Art at the Center 2009, 3rd July Opening

Program:

16.00
Teatro di Cittadellarte (AREA 1)

Round table
The Regional Contemporary Art Funds (FRAC)
Experiences and prospects
Between France and Piedmont

With the participation of:
Isabelle Arnaud-Descours, Responsabile Patrimonio e Arti Plastiche, Consiglio Regionale Rhône-Alpes, Lione
Yvon Deschamps, Consigliere Regionale delegato alla Cultura, Consiglio Regionale Rhône-Alpes, Lione
Philippe Hardy,Inspector General for Artistic Creation, DAP, Ministry of Culture and Communication, Paris
Alain Hayot, Vice-president of the Regional Council, President of the Cultural Commission, President of the Provence, Alpes, Cote d'Azur, Marsiglia FRAC
Pascal Neveux, Director of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, Marsiglia FRAC
Gianni Oliva, Piedmont Regional Councillor for Culture
Andrea Bellini, Director of Artissima

Moderatore: Michel Griscelli, Consigliere per le arti plastiche, DRAC Rhône-Alpes, Lione

Saluto di Véronique Vouland-Aneini, Console generale di Francia e direttrice del Centre Culturel Français, Torino

18.00
Inauguration of the festival
ART AT THE CENTRE 2009

20.00
Apericena Itinerante by Cafeteria - Glocal Restaurant of Cittadellarte.

21.30
Teatro di Cittadellarte (AREA 1)
First appointment of the
Bio Ethical Sustainable Trend
film festival
Organized by Sara Conforti, Giuseppe Gariazzo, Grazia Paganelli, Gigi Piana.

Screening of the film “The Planet” – by Michael Stenberg, Linus Torell, Johan Soderberg (Cinemambiente prize, Turin 2007). An intelligent and complete portrait of our planet: its beauty, its diversity and its social injustice. The film exposes the dramatic global changes in the ecosystems, highlighting the need for a global change of course. Well presented without being predictable and with the right dose of irony.
 

 

 

Cittadellarte models its structure on the biological system of nature: it is a cellular organism subdivided into numerous nuclei, called the “Uffizi”.
These ‘offices’ are independent but interconnect with each other at the same time.
The Uffizi currently active in Cittadellarte are working in the fields of Art, Education, Ecology, Economics, Politics, Spirituality, Production, Employment, Communication, Architecture and Nutrition, and others are in the pipeline.
The activities of Cittadellarte and its Uffizi are illustrated in a permanent exhibition.

 

 

This is a visual and textual project consisting of a space of witness, analysis and in-depth examination of the subject of artistic practices applied in places of conflict in the Middle East.


Ziad Antar - Cote d'Azur Hotel, Jnah, built in 1973

Invited artists:
Tal Adler (Israel), Emad Ahmad – IdiomsFilm (Palestine), Ziad Antar (Lebanon), Yael Bar On & Ahmad Malki (Israel/Palestine) and Sakiko Sugawa (Japan), Michael Blum (Israel/Austria), Yael Davids (Israel/Netherlands), Rene Gabri & Ayreen Anastas, (Iran/Armenia/Palestine/Usa), Majd Abdel Hamid (Palestine), Eytan Heller (Israel), Mazen Kerbaj (Lebanon), Walid Maw'ed (Palestine), Alessandro Petti & Sandi Hilal (Italy/Palestine), Rasha Salti (Lebanon), Layan Shawabkeh (Palestine), Mohamed Soueid (Lebanon), Oraib Toukan (Jordan), Wafaa Yasin (Palestine).

3rd July 2009 – 28th February 2010

For us the essence of minga is the teamwork behind the construction of an “invisible basket” where we put the thought of all the tribes and ethnic groups that are gathered together in the territory; with this life-generating spirit we take on our activities.
(Romualdo Roman Sanchez – Enokado in a conversation with Juan E. Sandoval, 2009)

With the intensification of the mechanisms of economic and cultural globalization, one of the most meaningful changes in contemporary society is brought about by migratory phenomena. Notwithstanding the resistance the West poses against this social transformation, notwithstanding the colonial domination or the exclusive right to invade and rob others that first world culture has laid claim to historically, change is inevitable.
The clear and established idea of an identity deriving from the individual’s membership in a (regional, national, ethnic) community is yielding to reidentification achieved by a complex territorial pact of proximity, by a surmounting of the fear of difference, and by cultural hybridization.
Doubt is being cast over the stereotyped image of the other based on the sort of fair of differences in which cultural features are put on show before the ethnically neutral Westerner, a notion rooted in a colonial model that is hard to die.
So, we must break the unilateral ideology of progress as the only measure of the world (Homi K. Bhabha) which records the harsh divide between overdevelopment and underdevelopment, to translate and betray it in the elsewhere that is among us, in the interstices of our cities and our cultures, which are thus revealed as not ours alone (Ian Chambers).
The starting point of the path mapped out by Sandoval’s works can be made to correspond to the trans-Amazon territory of Latin America, analyzed at the anthropological, social and economic levels. This geographic choice does not imply that the questions the artist deals with form a political, economic and socio-cultural inquiry valid only for a particular territorial context; every analysis opens up to describe phenomena belonging to globalized society as a whole. This is the case of “Isola” (“Island”), a video installation in which the viewer is completely enveloped by whirling images. The images, collected by Sandoval himself between the Colombian Amazon and the Ecuadorian Andes with a hand-made rotating telescopic video camera, become in “Isola” a circular horizon that, by abstracting the viewer from concrete reality, brings him/her along with the artist on an archetypal journey through the forest. The amazonian explorations alternate with moments of community life. in some villages. and recordings of a minga.
Minga, group action designed to benefit a community, is an ancient system of teamwork that has been used in Latin America since pre-Columbian times. Minga can be used to satisfy the needs of the whole community, as in the construction of public buildings, roads, etc., or to benefit a single individual or family, by organizing the construction of a house or the harvesting of potatoes or other agricultural products. The minga participants are asked only to provide manpower, which is always rewarded but never remunerated. In addition to the images, the screens carry words drawn from two interviews with Romualdo Roman Sanchez—Enokado, who clearly explains how his Andoque community understands this form of group effort. Romualdo is at once archaic and pointedly contemporary, a duality that identifies Sandoval’s work well.
Romualdo has been chosen by his own community—as he tells— to study in the Colombian capital, so that he will know how to integrate Western knowledge with the century-old wisdom of his grandfathers. While he carries forth shamanic thought transmitted by his ancestors, thanks to his law studies he helps the Uitoto communities make a place for themselves in the central State and defend their own autonomy and rights.
The text that appears impresses, more than ever at the present moment of economic crisis, as much because it tells of a community organization in which labor is on mutual aid and respect rather than on profit, as because it testifies to the validity of very old organizational models as possible alternative paradigms of economic and social development.
The installation “Costellazione” (“Constellation”) touches some of our society’s exposed nerves: the distribution of resources, capitalist (and colonial) exploitation and the absurd disproportion between labor expended and sacrifices made throughout the world and the wellbeing of Western society they guarantee. In the installation a large number of golf balls are suspended and distributed as in a statistic representation. The work extends over a time period that begins with 1493, the year of Christopher Columbus’s second voyage, to focus on the moment the Amazon held the natural monopoly on raw natural rubber, the late 19th to mid-20th century. In the name of rubber and money, atrocious crimes were committed, thousands of indios—inhabitants of those forests in which civilized man would never have ventured, if not under the irresistible thrust of greed—were reduced to slavery. Exploited as forced laborers, the indios paid with their blood to build the fortunes of the rubber magnates. Among the many uses of rubber, a little-known but peculiar one, perhaps, is the manufacture of golf balls. The symbolic parallel is charged with meanings, as the material produced with such losses (human, cultural, environmental) is changed into a plaything for a wealthy Western society in search of amusement. This perverse dynamics becomes exemplary of a multitude of analogous phenomena in which a small group of individuals, by draining human and material resources, keeps exploited peoples from breaking out of their condition of economic and social subalternity—which would be possible if wealth were invested locally instead of being plundered.
A highly symbolic work is “Canoa del Cauca” (“Cauca Canoe”), a canoe reproduced as a life-size photographic image. This ancient means of transportation appears patched in several places, its efficiency maintained through the patient toil of continuous repair. A means of transportation that sill works notwithstanding its years and its misfortunes, becomes a symbol of cultural resistance. The resistance of a community that does not give in to the logic of - all things pass, all things become obsolete -, but obstinately continues to journey through history slowly, with all the failures and crises the voyage brings.
The title of the exhibition “The Constellations of Others”, which brings together the works described here, and more, fits into the folds of these considerations. It refers us back to the vision of a world in which there are different points of view on the same heavens. Every culture interprets the constellations in its own way, and from the constellations originates an autonomous mythology, even if the stars gazed upon are always the same. The constellations of others are our own. Point of view and interpretation can change, but the phenomenology is objectively the same. Juan E. Sandoval, by means of his migrant experience and his work as an artist, offers us the interpretative keys to bring distant stories together beneath the same sky.

 

This exhibition sponsored by the Piedmont Region and organized by Artissima, presents the works of 24 emerging artists on the international scene acquired by the FRAC in 2007 and 2008.

The works were selected by a committee of curators made up of:
Christine Macel, curator of the Centre National d'Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, Paris; Francesco Manacorda, curator of the Barbican Art Gallery in London; Agustin Pérez Rubio, head curator, MUSAC Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Castilla y Léon, Lyéon. The exhibiting artists include: 2007 - Rosa Barba, Keren Cytter, Sam Durant, Jimmie Durham, Cyprien Gaillard, Vidya Gastaldon, Ian Kiaer, Josephine Meckseper, Tom Molloy, Evariste Richer, Ignacio Uriarte. 2008 - Lara Almarcegui, Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Iñaki Bonillas, Tobias Buche, Etienne Chambaud, Sebastian Diaz Morales, Lothar Hempel, Robert Kusmirowski, Lisa Oppenheim, Gyan Panchal, Bojan Sarcevic, Reena Spaulings, Clemens von Wedemeyer.


A project by:



www.contemporarytorinopiemonte.it