August 29th, 2008
September is just about here and this means i officially start my employment with Manifesta 7. Not to say these past couple of weeks have been just sightseeing though. Most of my days have been spent visiting the various Manifesta venues and studying up on curatorial themes and artists work.
The exhibition takes place in five towns over the entire region of South Tyrol/Trentino in northern Italy. Politically this area is quite interesting as it was a part of Austria until just after World War I and is culturally more Austrian then Italian. During Mussolini’s era it went through a process of “italian-ification” with construction of large industrial plants and relocation of thousands of Italians to the region. In the 1970’s the region gained partial autonomy from Italy and benefits from many tax priviliges and as a result is a quite wealthy area.
Against this backdrop the exhibition takes place in various “post” sites, such as a former aluminum factory, a tobacco plant, and a 19th century fortress closed to the public until now. The venues are rich with history and beautifully set in the landscape of the region surrounded by the Dolomite mountains of the Southern Alps.
Actually to tell you the truth… being saturated with so much art, but not being in conversation about making has been draining on my creativity. At first it felt the opposite of graduate school, here everything is already in a state of having been completed, it’s on exhibit, it’s a show after all… I felt like I arrived to the party too late and everyone is already gone. The excitement of the opening of the show is over, the artists are gone, and attendance has been pretty low.
My hope was to use the art mediation as an intervention, a live element in a show that is already “dead” by virtue of it’s being on show.
This brings me to my first project here. In collaboration with Barbara Campaner, a brilliant and very talented art educator, we’ve devised a week long workshop for teenagers which will consist of a series of re-enactments of performance art pieces. As our classroom we are using the new Modern and Contemporary Art museum Museion that just opened in town and has a show filled with videos of historical performance art pieces, and the Former Aluminum Factory and now site for one of the Manifesta exhibits. The concept of the workshop is to experience key concepts in contemporary art through a physical engagement with them, analysis of them and re-invention of them.
Yesterday we were interviewed on radio for a local culture show. It was pretty cool, we talked about the concept of the workshop and also how it relates to my practice as an artist.
Posted in Pedagogy, Performance, My work, Ideas | No Comments »
