ecopolis

EXPLODING CAVE
Giornate di libera ricerca tra cinema, suono, video e digitale

17 – 18 Aprile 2009
C.S.O.A. Cox18
Via Conchetta 18 – Milano

Info: cox18@inventati.org ; info@digicult.it
Info: http://cox18.noblogs.org ; http://www.digicult.it/ExplodingCave.asp

A cura di: Marco Mancuso, Marco Lorenzin, Claudia D’Alonzo Trafficando con le forze tecnologiche emergenti, tra il 1966 e il 1967 Andy Warhol crea l’Exploding Plastic Inevitable, formando uno spazio contradditorio e sperimentale. Invece di una loro naturalizzazione, produceva un montaggio che scomponeva lo spazio nel quale diversi media interferivano ed entravano in competizione gli uni con gli altri (…). Improvvisamente, il ritmo della musica suonata dai Velvet Underground e dall’attrice/cantante Nico, i giochi di luce, i movimenti dei diversi film di Warhol, le performance dei ballerini si univano per creare qualcosa di significativo, ma prima di cogliere il senso di quello che stava avvenendo, tutto diventava nuovamente confuso e caotico. Il rumore ti colpiva. Volevi urlare, o lanciarti in una danza sfrenata, dovevi muoverti, agire (…). Nell’apparente oscurità e nel caos dell’Exploding Plastic Inevitable, si poteva trovare una possibilità di trasformazione, se non di liberazione”. – [Branden W. Joseph, My Mind Split Open]

Conosciamo una Milano che dagli anni Cinquanta è stata progettata “a somiglianza dell’organizzazione generale del lavoro, i quartieri sono divisi per ceti, si calcolano le distanze tra luogo di lavoro e abitazione. Si progetta una specifica famiglia. Si pianifica un certo tipo di abitazione (…). La sensazione generale era quella di un futuro bloccato, dominato da eventi in gran parte incomprensibili e a cui non si poteva partecipare (…). Nella ‘cava esistenzialista’ della Milano degli anni Cinquanta, ai codici tradizionali della sala da ballo meneghina si sostituisce la sperimentazione di nuovi generi musicali e nuove modalità di scambio tra suoni e visioni che comportano a loro volta dinamiche specifiche. Il rapporto di seduzione si manifesta attraverso la liberazione del corpo mosso dai ritmi musicali e non più dalle ‘figure classiche’ della danza da balera. Il look delle persone si libera dell’estetica borghese del ‘giacca e cravatta’ (…). – [John Martin, Primo Moroni, La Luna sotto casa ]

http://www.digicult.it/ExplodingCave.asp

*Of the Danger of Love, Refusal of Labor, and the Beauty of Autonomy * /-Proliferating and losing oneself. This was the sense of the collective enterprise that the movement was attempting in Italy at the time. -Franco Berardi /

Please join The Change You Want To See Gallery for a conversation with renowned philosopher, media activist and cultural agitator Franco Berardi (aka Bifo) and media theorist MacKenzie Wark, author of Game Theory and A Hacker’s Manifesto.

Bifo has been a pivotal figure in Italian social movements for that past 40 years. He co-founded the legendary Radio Alice (1977), the first pirate radio station in Italy, the magazine A/Traverso (1977-81), and Rekombinant (2000), an online network environment that focuses on radical philosophy, urban conflicts, media activism, networking art, knowledge economy, western psychopathology, autonomous universities, and institutions of the common. More recently he produced the autonomous street television network Orfeo TV (2002), which sparked a national network of pirate micro TV stations to counter the media monopoly of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

This event marks the long awaited publication of the first two Bifo’s books in English: Felix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography (Palgrave, 2008); and Ethereal Shadows: Communication and Power in Contemporary Italy (with Marco Jacquemet and Gianfranco Vitali, Autonomedia, 2009).
The evening will be moderated by Marco Deseriis, member of Not An Alternative and Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU.

*The Change You Want To See Gallery
Monday, March 30th, 7:30pm (free)
84 Havemeyer St, at Metropolitan Ave
*
* Brooklyn, NY 11211*
***http://www.thechangeyouwanttosee.org*

Galerija Škuc is proud to announce “RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting”, the exhibition of the works realized in the last three years within the platform “RE:akt!” produced by the Slovenian cultural institution Aksioma.

During recent years the term re-enactment and the practices it refers to have enjoyed increasing success in the artistic context. On one hand, the success of re-enactment appears to be connected to a parallel, vigorous return to performance art, both as a genre practiced by the new generations, and as an artistic practice with its own historicization. On the other hand the term re-enactment accompanies two phenomena that at least at first glance have very little in common: re-staging artistic performances of the past, and revisiting, in performance form, “real” events – be they linked to history or current affairs, past or present.
“RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting” tries both to research on the complexity of this concept and to get rid of it, approaching re-enactment not merely as “live action role-playing” or “living history” but rather as a strategy for cultural critique, analysis and artistic expression. “RE:akt!” – meaning not only “to act again” but also “to respond to / to react upon” and “Regarding: act!”– confronts current ideological and intellectual canons, power structures, policies, and distribution channels by re-enacting selected historical and culturally relevant events. Through processes of analysis, deconstruction, re-enactment and re-reporting, the intermedia research and presentation project “RE:akt!” examines media’s roles in manipulating perceptions and creating postmodern historical myths and contemporary mythology.

Thus, “RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting”, curated by the Italian art critic and curator Domenico Quaranta, will collect ten different approaches to the concept of enaction: from Ich Lubbe Berlin! (2005, SilentCell Network), a take on the 1933 burning of the Reichstag building in Berlin, which explores the contemporary meaning of symbols such as the Reichstag itself, and of concepts such as “communism” and “terrorism”; to Das KAPITAL (2006, Janez Janša), a performance which re-stages the 1968 occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces with the languages of popular street artists; from C’était un rendez-vous (déja vu) (Janez Janša in collaboration with Quentin Drouet), a project that plays with the paradigmatic history of a well known artwork, the film C’était un rendez-vous by Claude Lelouch, from “cinema verité” to “media fiction”; to VD as VB (2007), a series of actions in which Vaginal Davis, the “grande dame” of the queer underground in Los Angeles, dialogues with Vanessa Beecroft’s performances. In Mount Triglav on Mount Triglav (2007), the three artists Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša re-stage a well known performance of the OHO group from the late Sixties, recently appropriated by the IRWIN group for their Like to Like Series (2004), performing it on the Mount Triglav itself, and then translating it into a monumental golden sculpture; while in Slovene National Theatre (2007), Janez Janša translates an infamous fact of recent racism against Gypsies – known in Slovenia as “the Ambrus case” – into a piece of theatre, re-invoicing it as it was featured by the mass media. In their Synthetic Performances (2007), Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG reenact on the virtual platform of Second Life a series of historical performances that are all but virtual, raising issues such as body, violence, sex and pain, thus exploring the meaning of these very issues in a virtual world. In SS-XXX | Die Frau Helga (2007), Janez Janša (in collaboration with Dejan Dragosavac Ruta) again adds details and proofs of evidence to an “urban legend” recently circulated on the Net and mainstream media, concerning the presumed creation of a cyber-sex doll by the Nazis. Thus, performance and reenactment are far from being the only strategies adopted in “RE:akt!”, which also involves strategies such as documentation, remix, re-invoicement, reconstruction and remediation (such as in the project The Day São Paulo Stopped 2009 by Brazilian artist Lucas Bambozzi), and media such as photographic print, video, media installation and even architecture (such as in the project Il porto dell’amore, by Janez Janša (in collaboration with Bor Pungerčič), an homage to Fiume as an example of pirate utopia).

RE:akt!
Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting
curated by: Domenico Quaranta
www.reakt.org

Galerija Škuc
Stari trg 21, Ljubljana, Slovenia
25 March – 17 April 2009

Presentation of the book: 25 March 2009 at 19:00
Exhibition opening: 25 March 2009 at 20:00

Featured artists: Lucas Bambozzi, Vaginal Davis, Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Eva and Franco Mattes (aka 0100101110101101.ORG), SilentCell Network (Mare Bulc, Janez Janša, Bojana Kunst, Igor Štromajer).

On Wednesday, March 25, Škuc will host the presentation of the book RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting featuring the co-editors Janez Janša, artist and director of Aksioma and the italian theoretician Antonio Caronia. The book was published on March 2009 by FPeditions and includes contributions by Rod Dickinson, Jennifer Allen, Jan Verwoert, Antonio Caronia and Domenico Quaranta. More: www.reakt.org/book

On Saturday, March 28, SS-XXX | Die Frau Helga (2007), by Janez Janša will be presented in a solo show at the Fabio Paris Art Gallery in Brescia, Italy. More: www.fabioparisartgallery.com.

On May 22, the exhibition will travel to MMSU – Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka (Croatia).

FREE IMAGES FOR PRESS and MORE INFO:
www.reakt.org/press

Production:
Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana
www.aksioma.org

Galerija Škuc
http://www.galerija.skuc-drustvo.si/

On the Idea of Communism Conference
March 13th-15th
Birbeck, London

“It’s just the simple thing that’s hard, so hard to do.”(B.Brecht)

The year of 1990 stands for the triple defeat of the Left: the retreat of the social-democratic Welfare State politics in the developed First World, the disintegration of the Soviet-style Socialist states in the industrialized Second World, and the retreat of emancipatory movements in the Third World. A certain epoch was thereby over, the epoch which began with the October Revolution and was characterized by the Party-State form of organization. Does this mean that the time of radical emancipatory politics is over?

In recent years, there are multiple signs which indicate the need for a new beginning. The utopia of the 1990, the Fukuyamaist “end of history” (liberal-democratic capitalist as the finally found natural social order) died twice in the first decade of the XXIst century. While the 9/11 attacks signaled its political death, the financial crisis of 2008 signals its economic death. In these new conditions, the task is not only to reflect on new strategies, but to radically rethink the most basic coordinates of emancipatory politics. One should go well beyond the rejection of the Party-State Left in its “Stalinist” form – a common place today -, and extend this rejection to the entire field of the “democratic Left” as the strategy to reform the system from within its representative-democratic state form. Much more than the debacle of the Really-Existing Socialism, the defeat of 1990 was the final defeat of this “democratic Left.” This defeat raises the question: is “Communism” still the name to be used to designate the horizon of radical emancipatory projects? In spite of their theoretical differences, the participants share the thesis that one should remain faithful to the name “Communism”: this name is potent to serve as the Idea which guides our activity, as well as the instrument which enables us to expose the catastrophes of the XXth century politics, those of the Left included.

The symposium will not deal with practico-political questions of how to analyze the latest economic, political, and military troubles, or how to organize a new political movement. More radical questioning is needed today – this is a meeting of philosophers who will deal with Communism as a philosophical concept, advocating a precise and strong thesis: from Plato onwards, Communism is the only political Idea worthy of a philosopher.

“The communist hypothesis remains the good one, I do not see any other. If we have to abandon this hypothesis, then it is no longer worth doing anything at all in the field of collective action. Without the horizon of communism, without this Idea, there is nothing in the historical and political becoming of any interest to a philosopher. Let everyone bother about his own affairs, and let us stop talking about it. In this case, the rat-man is right, as is, by the way, the case with some ex-communists who are either avid of their rents or who lost courage. However, to hold on to the Idea, to the existence of this hypothesis, does not mean that we should retain its first form of presentation which was centered on property and State. In fact, what is imposed on us as a task, even as a philosophical obligation, is to help a new mode of existence of the hypothesis to deploy itself.” (Alain Badiou)

Speakers:
Judith Balso, Alain Badiou, Bruno Boostels, Terry Eagleton, Peter Hallward, Michael Hardt, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Alessandro Russo, Alberto Toscano, Gianni Vattimo, Wang Hui, Slavoj Zizek

For more information: here
Cost for all three days: Standard = £100 Birkbeck Staff and all Students = £45

Public booking form for Standard – £100 and Non-Birkbeck students – £45
Birkbeck booking form (login required) for Birkbeck Staff and Students – £45

To pay by cheque please click here for a form.

Friday 13th March Room B33 Birkbeck Main Building
Saturday 14th March Room B34 Birkbeck Main Building
Sunday 15th March Room B34 Birkbeck Main Building

There will be an overflow room on each day with a video/audio link. Bookings will be taken on a first come first served basis.

Climate For Change exhibtion at FACT from 13th march till 31 of may.
Climate change isn’t the only hot topic facing the planet. Environmental crisis, food crisis and housing crisis, all against the backdrop of an economic crisis that has been a long time coming. The 21st century has finally hit and there is an energy in the air – how do you respond? Forget the eco-art and bring on local, national and international debates, actions, contexts, struggles and solutions. With Stefan Szczelkun, Eyebeam’s Sustainability Research Group, Melanie Gilligan, Ghana Thinktank Project, N55, Anthony Iles of Mute Magazine, Glenn Davidson and, most importantly, a plethora of local activity and engagement.

Climate change is the symptoms of suffering on the planet. The plants, animals and human beings suffers because every day the balance of nature is sacrificed on the altars of the god of profit. Giuseppe Serravezza and Patrizio Mazza, coordinated by Tonino Girau, will lead us in the adventure of complex prevention and treatment of cancer, but also on the prospects opened up by the new local law. The talk is broadcast live on the Internet Wednesday, 11 March 2009 at 21, at www.oistros.it/lunapiena web – it is advisable to book the activities at lunapiena@oistros.it or email to skype contact casaoistros.

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 site-specific thematic relations to the space where they are shown, engaging and reflecting upon the unique architectural, historical, and interpersonal context of each area the festival travels to.

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.

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.

The International Guerrilla Video Festival (IGVFest) will be held 19-20 February in three unique areas of the Dublin: Talbot Street, Parnell Street and Rathmines. Using a converted rickshaw, the festival navigates the city, stopping to project films directly on building facades, monuments and temporary structures, illuminating the urban landscape.

The festival aims to counter the ever-present billboards and advertising screens that have transformed the urban setting into a homogeneous landscape from New York to Shanghai. Over 50 international artists will be participating with films that engage the distinct social and architectural character of each site. The International Guerrilla Video Festival, previously held in Florence and Milan, suggests new possibilities in the relationship between art and the social context.