (Office for Urban Transformation), with offices in Milan and Mexico DF. He has taken part in international art events like the Venice Biennale 1995, Sculpture. Projects in Münster 1997, Arte all’Arte 1998, Manifesta 1998, Biennial of Gwangju 2002, Biennial of Tirana 2003, Biennial of Busan 2006.

__________________________________________________________________________
Save Isola Art Center! - Non chiudete Isola Art Center! - Save Isola Art Center!

20 03 2007
Collettivo 3.2.1: Aeroazione "SituazionIsola"

On saturday 24th of march, from 11am to 5pm in the Confalonieri gardens, Forum Isola presents:

First meeting of the workshop for the construction of flying baloons with the children of Isola Neighborhood, under the direction of Alice Rosa, Francesca Riva, Laura Piazzola.
______________________________________________________________

Non chiudete Isola Art Center!

Domenica 15 marzo il vicesindaco di Milano De Corato ha dichiarato che entro 10 giorni la Stecca degli Artigiani dove ha sede Isola Art Center sarebbe sgomberata e murata, prendendo come pretesto la presenza di un gruppo di spacciatori nella via interna dello stabile.
Questo atto avrebbe come conseguenza la chiusura di Isola Art Center, metterebbe in pericolo la costruzione del nuovo Centro per l’Arte e il Quartiere Q’ART proprio nel momento che Isola Art Center viene invitato alla Biennale di Istambul a settembre 2007.

A questa minaccia di sgombero le associazioni del Forum Isola hanno risposto in un comunicato:

1. Diciamo no allo sgombero di artigiani, associazioni e del centro per l’arte presenti all’interno della Stecca degli Artigiani. Chiediamo l’allontanamento degli elementi criminosi con interventi delle Forze dell’Ordine che non mettano in pericolo gli abitanti dell’Isola.
Chiediamo la chiusura temporanea degli spazi non utilizzati da associazioni qualificanti e di pubblica utilità o da artigiani.

2. Chiediamo che l’area dei due giardini e della Stecca, di proprietà del Comune di Milano, rimanga pubblica, e che i progetti edilizi degli operatori privati siano realizzati dove insistono i loro diritti di volumetria o verso il Garibaldi-Repubblica, senza effettuare lo scambio di aree tra proprietà pubblica e privata.

3. Ci proponiamo di realizzare un Laboratorio per l’Arte e per il Quartiere in una Stecca diversa, ristrutturata e sicura, e nei giardini di via Confalonieri bonificati:
Q’ART sarà un luogo di quartiere e d’arte, un luogo da vivere e non solo da visitare, un progetto già in fase di realizzazione con le attività di Isola Art Center e del Forum Isola. Un innovativo uso dello spazio pubblico che prevede la compresenza di più attività, dalla ricerca artistica allo sport, e una inedita formula di aggregazione di tutte le componenti sociali del quartiere, dagli adolescenti fino agli anziani.

4. Il Comune non è il solo e unico proprietario della Stecca. Ieri, uno degli artigiani, che dal 1984 dispone come proprio di tutto il secondo piano in modo pacifico e mai contestato dal Comune, ha citato in giudizio quest’ultimo affinchè gli venga riconosciuto il diritto di proprietà da lui usucapito in ragione dei 23 anni passati da quando iniziò ad occupare quei locali.

IL Forum Isola e il coordinamento di:

Associazione Genitori F.Confalonieri per info cell. 3478702552
Comitato “I Mille” per info cell. 3337365511
Associazione Isola dell’Arte per info cell. 3396057111

19 02 2007
Absolute Beginners

Isola Art Center
Via Confalonieri 10 (II floor), Milan
New entrance: Via Confalonieri 10A
info: 339 60 57 111

Opening: Thursday 15 March 15th, h 7pm

March 15th – april 5th 2007
Thursday and Saturday from 4pm to 7pm
and by appointment

ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS
Four artists from Albania and Kosovo
curated by Fani Zguro

Participating artists:
Jakup Ferri | Armando Lulaj | Anri Sala | Fani Zguro

Works:
Don’t tell anybody (2003): video
Walking free in harmony (1999): video-performance
Avec Marubi (1996): video-animation
Fotogramma (2004): video-loop

ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS features four videos by Albanian artists Jakup Ferri, Armando Lulaj, Anri Sala and Fani Zguro. The exhibition’s paradoxical title, ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS, is essentially tied to the participant artists’ condition at the time of the work’s production, evoked as evidence of the indefinable, uncertain moment always catalyzed by beginnings. The ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS project set up in ISOLA ART CENTER aims to explore the first steps of artists now operating on an international scale; the exhibition thus offers an unprecedented configuration of research, doubts, transformations, ways sought and found, investigating the possibilities of artistic survival on the contemporary scene, as well as the ambiguous relationship between up-and-coming artists and established figures in the art system.

Jakup Ferri/Don’t tell anybody.
Young Kosovan artist Jakup Ferri’s video – “Don’t tell anybody” – is one of his first works, selected from a video cycle made between 2002 and 2005. His works explore the artist’s condition between humor and self-irony, exploiting his image as if it were a depiction of his own research’s first stage. In “Three virgins” the artists takes part with his own voice in a Lennon & Ono duet; in “An artist who speaks no English is no artist”, he ironizes on his own work in terrible English, whilst re-using a title already chosen by Croatian artist Mladen Stilinoviç; the work picked for ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS belongs to this early period: “Don’t tell anybody” displays the artist counting, one by one, a huge heap of rice grains, splitting them into small groups, in search of the exact amount contained in a kilo of rice.

Armando Lulaj/ Walking free in harmony.
Armando Lulaj’s work has, from the outset, found expression in performances. “Walking free in harmony” is one of his first actions, performed while he still was a student at the Florence Fine Arts Academy; in it, Armando Lulaj sought and developed a relationship with the academy’s environment by impersonating Christ’s last open-armed pose on the academy’s dome – the one sheltering Michelangelo’s David. Following this performance, Armando Lulaj was expelled from the Academy and has carried on with his independent performing, taking part in many international events such as the 2003 Prague Biennale and the 2005 Tirana Biennale.

Anri Sala/Avec Marubi.
Internationally renowned artist Anri Sala has been showing work for years in the most prominent venues and events of the contemporary art scene, such as the Venice Biennale, Manifesta, Hugo Boss Prize, etc. The work here is perhaps his very first film: “Avec Marubi” is a video-animation based on what is now a cult picture by Albanian photographer Marubi, taken in the early 1900s; two northern Albanian women, traditionally dressed, are working on a sewing machine to make a depiction of Manet’s famous masterpiece, “Le dejeuner sur l’herbe”. By the end, Manet’s naked woman is wearing the same traditional outfit as the two seamstresses in Marubi’s picture.

Fani Zguro/Fotogramma.
Fani Zguro’s work began in 2004, with “Fotogramma”, shot in Tirana. “Fotogramma” is a short film depicting an alley on a rainy night. The film’s initially short footage has been dilated to almost a minute; the audio has been eliminated. “Fotogramma” is the first part of Fani Zguro’s “Night Project”.

Isola Art Center events:

Thursday 22 March at 19.00:
Discussion: “Albania, 10 years of contemporary art”.

03 12 2006
"Collegare" and "New Museum"

Isola Art Center
New access: Via Confalonieri 10A

via Confalonieri 10 (II piano), Milano
info: 349.8051697 – 3396057111
www.isolartcenter.org

Opening: friday 8 december 18.00pm
Open from: 9 - 18 december 2006
Every day 12.00 – 20.00 pm

New Museum
by Daniele Innamorato and Federica Perazzoli curated by Alessandra Poggianti

Collegare group show curated by Gianni Romano
René Arbeithuber, Daniel Lange/Malun, Benjamin Wittner, Sascha Thoma/CASTO, Julie Djohan, Nino Maljevic, Marco Villaseñor, Davide Farabegoli, Linda Hörnquist, Philippe Werhahn

New Museum is the ten-meter long neon sign hung on the Isola Art Centre terrace, so as to become its signpost. Such an imposing light sign, readable from afar, signals, self-legitimates and claims both the presence and the existence of a Centre for the Arts. Neon lights are often used in Daniele Innamorato and Federica Perazzoli’s works, aiming, alongside LPs, record covers, sketches and rare rep files, at offering “an anarcho-punk aesthetics typical of dirty boys” (Marco Scotini, exhibition text for “R’n’R”, Artra Gallery, Milan, 2005). On this occasion, the sign atop the Stecca building denies its precariousness, underlining its active presence. Within this “new museum” the two artists have set up a photographical work – linked to the outward stance – activating a musealization process, driven towards a New Museum imagined as “an area viable for anyone… new room for movement, exchange, silence, music…” (Daniele Innamorato and Francesca Perazzoli).

“Collegare” represents the result of ten young artists’ cooperation revolving upon the theme of “connection”. This term gathers today many different meanings, reaching far beyond mere “getting connected” or establishing connections between different objects. Such an explosive project is aimed at investigating its various meanings, its hidden faces, letting every artist independently interpret the theme. Valuing very disparate backgrounds, “Collegare” group sports an interesting combination of works, ranging from illustration, fashion design, film, photography, graphics]…], graffitis, interior design, animation… Each different mode of expression corresponds to a distinct cultural context, each work gathering layers of meaning in its relation to each other, resulting in a whole with markedly choral aspects.
Interventions by: René Arbeithuber and Daniel Lange/Malun, two young German artists forming together the DFM group. Also from Germany Benjamin Wittner,photographer, Sascha Thoma/CASTO, writer, and artist- designer Julie Djohan. From Serbia video-animations by Nino Maljevic, from Mexico-City filmmaker Marco Villaseñor and from Italy Davide Farabegoli, photographer. Concluding the “connection” the two stylists Linda Hörnquist (Sweden) and Philippe Werhahn (Germany).
Program

10 december: “Fashion happen(-ing)”: Linda Hörnquist & Philippe Werhahn offer the public a chance to have their used garments re-fitted into new clothing. Bring your clothes before 15.00 pm.
17 december: fashion-sale auction
18 december: end of the exhibition with conclusive artwork auction

Meeting

Saturday 16 december, 17.00 pm
Presentation of the new issue of Millepiani’s review: “Caosmos”.Philosophy and technics in the control society, by G. SIMONDON-D. LYON.

12 10 2006
“Women shi gaibian” (The revolution is us)

Isola Art Center
via Confalonieri 10 (II piano), Milano
info: 349.8051697 / 334.942 54 42

19 October - 3 December 2006
Thursday,Saterday 16.00-19.00

Opening 19 ottobre 2006, 18.00
performance in piazza Minniti
and a Tai Chi Chuan event

“Women shi gaibian” (The revolution is us )
Artists from Canton, China
curated by Martina Köppel-Yang

Xu Tan, Jiang Zhi, Zhou Tao, Liang Juhui, Duan Jianyu, Lin Yilin, Yang Jiechang, Huang Xiaopeng, Yang Yong e santomatteo and Libreria Borges

In an era when the colour of a cat is not important but only the fact that it catches mice, bringing back the idea of a colour, is crucial. Who could fulfil this task better than artists?
Culture and art have the capacity to provide this kind of not primarily pragmatically motivated thoughts, like for example utopian ideas. Surplus value, of course, makes reference on the fact that art in China today, where the creation of a cultural industry is enhanced by the government, is considered an indicator and an important factor of social and economical productivity.

Adorno wrote in the early 1950s: “Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic”. For art in China today it is just the other way round: “Art is certainly not obsolete: economic.” This is even more true as there is more to art than just a measurable economic value. It is this surplus value that makes art attractive and provides it with a great potential, a potential to engender and promulgate ideas, a capacity to preserve values, cultural and social. One basic question still is that of the value of the individual. Is happiness obsolete, uneconomic?

In the exhibition "Accumulation- Canton Express, the Next Stop" (July-September 2006, Beijing) accumulation means the accumulation of “human capital” ,which is represented through artists from Canton. Most of them first exhibited together as “Canton Express” in 2002. Canton, a region far away from the political and economical centre but with a long colonial tradition, has been the craddle of China's utopian and revolutionnary throughts and concepts.Sun Yatsen, and Kang Youwei are both of Cantonese origin. Today in the field of contemporary art, new impulses and trends come from this region. An individual art scene has emerged that first manifested itself at the Gwangju Biennial in 2002 as “Canton Express” in 2002, an art scene that still is less touched by the international art market than those of other regions in China.

“Women shi gaiban (The revolution is us) - Artists from Canton" presents works of members of Canton Express. Milano-based artists santomatteo who spent six weeks in Canton and China will participate in the show as new members of Canton Express. They also take part in "Accumulation" in Beijing.

Martina Köppel-Yang is a Paris based curator and art historian.
She has curated two recent shows in Bejing, China:
"Surplus Value" (2006) and "Accumulation: Canton Express - the Next Stop" (2006).
Thanks to Tang Contemporary Art Center, Beijing and Provincia di Milano

08 10 2006
Palais de Tokyo, place of contemporary creation

Isola Art Center
Via Confalonieri 10, Milano

Tuesday 10th october 2006, 6.30pm
Isola Art Center and Forum Isola are glad to invite you at the presentation of the book:

Palais de Tokyo, place of contemporary creation
by Paola Nicolin

Followed by the debate
The discorse of others: Paris, Frankfurt, Mexico City… Milano

With Paola Nicolin, Bert Theis, Katia Anguelova, Alessandra Poggianti, Marco Scotini., Stefano Boeri (architect), Pippo Ciorra (architect), Francesco Garutti (curator/architect), Cloe Piccoli (art critician), Gianni Romano (curator/publisher), Gabi Scardi (art critician/curator), Francesca di Nardo (art critician/curator)

The case of Palais de Tokyo, opened in 2002 in the left wing of a 1937 building, can be considered a truly experimental case in the context of the Paris contemporary art scene. The analisys of such a case and the interpretation of some of the artworks that it has been producine is the content of Paola Nicolin’s book, which presents the center as a perfect example for the mingling of “art and life”.
After having considered these issues, the debite “The Discorse of others” will start, introduced by Bert Theis who will speak about the specific case of Isola Art and Community Center of Milano and from what has to be learnt from the events of Portikus in Frankfurt. Then will follow the analysis of other international art centers by Katia Anguelova (Le plateau, Paris), Alessandra Poggianti (El faro d’Oriente, Mexico City) and Marco Scotini (Beaubourg, Paris).
What all these cases have in common is the fact of having challenged and solved, in different ways, the same kind of issue: how to be dealing with both the Art and the Community. At this point the open discussion will start, animated by the interventions of Stefano Boeri and Pippo Corra, Francesco Garutti, Cloe Piccoli, Gabi Scardi, Francesca di Nardo, Gianni Romano… and of corse from whoever will like to join from the public.

During and after the event, at the new cafeteria “Ginoteca” of Isola Art Center will be on sale the Isola Art Beer, an organic beer produced to support the struggle and the projects of Isola neighborhood.

In the Isola area on the same day there will be the opening of
“Fragmented Show”, an exhibition produced after the course held by the visiting professor Marjetica Potrc at Ratti Foundation
Viafarini, via Farini 35 / Careof, via Luigi Nono 7 / neon-fdv / Fabbrica del Vapore, via Procaccini 4

Next exhibition at Isola Art Center will be: Women shi gaibian (The Revolution is us) Artists from Canton, China: Xu Tan, Zheng Guogu, Jiang Zhi, Zhou Tao, Liang Juhui, Yang Yong, Cao Fei, Duan Jianyu, Lin Yilin, Yang Jiechang, Chen Tong and santomatteo / curated by Martina Köppel-Yang / opening: 19th october 2006, 6pm

26 03 2006
The People’s Choice

Isola Art Center
Via Confalonieri 10 (II floor) Milano
Info: Alessandra Poggianti 0039 349.8051697;
ida@undo.net

Opening Monday 27 March 18.00
27 March 2006 - 7 May 2006
Opening hours: Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday 17h – 20h

The People’s Choice / La scelta della gente
Tools for an Art and Community Center

curated by Marco Scotini

Conceived more as a kit for use than as an itinerary to look at, the exhibition The People’s Choice, brings together proposals, projects and practical experiences that attempt to define a potential model for a contemporary art space as an integrated part of a neighbourhood. The challenge facing this project is to imagine an arts centre under permanent construction within a community that, day by day, negotiates its own parameters regarding its representation and relation to and in the urban space. Over 40 international artists will compare notes on the proposals of as many curators, economists, politicians and neighbourhood associations. Since the notion of a separate space and a specific function - of an ‘heterotopia’ in the Foucaultian sense - is no longer viable, The People’s Choice contemplates not only an open, flexible space, but one that literally involves the ordinary life of the people. A series of sections (financial, architectural, curatorial etc.) will divide the show into more than one area and into different expositional and functional regimes, each of which will house processes and materials of the most diverse kinds.
The project has developed as a mature, advanced phase of the Isola di Milano neighbourhood’s opposition to the Garibaldi-Repubblica building project. Over the course of years of struggle, the neighbourhood’s collective response has validated the maintenance of a public green belt between via Confalonieri and via De Castilla, including the ex-industrial building that crosses it.
After Isola Art Centre’s installation inside this building last year, The People’s Choice seeks to define the possible form a contemporary art space should take - a space, moreover, that Milan lacks - through a democratic planning and transformation process.
The actual name ‘The People’s Choice’ comes from Group Material’s famous exhibition held in 1980 at the group’s premises in New York’s East End, where the people from the neighbourhood were asked to bring to the gallery objects that meant something to them, their families or their friends.
Gruppo A12, Doug Ashford (Group Material), Stefano Boccalini, Gea Casolaro, Josef Dabernig, José Davila, Pablo Leon de la Barra, Paola Di Bello, Etcétera, Alberto Garutti, Bernardo Giorgi, Isabella Inti, Rem Koolhaas and Alain Fouraux, Armando Lulaj, Marcello Maloberti, Alessandro Nassiri Tabibzadeh, Network Nomadic Architecture, OUT, Adrian Paci, Maria Papadimitriou, Steve Piccolo, Cesare Pietroiusti, Post-Programmed City-Territory, Marietjca Potrc, Oda Projesi, Radek Community, Renshi.org, Oliver Ressler, Pedro Reyes, Mariette Schiltz, Chemi Rosado Seijo, Stalker, Bert Theis, Tercerunquinto, Ian Tweedy, Enzo Umbaca, Luca Vitone, What is to be done?....

Events:

Forum “The People’s Choice, la scelta della gente”
10 April 2006, 21h
Rectory “Sacro Volto”Via Sebenico, Milano
Organized by “Isola dell’Arte”, committee “I Mille” and the parents committee of Isola

Interdisciplinary Philosophical Lab “Divenire Urbano”
Tuesday 7 March, 14 March, 11 April, 18 April,at 18.00
Office out, Via Confalonieri 10 second floor, Milano
Presented by Tiziana Villani (Millepiani), Bert Theis (OUT) and Marco Scotini
Info: Tiziana Villani 0039 349.074 53 20

Book presentation
Sunday 9 April at 18.00
“Il tempo della trasformazione” by Tiziana Villani (manifestolibri)
Office out, via Confalonieri 10, second floor, Milano

13 03 2006
Art for the Isola!

ISOLA ART CENTER
STECCA DEGLI ARTIGIANI, SECOND FLOOR
VIA CONFALONIERI 10, MILAN

Art for the Isola!

Auction sale for fundraising
Thursday 30th of march at 9pm
NABA New Academy of Fine Arts
via Darwin 20, Milano

Isola Art Center together with Naba Futurarium present the second edition of "Art for the Isola!", the sale exhibition of art works. After the one held in december 2004, curated by Giacinto di Pietrantonio and Lino Baldini in Isola Art Center itself, this second edition will be adopting a different format.
Held during the time of MiArt, this year's "Art for the Isola! will be hosted by NABA and will be a proper auction sale. The exhibition project will be designed by Isola Dell'Arte association, with the contribution of art critics and curators. All art works on show will be put on sale during the auction, in order to raise as much funds as possible to help with the legal struggle in defense of Stecca degli Artigiani and Confalonieri gardens, brought on by the Isola neighborhood associations.

Artworks will be from: Olaf Nicolai, Francesco Vezzoli, gruppo A12, Marcello Maloberti, Massimo Bartolini, vedovamazzei, Maurizio Nannucci, Bert Theis, Stefano Boccalini, Enzo Umbaca, A Constructed World, Adrian Paci, Paola Di Bello, Alessandro Di Giampietro, Gabriele Di Matteo, Alessandro Ceresoli, Luca Pancrazzi, Italo Zuffi, Mario Airò, Andrea Sala, Marco Vaglieri, Luca Vitone, Michelangelo Consani, Patrick Tuttofuoco, Piero Gatto, Eva Marisaldi, Alex Pinna, Pastorello, Paola Sabatti Bassini, Giuseppe Restano, Ciboh, Antonio Rovaldi, Lodola, Gianni Cella, Piero Almeoni, Seamus Farrell, Paololuca Barbieri, Flavio Bonetti.

We'd like to thank: Ciocca Arte Contemporanea (Milano), NABA Nuova Accademia (Milano), NO Gallery (Milano), Sonia Campagnola, Studio Guenzani (Milano), White Project (Pescara) and all the artists.

RELATED EVENTS:

30th of march at 6pm
The Utopian Display Platform: Roundtable "Independent Spaces and Models of Curatorship?" curated by Maurizio Bortolotti and Marco Scotini. With Peter Lewis, Raimundas Malasauskas, Maria Lind.
MiArt, fieramilanocity, Milano

Until 7th of may:
La scelta della gente/The people's choice curated by Marco Scotini, at Isola Art Center, Stecca degli Artigiani, via Confalonieri 10, Milano. Open on tuesdays, wednesdays and sundays from 5pm to 8pm, or on special request.

13 03 2006
Revolution is on hold

Isola Art Center
STECCA DEGLI ARTIGIANI
VIA CONFALONIERI 10 (SECOND: FLOOR)
MILAN
INFO: ALESSANDRA POGGIANTI: TEL. 349-8051697, IDA@UNDO.NET

march 4th – march 13th 2005
opening: friday march 4th at 7 pm
15.00 - 20.00
monday, tuesday, and thursday closed

The association Isola dell'Arte presents:

Revolution is on hold

A project by Adrian Paci
in collaboration with Accademia Carrara di Belle Arti di Bergamo
works by Tania Bruguera (Cuba), Johanna Billing (Sweden), Carey Young (England), Emma Ciceri (Italy), Mircea Cantor (Romania), Dan Perjovschi (Romania), Armand Lulja (Albania)

“A spectre is haunting Europe”… and plenty of time has passed since Marx and Engels wrote the Manifesto of the Communist Party, starting with that now famous phrase.
Enough time for the spectre introduced by the fathers of the theory of class struggle to become first an ideal to follow, a project to realize, an idea of power to be maintained, and then an evil requiring elimination. In any case the spectre isn’t what it used to be. It has lost something of its charm, as well as its menacing air. Today Europe not appear to be the setting where the destinies of the near future will be determined, and the world itself, hurtling toward a definitive, inevitable globalization, seems to be threatened by other looming phantoms.
What has happened? Is it possible that the spectre evoked by Marx and Engels has vanished into thin air? Is revolution still a possible prospect, or has it become a tame idea, obeying the rules of power, a topic for discussion at cocktail parties (on the left), a utopian goal to soothe the critical conscience as one lives capitalist reality to the fullest?
An art show cannot attempt to provide answers to these questions. But it can become a place for reflection, an encounter of works that establish a dialogue and stimulate cross-interpretations.

At the same time out, the Office for Urban Tranformation presents three facets of the Stecca degli Artigiani building: the surveying, the photographs by Alessandro di Giampietro and the drawings by Marco Colombaioni.
The laboratorio workshop presents a patchwork of small-format art works.

Lectures

Two lectures will deal with the relationship between art, philosophy and politics examined in the show

Sunday march 6th at 6 pm: “Situationism reloaded?”
with Giorgio Agamben, Gianfranco Marelli, Bert Theis and others

Wednesday march 9th at 6.30 pm: “ Nomad Thinking.
The experience of the book-magazine Millepiani”
Presentation of the philosophy journal Millepiani with Tiziana Villani, Francesco Galluzzi, Alessandro Rudelli, Marco Scotini

13 03 2006
Sugoe at Mi-Art

Sugoe

SUGOE. A new form of collaboration

Between its members: Marco Colombaioni, Alice Pintus and Fernando Saavedra Roca, Fabrizio Stipari, Christian Raimondi, Manuel Scano and Giovanni Ciapessoni, Matteo Rubbi, Luca Pozzi, Alek O. and santomatteo

SUGOE is a sort of permanent workshop composed of artists, designers and architects. It started its activities in september 2004, envisioned from Bert Theis and Alessandra Poggianti.
SUGOE is the japanese word for "fantastic", last word said from Adrian Paci after cheering at the end of an exposition cocktail in Isola Art Center. It's a name able to include the different identities of the group, without defining a specific one. One of the most important qualities of the workshop is in fact the heteogeneity of its members.
SUGOE works at Isola art Center, involved in many different ways in its activities.
A primary role concerns the production of art works and the design of the exhibitions of the Center. During this year, for example, SUGOE produced the works of Tania Bruguera, Loris Cecchini, Bernardo Giorgi, Dan Periovschi, and designed the exhibition "Deleuzian Effect", a permanent project created from Marco Scotini and the magazine "Millepiani", inspired by the work o the french philosopher Gilles Deleuze.
Apart from these activities, SUGOE works on autonomous projects, which are often inspired by very practical kind of needs. The group has in fact been producing stages, screens, armchairs, lamps... works that can be considered authentic original design projects, accomplished as much as possible just making use of the raw materials found in the Center.
Furthermore, members of the group are involved in personal artistic projects: through the activities of the Center, SUGOE has been able to presenit itself in public venues as a collective project composed of singular artists.
First time has been in december 2004 in the context of "Art for the Isola!", the sale exposition of art works curated by Giacinto di Pietrantonio. Sugoe produced a DVD where each of its members presented him/herself with one minute of video, audio, slideshow, pictures, text... a sort of collective selfportrait.
Following opportunity was Miart, the contemporary art fair of Milano of 2005: SUGOE had been invited as a young artist. Each of its members presented an art work based on a "35x35cm" square panel, as to produce a singular art patchwork.
Then came the exhibition "The necessity of an island", where more than ten original projects where presented, dealing with both art and design. Some of them were based on the specific needs and context of the Center, while others were much more dealing with a personal artistic path.
Although from this short text SUGOE could be seen as mostly concerned with practical and productive issues, indeed much of its activities are based on daily discussions and exchange of ideas: this thorough relational activity is the characteristic which marks its spontaneous and selforganizing projects.
SUGOE has never been tutored in any kind of way, and this fact has allowed the activation of new dynamics, as well as new subjectivities, new working fields, new forms of collaboration always dealing with the spcific context of the Art Center and the Isola neighborhood.

08 03 2006
Artchitecture of change

STECCA DEGLI ARTIGIANI, SECOND FLOOR
VIA CONFALONIERI 10, MILAN
TEL 349-8051697
IDA@UNDO.NET

Opening: friday 8 april 18.00
8-18 april 2005
Open: every day 16.00-20.00, closed on tuesday

ART-CHITECTURE OF CHANGE
curator: Marco Scotini

Massimo Bartolini, Cantieri Isola, Loris Cecchini, Alexandre da Cunha, Vincenzo De Cotiis, Brice Delarue, Paola di Bello, , Carlos Garaicoa, Alberto Garutti, Bernardo Giorgi, Gruppo A12, Isabella Inti, Deborah Ligorio, Love Difference, Francesco Jodice, out, Luca Pancrazzi, Olaf Nicolai, Marietica Potrc, Andrea Sala, Paola Salerno, Antonio Scarponi, Bert Theis, Florin Tudor e Mona Vatamanu, Ultra-Red, vedovamazzei, Italo Zuffi

Conceived as the opening event of the Isola Art Center, the exhibition focuses on the relationship between artistic practices and the urban context in the moment of the construction of the public city. Starting with the premise that no technical solution exists to the urban problem, but many political, communicative and linguistic solutions, Art-chitecture of change has the objective of monitoring the transformation not only in the use of space but also in the forms of its representation. It is no coincidence that the project has taken form as part of a concrete experience still in progress, in which the Isola neighborhood in Milan is seen as an unresolved urban question and a platform where public policies and dynamics of self-organized transformation meet.
The Isola Art Center space itself is an attempt to provide an effective response to planning shortcomings. This project has been developing for five years, with the involvement of groups of artists, neighborhood associations, collectives of architects and urbanists, as new subjects active in the production of the city. As the borderlines between the intellectual sphere, political action and culture become increasingly blurred, an artspace can no longer present itself as a separate situation, outside an urban context stratified between memories, practices and new functions. In this sense the Isola Art Center attempts to insert itself in the “here and now” of the contingencies of social space, inside a multitude of different stories.
The frame of reference of Art-chitecture of change is the heterogeneous nature of the series of reflections involved in the definition of an exhibition space and the possible relationships it is capable of triggering at various scales of intervention: from the proposals for the contemporary art center to the investigations and the activities of the neighborhood, all the way to more general networks with the entire city. The exhibition is offered as a space open to multiple perspectives, without codes or itineraries, but composed of simultaneous, parallel spaces on the three themes regarding the city identified by Henri Lefebvre: material spatial activities, representations of space, spaces of representation. Therefore the artists and architects involved in Art-chitecture of change are called on to come to terms with the performative character of the production of space, rather than architecture as a constructed object.
Inside Art-chitecture of change zones will coexist on different time scales and with different functions: from permanent workshops like Out and Wurmkos to projections and debates; from the presentation of photographic analysis and micropolitical maps to the exhibiting of design proposals and visionary models. Emergency architecture, temporary uses of urban voids, audio investigations of space, do-it-yourself design objects, scale models of habitats are some of the fragments of a wider discourse that Art-chitecture of change proposes as a tool for interpretation and intervention of and in the post-Fordist city.

Special projects:

-Stazione Isola
Presentation of the first phase of work for a tourism guide to the Isola and a radio broadcast. The project stems from the desire to study the territory of the Isola, to narrate the hidden parts of the neighborhood, to investigate this reality by constructing personal itineraries related to realities present in the quarter, to reflect on multiculturalism, to monitor the coexistence of different realities, to describe the situations using a range of different methodologies, including audio, visual and written archives.
organized by Katia Anguelova and Stefano Boccalini
in collaboration with the Art Center Workshop

-kkk by Alessandro Ceresoli
In the spaces of the Stecca, “King Kong Park” is a sculptural space in continuous transformation, an process operation conditioned by the spaces that contain it. It grows and changes its appearance, becoming more and more complex. A external transposition of internal qualities, a place to bring suggestions and take away others, offering space for fantastic and imaginary impressions.
www.infokkk.net
curator: Alessandra Poggianti

-Fox trot, a site-specific project by Emre Huner, Stefano Mai, Jonatah Manno, Fabrizio Tropeano
Four young artists confront the space of the Stecca, with four different projects united by a shared sensibility: from the stratification and accumulation of imagery to the almost mimetic relationship with space, from the object-ive presence to representation seen as a way of exploring a place.
curator: Alessandra Poggianti

-Wurmkosbau
The Wurkmos workshop will be hosted in the spaces of the Isola Art Center, continuing the experience started in 1987 by Pasquale Campanella, making a relationship between art and mental illness without objectives of “salvation”, a situation open to different projects, artists, persons with mental difficulties or not, critics...
curator: Simona Bordone

Events:

Friday 8 April, from 18.00:
Official Inauguration of the Isola Art Center

- 18.00-19.00 Steve Piccolo presents the project Isolated Fanfare
with Matteo Pennese (trumpet) and Diego Ruvidotti (flugelhorn).

- 18.15 Bert Theis with the Laboratorio and Legambiente- Compagnia del Parco: planting
of another clandestine palm tree in the park of via Confalonieri.

- 19.00 Inaugural ribbon-cutting and opening of the Art Center and the exhibition to the
with representatives of the associations of the Isola neighborhood and Daniela Benelli,
alderwoman for culture of the Province of Milan.

Sunday 10 April, 18.00: “Public voids?”
Encounter with Sandro Balducci, Stefano Boeri, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Marco Scotini.

Monday 11 April, 18.30:
“From the 1980s to the present: the world of contemporary art in Italy”
Presentation of the book by Giulio Ciavoliello with Lea Vergine and Mario Airó

08 03 2006
The necessity of an island

Opening event: tuesday 28th of february 2006 at 6pm - with a musical performance from Carta
Opening times: from 28th of february to 16th of march, between 5pm and 8pm

The necessity of an island

"The necessity of an island" is the first exhibition of the new year for Isola Art Center. For this occasion Isola dell'Arte will present the new projects of the different subjects who have been working at the Center: out, Millepiani, Staione Isola, Sugoe, Love Difference, OsservatorioinOpera, and as a special guest, the White Project gallery of Pescara, with Picnic#3.

Out office together with the philosophy publication Millepiani will present the interdisciplinary philosophical workshop "The becoming-urban": the becoming urban of the territories asks for the comprehension of the complexity of the processes that have been developing and that concern the uses and the practices of daily life, the relationship with bodies and existences, the problem of identity and the one of searching for new expressions of freedom and resistance. The theorical contributions given to these issues by some specific authors will then be analyzed in the course of the workshop meetings, paying attention to those philosophers, artists, urbanists and architects who have been able to cross different disciplines, visualizing new conceptual cartographies.

Stazione Isola is a work in progress curated by Katia Anguelova and Stefano Boccalini, aimed at realizing a "tourist guide" of the Isola neighborhood of Milano. This time Stazione Isola will present the itineraries of Stefano Boccalini, Gruppo 11:27, Paola Ceretta, Giovanni Giaretta, Camilla Micheli, Gionata Gesi Ozmo, Angelo Sarleti, Claudia Sinigaglia, Alessandro Nassiri Tabibzadeh, Michela Taleggi. It concerns individual itineraries regarding the real and physical situation of the neighborhood, making use of different methodologies (either visual, sound and literary ones). All these projects will then be gathered in a guide to be used as a tool for both researching and describing the urban territory.

Sugoe, the permanent workshop active in the Art Center since autumn 2004, will present more than ten new original art and design projects, some of which realized with a strong concern with the physical context of the Art Center (Marco Colombaioni, Alice Pintus e Fernando Saavedra Roca, Fabrizio Stipari, Christian Raimondi, Manuel Scano and Giovanni Ciapessoni), while others (Matteo Rubbi, Luca Pozzi, AlekO. and santomatteo) more related with a personal artistic sensibility.

LoveDifference, the Artistic Movement for Intermediterranean politics, non profit asociation promoted by Cittadellarte and Michelangelo Pistoletto, will present a new project based on the interaction and the feedbacks of whoever will be available to join it. The project's gaze will be focused on Milano through the lens of time and of all the meanings that times have in realtion with people's lives.

OsservatorioinOpera will present their project, based on the consideration of the act of artwork destruction, whether voluntary or not. The project is brought on by Piero Almeoni, Paola Sabatti Bassini and Roberta Sisti. They will presnt the first number of their publication "Bollettino di OsservatorioinOpera", and the work"Rollio", made of stolen images, videos and other documentation of destroyed artworks, including "Enclave Kosovo" from Elisabetta Valgiusti.

Special guest of this event will be White Project gallery from Pescara, that will present Picnic#3.
In the tradition of Isola Art Center, Picnics are temporary projects curated by artists, gallerists, foundations,... Mauro Bianchini, director of White Project gallery, is in charge of this third appointment of the series, for which he will be showing an exhibition of works made by artists of his gallery together with a design and architecture office: Damir Niksic, Pastorello, Giuseppe Restano, Kei_en studio more Fabio Meliota, Patrick Hamlton and Michelangelo Consani. Apart from other works, they will be showing some possible projects designed by them specifically for the Isola Art Center.

Further Events:

Thursday 16th of march, 6pm

Networking presents "My home. Una casa in città", the third edition of the project promoted by the Tuscany region and from the municipalties of Florence, Livorno, Monsummano Terme, Pontedera, Prato, Seravezza. There will be a discussion concerning the need of promoting open and participatory artistic practices, based, as Networking, on the collaboration between artists and students in order to address issues regarding the crossing of contemporary art, urban environment, economic, political and social relations. With Arianna di Genova, Marco Scotini, Lorenzo Bruni, Daniele Ciullini.

The Becoming-urban
interdisciplinary philosophical workshop
curated by Tiziana Villani (Millepiani), Bert Theis (out) and Marco Scotini

Tuesday 7th of march, 6pm
From the global city to the urban spreading
The urbanization process between the global and the local
moderated by Alessandro Rudelli

Tuesday 14th of march, 6pm
Body/territory: material and virtual transformation processes
Towards a new ecosophy
moderated by Katia Rossi

Tuesday 11th of april, 6pm
The transformation of identities
From biopolitics to control societies
moderated by Silvano Cacciari and Ubaldo Fadini

Tuesday 18th of april, 6pm
Coming territories
From the catastrophe to the imaginary
moderated by Stefano Righetti and Andrea Sartini