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A couple more posts about this year's edition of Manifesta. Apart from Bolzano which i started covering this week, another location for the biennale is Rovereto. The Manifattura Tabacchi, an ex-tobacco factory built in the 1850s, hosts one of the exhibitions set up in the tiny city. The show curated by Adam Budak is called Principle Hope, and i must say that it kicks off jolly well.
Right after passing the ticket booth, there;s the free ice cream. Hurray! I'm lactose intolerant. Art Flavour by Tim Etchells translates into gelato flavours some key themes of contemporary art: The Body, Memory, Spectacle and The Archive. Party goes on! In the courtyard, there is a bouquet of giant helium-filled balloons.
Ricardo Jacinto's Labyrinthitis (2007) physically alter's visitors perception by upsetting their system of balance and therefore upsets the relationship of their body with space. You can grab the bar, lift your feet and hang gently from this levitating sphere-cluster. Your weight is diminished by roughly 35kg. However, the colour of the giant bouquet is black and its title refers to something as dark as balance disorder, the labyrinthitis. The work seems therefore almost more ominous than playful. As the description of the work states: the monumental sculptural "cloud" announces a decline of modernist utopias and articulates the precariousness of political balance.
At some point during my visit i saw Guido van der Werve's video Nummer acht. Everything is going to be alright (there's a poor version of it on youtube). I found it so mesmerizing that the rest of my visit at the ex-tobacco factory is lost in some kind of fog so i'm afraid my report from Rovereto will end here. The film documents a performance that saw the artist walking 15 meters in front of an icebreaker in the landscape of the Finnish Gulf of Bothnia. The performance lasts only 10 minutes, the time of one roll of film but this duration bears a sort of never-ending and meditative quality.
Manifesta, the itinerant European Biennial of Contemporary Art is hosted this year by the Trentino - South Tyrol Region. It runs until November 2, 2008. |
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Last year at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Philippe Rahm's installation Diurnisme was introducing the night during the day as a perverted answer to the perpetual daytime created by the modern lightening, internet and globalization. The room was bathed in a very bright orange/yellow light that triggered the production of melatonin which regulates our perception of day and night, fooling the body into thinking that it is nighttime. Rahm is an architect of the invisible and physiological aspects of space. One of his earlier projects, Hormonorium, featured an alpine-like climate, complete with the brighter light and shorter supply of oxygen you get at high altitudes. Made of 528 fluorescent tubes, the floor emitted a white light that reproduces the solar spectrum. The very bright light stimulates the retina, which transmits information to the pineal gland that causes a decrease in melatonin secretion. Visitors were thus supposed to experience a decrease in fatigue, a probable increase in sexual desire, and regulation of moods. Besides, the oxygen-rarefied space caused a slight euphoria due to endorphin production. Rahm is showing two new projects at Manifesta 7, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art currrently taking place in Northern Italy. Both installations engage with architecture's contingent relationship with climate, this time with a higher emphasis on the state of our planet:
The first project was exhibited in the Scenarios exhibition at Fortezza, near Bolzano. That's actually the only show i didn't visit (but if you read italian, i'll recommend you the report that SounDesign wrote of the show). Fortezza was built in the 1830s by the Habsburgian Empire in order to defend the north/south passage through the Dolomite mountain region from two sides. For the biennale, the fortress is hosting projects which are mostly immaterial: voice recordings, text, light and landscape. Rahm placed black-backed lightboxes over the outside of some of the fortress windows. This light installation, named Climate Uchronia, refers to how our perception of natural and artificial ambient conditions are subtly influenced by factors such as climate change. Rahm's purpose is to re-create, inside a room, the climate and exact daylight that the city of Bolzano would experience in the absence of global warming. The installation demonstrates how today, you can still obtain a 'natural' climate but only through artificial means.
The concept is not as 'crazy-arty' as some might believe. In the UK, the Royal Society is about to launch a study aimed at reviewing the possibility of saving the planet by "geoengineering" the climate on the grandest scales imaginable. Based on an Atmospheric Chemistry Model that sets out to remove the effects of greenhouse gases since 1850, a computer generates the uchronian climate of Rahm's installation for each minute of the duration of the biennale. The software calculates the variation of light intensity depending of the variation of the relative humidity in the air. With Climate Uchronia, the architect offers visitors the possibility to inhabit for just a moment a world that we will never know. The second work, Météorologie d'intérieur / Interior Weather, 2007, was exhibited in Rovereto, once again in a post-industrial sites (the Ex-Peterlini cocoa factory). I forgot to take a picture of the outside of the exhibition space as i was too busy admiring the glorious Uterus Flags that graced the street right in front of the Ex-Peterlini.
Interior Weather is conceived as two spaces, one white gallery whre an abstract "interior weather" condition is produced, and the other black space, where the resultant data is interpreted.
In a brightly lit and enclosed room, sensors measure variations in light, humidity and temperature; the space is analyzed as a micro-geography in constant flux. The results of these measurements are sent to the adjacent gallery where they are visualized as images and stories. Unlike what happened in the first gallery, stern sensors are not guiding the communication of the data. Instead, the information is freely reinterpreted in "fictional scenarios" written by French writer Alain Robbe-Grillet and visualized with a projection in the black room.
The installation suggests how the infinite combination of light, humidity and temperature parameters have the potential to generate new spatial practices and social behaviours, and in turn, new architectural forms. In opposition to previous architectural theories (namely the Form follows function position vs the Function follows form one), function and form emerge here as a spontaneous response to climate. The possible use of space is dictated only by the chance confluence of climatic parameters, suggesting new spatial practices, new forms of social behavior and new urban and architectural forms. |
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A Matrioska suffering from acute radiation sickness.
A work by Jaime Pitarch for The Rest of Now, an exhibition which runs until November 2 in an ex-aluminium factory in Bolzano, Italy, as part of the Manifesta Biennale. |
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I liked 'The Rest of Now', the Bolzano section of the Manifesta biennale so much that i fear that i'll end up forgetting about the other exhibitions i saw at the Biennale this week. Two of the participating artists/architects took very literally the questions put forward by The Raqs Media Collective who curated the exhibition: What gets left behind when everything is taken away? What can be retrieved, and what can be remembered? How can the residual become the engine of meaning? Over time, parasitic micro-organisms such as cyanobacterias and the Cladosporium genus of fungi, have occupied and taken over the walls of the abandoned Alumix factory. The restoration of the ex-factory means that the building is loosing its value as habitat for the organisms.
Architects Stangeland and Kropf decided to engage with this transitional state. The Naked Garden is generated by the mediation of different modes: biological propagation, mathematical abstraction and technological execution. A robot, programmed with the rules by which the fungi grow, engraves and perforates the wall already inhabited by fungi, thereby allowing light, water and wind to enter and to facilitate the basic conditions of life.
Jorge Otero-Pailos is an architect and theorist specialized in experimental forms of preservation. His contribution to Manifesta is The Ethics of Dust, an installation intended to preserve pollution and the dust that has to be swept away from the building during the renovation process. Pollution has negative connotation. Yet, it can tell fascinating stories about our social, cultural and industrial past.
During two weeks, Otero-Pailos and his team of architectural conservators coated in latex an entire wall of the a wall inside the ex-Alumix factory in order to trap the dust and any trace of air pollution that have accumulated over decades. The architect then peeled the latex off, displaying it like a semi-transparent and precious shroud.
Following the tradition of nineteenth-century archeologists, who made plaster casts of the world's monuments so that European academics could study the architecture of distant cultures, Otero-Pailos suggests a new way of looking at architecture and our history. Manifesta 7 - the European Biennial of Contemporary Art runs until November 2, 2008 in Trento, Fortezza, Rovereto and Bolzano. |
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As i blogged the other day, the Bolzano segment of Manifesta 7 exhibition is located in a disused aluminium factory by the Dolomites mountains. The show is called The Rest of Now and words fail me to express how consistent, intelligent and thought-provoking it is.
The curators, Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula & Shuddhabrata Sengupta from Raqs Media Collective, took as a point of departure for their reflection the abandoned industrial site and the questions its 'after-life' raises, they then enlarged the scope of the discussion: What gets left behind when everything is taken away? What can be retrieved, and what can be remembered? How can the residual become the engine of meaning? They invited artists but also a few practitioners whose work wouldn't be defined as art to participate to the conversation. I'll focus on a couple of them in this post. David Adjaye is one of the most famous and oh! so talented architects from England. One who, although he collaborated with Olafur Eliasson to create the Your Black Horizon installation at the Venice Biennale in 2005, has never tried to confuse his work with one of an artist (like some architects like to do these days)
His contribution to the Manifesta biennial is Europolis, a beautifully crafted glass and metal foil panel that raises questions such as 'What if Europe was condensed into one piece and combined as one cell? What would be left behind as residue?'
Adjaye extracted information from the capital cities of the European Union and condensed it into a single entity. The sum of many European cities doesn't make a European city. These have not been planned; they have evolved over time, through history and war, development, destruction, mixing, migration and changing populations. Adjaye's work evokes the idea of the city as phenomenon. Its organic form contains all the information about those cities from which it is drawn: material texture, population, time, scale and occupation.
The other rabbit in Manifesta's magic hat is Piratbyrån (The Bureau of Piracy) who came all the way down from Stockholm to Italy in an old bus. Piratbyrån is best known as the initiator of The Pirate Bay, the world's largest bit torrent tracker and the subject of a controversial court case.
The journey doubled as a workshop whose aim was the formulation of a new, collaborative statement based on the group's experiences of the recent Scandinavian conflicts over copyright. The bus was left behind as part of the exhibition, along with the documentation of Piratbyrån's work. I admire the Biennale for having the guts to support the project in a country whose government has recently decided to censor The Pirate Bay. So far the move has been unsuccessful. I guess that among the worries of the head of State is also the suspicion that we'll use the file-sharing website to enthusiastically download his upcoming CD of Christmas songs.
Unfortunately (for me cuz it means i can't download the Commissario Montalbano), Colombo-BT is still blocked due to the same measure. Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak: "It kinda shows that we're more than just a site, that we're an idea, and that we're art in ourselves. As I've said many times before, we see The Pirate Bay as some sort of ongoing art project/performance."
There's of course a torrent of TPB's road movie. Manifesta, the itinerant European Biennial of Contemporary Art is hosted this year by the Trentino - South Tyrol Region. It runs until November 2, 2008. |
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Just back from Manifesta. The seventh edition of this touring art biennale is held in Trentino-South Tyrol, in N-E Italy. The food over there is definitely Italian but with a crispy teutonic twist, so are the people and atmosphere. To make things even quirkier for visitors, the exhibition is split over several locations, most of them in derelict ex-industrial buildings (how fashionable!) at the outskirts of the small towns that host the event.
Anyway, i'll be back in full Manifesta force later on this week but i'll kick off my reports with a project i saw at the Bolzano branch of the Biennale, more precisely in the dramatic ex-Alumix factory which used to produced aluminum.
Tantalum Memorial - Residue, by England-based Graham Harwood, Richard Wright, and Matsuko Yokokoji, is a telephony-based memorial to the people who have died as a result of the coltan wars in the Congo. Coltan is the colloquial African name for columbite-tantalite, a metallic ore which is mined for the metal tantalum - an essential component of consumer electronics products such as mobile phones and computers. The demand for tantalum makes it highly valuable. Analysts say that the international demand for coltan is one of the driving forces behind the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the presence of rival militias in the country and, indirectly, the disappearance of gorillas from the area.
This installation is constructed out of an old electro-mechanical 1938 Strowger telephone exchange, discovered amongst the remains of the Alumix factory. Seen from afar it looked like it does belong to the ex-factory. An old telephone switch forgotten for decades. The switches are reanimated by tracking the phone calls from Telephone Trottoire - a social telephony network designed by the artists in collaboration with the Congolese radio program Nostalgie Ya Mboka in London. The TT network calls Congolese listeners, plays them a phone message and invites them to record a comment and pass it on to a friend by entering their phone number. This builds on the traditional Congolese practice of "radio trottoire" or "pavement radio", the passing around of news and gossip on street corners in order to avoid state censorship. But back to the amazingly beautiful installation. As the catalog states: The movements and sounds of the switches create a concrete presence for this otherwise intangible network of circulating conversations, weaving together the ambiguities of globalization, transnational migration and the impact of our addiction to constant communication.
More images of the installation. Photo on the homepage: Graham Harwood, Richard Wright and Matsuko Yokokoji @ Manifesta 7, The Rest of Now, Bolzano/Bozen, Italy, 2008. Manifesta 7 - the European Biennial of Contemporary Art runs until November 2, 2008 in Trento, Fortezza, Rovereto and Bolzano. |
