“Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto and Michelangelo Pistoletto” at “1:1 stopover”, in Ljubljana from 17 October 2013 to 12 January 2014

La Redazione,06/11/2013

  CITTADELLARTE – FONDAZIONE PISTOLETTO AND MICHELANGELO PISTOLETTO  Michelangelo Pistoletto La Conferenza, 1975 Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto Re-Birth, 2013     From La Conferenza to Cittadellarte: portraying the community  In his 1975

 
CITTADELLARTE – FONDAZIONE PISTOLETTO AND MICHELANGELO PISTOLETTO 

Michelangelo Pistoletto La Conferenza, 1975

Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto Re-Birth, 2013
 
 
From La Conferenza to Cittadellarte: portraying the community 
In his 1975 work, La Conferenza, Michelangelo Pistoletto reflected on the relationship between the individual and the community. “A speaker stands in front of an audience of twenty people. Everyone is given a camera. The audience takes pictures of the speaker and the speaker takes pictures of the audience at the same time. In the end the image of the speaker has been reproduced twenty times, while the entire audience has been reproduced in just a single image, taken by the lecturer. This is a snapshot of power: the entire audience is concentrated in the person of the speaker, whereas the person of the speaker is multiplied by however many people are in the audience.” In this work Michelangelo Pistoletto builds a reflection on the 1:1 relationship, considering the individual as an integral part of a community where s/he observes and acts, while at the same time that community, made up of individuals, observes him or her and acts in its turn. On the basis of this historical work we decided to construct a sort of “community portrait,” starting with the relationship between the one and the many. In this case Cittadellarte is intended as one—not an individual but a place where people create, share ideas and develop projects; and a community is represented by five former residents of UNIDEE – University of Ideas, who in turn have invited five of their contacts to join the project. In this instance the “community portrait” is created not by a single image, or a series of images that portray the individual subject, but by a relationship among individuals that develops a common concept:rebirth
The concept has been chosen by Michelangelo Pistoletto to highlight, within a process of social change, the opportunity that art and culture have to stimulate a new interpersonal responsibility and to encourage people to promote ethical and sustainable practices with a view to sparking a cultural re-evolution
Starting from the theme of the show, we’ve built a network portraying the relationships among people who live in different places around the world, who have participated in the activities of Cittadellarte, and who in turn have used their network of contacts, like the shoots of a rhizome, to enlarge the final image. 
Juan E. Sandoval
 
Participating artists:
• Yoav Weiss invites: Naomi Gerstein, Assaf Rahat, Yonat Cintra, Michal Rivlin, Ilan Dotan 
• Alejandro Vasquez Salinas invites: Daniel Gil, Yesenia Rodriguez Bedoya, Víctor Muñoz, Ika Putranto, Yumemi Kobayashi 
• CTRLZAK (Katia Meneghini & Thanos Zakopoulos) invites: Harris Kodosfiris, Nikos Sereal, Yuangyung, Alistair Gentry, 2:pm (Paul & Mathiew) 
• Nataša Perković invites: Dragana Antonić, Amila Handžić, Renata Papišta, Dejan Slavuljica 
• Chalie Jeffery invites: Aurélie Godard, Camila Oliveira Fairclough, Philippa Jeffery, Jon Lockhart, Virginie Yassef
 
1:1 stopover: the concept
Not interested in showcasing art, 1:1 would be better called a stopover for art than an exhibition, since 1:1 art can never be wholly contained in the time frame of an event. The focus of the 1:1 stopover is the relationship between art and life, and art and institution. When on a scale of 1:1, art not only describes life, it is one with it. This relation can be disrupted by the institution, which is often thought to divorce art from life. Not so, however, when the institution itself tries to establish a similar one-to-one relationship with art by no longer merely representing it, but instead treating it as a partner.