MADE IN MIND #21 by Made in Mind Magazine

#21

ss 2021

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Francesca Pirillo DIRETTORE RESPONSABILE Dario Carotenuto PROJECT COORDINATOR Heidi Mancino CONTAINERS SECTION Forme Uniche STREAMS SECTION Marika Marchese COPY EDITOR Sharon McMahon SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER Gianluca Gramolazzi GRAPHIC DESIGNER Simone Macciocchi CONTRIBUTORS Fabrizio Ajello Lisa Andreani Francesca Biagini Irene Sofia Comi Benedetta D’Ettorre Gianluca Gramolazzi Alice Labor Ginevra Ludovici Marco Roberto Marelli Coral Nieto Garcia Flavia Rovetta Elena Solito COVER #21 Leandro Erlich Pulled by the roots, 2015 ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany CONTACT info@madeinmindmagazine.com adv@madeinmindmagazine.com PUBLISHED BY Aptalab | P ublisher for innovation and artistic research ISSN | 2532-1773 Registrazione della testata al Tribunale di Cosenza N°2/17 del 10.02.2017 PROMOTED BY Blacklist Creative Studio distribution@listlab.eu DIGITAL www.madeinmindmagazine.com madeInmindmagazine made_in_mind_magazine Madeinmind_mag All rights reserved. This production and its entire contents are protected by copyright. No use or reprint (including disclosure) may be made of all or any part of this publication in any manner or form whatsoever without the prior written consent of Made in Mind magazine. Views expressed in Made in Mind magazine do not necessarily represent the opinions of the editors or parent company.

ISSUE #21

CONTENTS

26 CONTAINERS DO IT ONE MORE TIME, HANS. by Marco Roberto Marelli

06 PORTRAITS

BEYOND REALITY. A conversation with Leandro Erlich. by Marika Marchese

66 PORTRAITS

THROUGH THE PRISM OF SOUND. Coral Nieto in conversation with the composers Clément Éduard and OKTO.

46 PORTRAITS DAVID BERNSTEIN - A DIALOGUE. by Fabrizio Ajello

84 STREAMS

TIME, BREATH, DEATH: the words to Giuseppe Stampone for Streams Column. Curated by Marika Marchese

92 PORTRAITS

TO EROTICISM, HAPPINESS AND BEYOND. An interview with Pietro Ballero. by Alice Labor

62 V/SPACE

THE ARTWORK AND ITS IMAGE: TAKE CARE OF ITS DIGITAL HABITAT. by Federico Montagna

BEYOND REALITY.

BY MARIKA MARCHESE

The Argentinian Leandro Erlich, Galleria Continua’s artist, internationally known, began his artistic career at a very young age; he began exhibiting at 18, receiving the first of many other awards at the age of 19 from the Fondo Nacional de las Artes of Buenos Aires. He has won numerous scholarships. In 2001, at the age of 28, the artist represented Argentina at the Venice Biennale, with perhaps the most famous of all his works, The Swimming Pool, 1999 (Installation, 270 x 240 x 540 cm), and in 2005 with La Vista, (1997 - 2005 Video installation). These works have mesmerized the public and art dealers.

Marika Marchese: How and when did the passion for illusion arise? Leandro Erlich: Illusions are a good way to question the understanding of what we consider real. In fact, I wouldn’t say that I have a passion for illusion but rather a passion for understanding the basis of reality (individual and collective).

L.E.: I would say that films were a major influence in my growth as an artist. I think that cinema inspired me to create visual narratives in which the audience assumes a performative role.

M.M.: With The Classroom, we observe each

personal issues we know at a deep level. Beyond any area of interest, these core preoccupations express the particularity we each carry and that we can voice.

other from afar as in The Chairman’s Room, Lost Garden and La Vista, except that in the first case, we are projected far away in time, back to our childhood. With the second work, however, we observe others like fish in an aquarium. This is reminiscent of a famous Hitchock film, Rear Window, in which the protagonist observes the life of others through a window, using binoculars of a movie camera. In this case, the window has a meta-cinematographic function that is found in many of your works by placing a reflection between cinema and voyeurism, playfully upsetting our notion of reality, creating new possibilities and situations. A recurring element in your works is the window, is there a reason? L.E.: Windows have always interested me. They are a potent symbol. Windows are frames through which we are able to gaze at potential and infinite possibilities. They are the portals of the everyday world. Leandro Erlich Portrait Photo Guyot

M.M.: Are there directors, movies, books, or

authors who have impressed you enough to influence your art?

M.M.: What is the ingredient that you consider

necessary to be an artist?

L.E.: I would say an inner voice. The extremely

M.M.: I think of Rain, The Boat, Skylight - The

Cloud Story and I feel a strong connection with the Surrealists. For the Surrealists, the dream dimension is the only one in which the destiny of man and real-life cannot play a central role. You studied philosophy, attended an art school but you understood that the world was a much more interesting source of inspiration and research, so you give us mysterious, reflective, emotionally charged works of art. Every artist is different and the creative process is stimulated by various factors, what influence yours? L.E.: My creative process is stimulated in several ways. Often, it’s a particular context that invites me to create a dialogue with space (physical or cultural). But there’s also a balance between stillness and action that I find essential in order to identify new ideas and paths to explore. 7

M.M.: Becoming an artist is the most compli-

cated job in the world, in my opinion, even the most fascinating. What would you recommend to a young artist or an art student? L.E.: I would advise letting go of the idea that you need to graduate from art school in order to start practising as an artist. Diplomas don’t create professional artists. I think that it is important to face the uncertainty inherent in an artistic career and to be willing to face it with enthusiasm and perseverance. Being adventurous is crucial. M.M.: How did the artworks dedicated to the

symbols of power come about? L.E.: I work with architecture and its elements as a kind of alphabet for building my stories. Within these narratives, I am interested in creating an environment for my concerns and reflections. Symbols of power offer a vast source of areas of interest and exploration, especially since I often find that they harbour a subliminal aspect that captures my interest and attention. M.M.: In your works there often appears an

aura of melancholy that has to do with the past or with the idea of absence. Why? L.E.: This may be part of my own nature. I often find beauty and poetry in shades and tones of melancholy. The past, absence, these both share the key element of something that’s missing. Something is not there but, at the same time, we perceive it. Ultimately, we became the ones who fill the void. M.M.: Our magazine publishes a column with

words to pay attention to, chosen because at the centre of the public debate, then they are proposed to artists and critics to analyze together. Are there three keywords that you would like to discuss, and why? L.E.: Reality, Perception, Awareness. These are the concepts and questions that keep me engaged as an artist and motivate me to keep working, looking for something new.

M.M.: Do you have a place you are fond of?

Why?

L.E.: Montevideo and Uruguay are places that

give me the kind of distance I need to cultivate a sense of perspective.

We thank both the artist, Leandro Erlich and Galleria Continua for their kind concession of this interview. 8

Leandro Erlich Bâtiment, 2004 Nuit Blanche, Paris, France Credit Leandro Erlich Studio

Leandro Erlich Bâtiment, 2004 Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan, 2017 Photo Hasegawa Kenta Courtesy Mori Art Museum

Leandro Erlich Dalston House – Model , 2013 Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan, 2017 Photo Hasegawa Kenta Courtesy Mori Art Museum

Leandro Erlich Building - Shanghai Bell Tower (Hanging on Time), 2018 HOW Art Museum, Shanghai, China Courtesy HOW Museum & Galleria Continua

Leandro Erlich Cadres Dorés, 2007 Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan, 2017 Photo Hasegawa Kenta Courtesy Mori Art Museum

Leandro Erlich Changing Rooms, 2007 Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan, 2008 Photo Hasegawa Kenta Courtesy Mori Art Museum

Leandro Erlich El Pasillo, 2007 Sudeley Castle, UK Credit Leandro Erlich Studio

Leandro Erlich The Classroom, 2017 Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan, 2017 Photo Hasegawa Kenta Courtesy Mori Art Museum

Leandro Erlich Cloud (UK), 2016 Cloud (France), 2016 Cloud (Germany), 2016 Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan, 2017 Photo Hasegawa Kenta Courtesy Mori Art Museum

Leandro Erlich Subway, 2010 Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan, 2017 Photo Hasegawa Kenta Courtesy Mori Art Museum

Leandro Erlich Global Express, 2011 Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan, 2017 Photo Hasegawa Kenta Courtesy Mori Art Museum

Leandro Erlich Mucca (Mercati Generali), 2020 Ala (Fontana di Trevi), 2020 Print on Hahnemühle Ultrasmooth Paper Courtesy the artist and Galleria Continua Photo by Giovanni De Angelis

Leandro Erlich Le Monte-meubles – l’ultime déménagement, 2012 Place du Bouffay, Nantes, Le Voyage à Nantes, France Credits Martin Argyroglo

Leandro Erlich Maison Fond, 2015 Nuit Blanche, Ville de Paris, ADAGP and with the support of Gare & Connexions, Paris, France, 2015 Photo Martina Maffini

Leandro Erlich Swimming pool, 1999 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan, 2004 Credit Leandro Erlich Studio

Leandro Erlich Swimming pool, 1999 Voorlinden Museum, Wassenaar, Netherland, 2016 Credit Museum Voorlinden

Leandro Erlich La Pileta, 1999 Malba, Buenos Aires, 2019 Photo Guyot Orti

DO IT ONE MORE TIME, HANS

MARCO ROBERTO MARELLI

CONTAINERS / curated by Forme Uniche

A great public art project that can take up and update the PWPA model (Public Works of Art Project) established by the President of the United States Franklin D. Roosevelt in the thirties. This is the perspective proposed by Hans-Ulrich Obrist - Swiss curator and artistic co-director of the prestigious Serpentine Gallery in London - to overcome the difficult moment of global health and economic crisis. Born in Zurich in 1968, Obrist spent his childhood away from the revolutionary turmoil of those years, in Weinfelden, a small town in the Canton of Thurgau, located about twenty kilometers from Lake Constance. Referring to the self-narration proposed in a recent and long interview granted to the philosopher and artist Eugénie Paultre1, three “periods” initially followed one another in his life: that of walkings, that of night trains and that of his first exile in Paris, city where he went with an old Volvo after winning a grant from the Cartier Foundation in 1991. All these phases merge and originate in an event from his early childhood when, due to a serious car accident, he was hospitalized. It was at that moment that his urgency, his mental frenzy and his physical inability to stay still were born. Many years later, through a brilliant and ironic description, the famous architect and his friend Rem Koolhaas reunited the youthful galaxy Obrist by writing: “It is said that he left his country of origin because he spoke too fast for the Swiss”2. This brilliant frenzy is the trademark of a curatorial and authorial process that has produced many epigones and a wide range of formats, 1 Hans-Ulrich Obrist e Eugénie Paultre, Forward. 5 conversazioni con Hans-Ulrich Obrist, postmedia books, Milano, 2020. 2 Hans-Ulrich Obrist, ...dontstopdontstopdontstopdontstop, postmedia books, Milano, 2010.

tests and critical successes that are the symbol of a new way of proposing and spreading art: liquid, fast on the surface, universal and, perhaps, not completely horizontal. The proposal of a great plan to get out of the profound economic and cultural crisis that has strongly affected the art world is only the latest act of a long journey that has profoundly influenced the epochal passage from the art critic, trained in prestigious universities, to the hybrid and elusive figure of the curator, a profession of which, for better or for worse, Obrist has become the prime example. Self-taught by his admission, in his interviews and in his writings the concept of mentor frequently returns, the idea that in life it is important to find a guide, a person with whom to venture into the world. After the walks inside and outside of himself, the overwhelming need to travel to get to know, to dialogue with the artists arrived. We can start this epic story at the first meeting with Fischili and Weiss, which took place one afternoon when a young Obrist was free from school commitments. Thanks to a powerful memory he remembers everything about that day, in an epiphanic way he tells of how the two Swiss artists were working on one of their most famous creations, Der Lauf der Dinge, a work in which, cascading, a small event generates a subsequent one setting in motion the re-enactment of the history of the world itself, representing the intertwined accidental dynamics of life. From these and other meetings the idea was born of creating a history of contemporary art conceived on the Vasari model, composed by recording and collecting the interviews carried out with artists, and not only. If his first romantic hero was not the “much hated” Santa Claus but the writer of inner and outer exiles Robert Walser - to whom

CONTAINERS Take Me (I’m Yours) exhibition view Hans Peter Feldmann, The Prettiest Woman (detail) Courtesy Hans-Peter Feldmann, The Jewish Museum, New York, and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan Photo Agostino Osio

he has dedicated a transportable museum - in his role as an unstoppable, and sometimes cynical, important curator is the thought of Édouard Glissant: French writer, poet and essayist, famous for having elaborated the concept of “antillanity” from which a broad reflection on the notion of multiple and rhizomatic identity starts (borrowing a term made all too famous by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari). For Obrist, the logic of the archipelago is fundamental to be considered as opposed to the logic of the continent: when there is a single, axiomatic truth, we are within a continental thought, based on a dominant logic. On the contrary, when there is no univocal vision but a dynamic succession of truths and thoughts, perspectives multiply and “Antillian” logic develops, made up of many islands in relation or opposition to each other. From theory to practice, the passage is coherent and energetic. All the exhibition and artistic events conceived by Obrist - from the legendary The Kitchen Show created in 1991 in San Gallo, to the recent Enzo Mari curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist with Francesca Giacomelli, available at the Milan Triennale until April 18, 2021 - propose mechanisms engaging, always different from each other but in dialogue with a new thought from Gesamtkunstwerk, a reading for islands that often do not stop but that develop, over the years, different ideas and innovative stages. Obrist’s is a large simultaneous circus where everything is in relation and everything is in motion, an organic complex system of our contemporaneity that grants individual meanings to stories acquiring a unique, luminous, almost Hegelian sense, if read through a vision from above, satellite.

Hans Ulrich Obrist portrait, by Brigitte Lacombe

The Kitchen Show, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, St. Gallen, Switzerland, 1991

“After Kitchen, the exhibitions I have organized have always followed the same principle: we start by talking to the artists, who sometimes want an exhibition in unusual places, other times in museums” 3. Denying, since his first exhibition, all that narrative based on the idea of “curator’s dictatorship”, Obrist bases his practice on dialogue with artists and on the willingness to develop, in a dialectical way, new ideas, born not from theoretical axioms but free to evolve even under the pressure of the contingent and factual needs that each exhibition brings with it. This first key point of Obrist’s work originates in a precise moment, in Rome. At the age of eighteen, advised by Fischli & Weiss, he decided to go and visit Alighiero Boetti. His new mentor urges him not to follow pre-established patterns like those that lead to exhibitions in museums or galleries: artists can do much more. Obrist pondered for a long time what this “other” could be. The solution was much simpler and more practical than one might expect: he realized that he never used his kitchen, he always ate out and that room had now become the place to keep books, a sort of library. Hence the beginning of an intense dialogue with artist friends, literally at his home; the opening of The Kitchen Show was only the consequence. In three months of opening, the exhibition had only thirty visitors. Among these Jean De Loisy, curator of the Fondation Cartier in France. Enthusiastic about the project, he offered Obrist to move to Paris, thus a research path took place, in which the game and the desire to question the routine and the ordinary never failed.

3 Hans-Ulrich Obrist, ...dontstopdontstopdontstopdontstop, postmedia books, Milano, 2010.

Enzo Mari Exhibition What Culture Allegory, 1998 Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist with Francesca Giacomelli Courtesy Triennale Milano Photo Gianluca Di Ioia

Serpentine Pavilion 2019 Designed by Junya Ishigami, Serpentine Gallery, London (21 June – 6 October 2019) Courtesy Junya Ishigami + Associates Photo Norbert Tukaj

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2013 Designed by Sou Fujimoto Photo Iwan Baan

Serpentine Pavilion 2018 Designed by Frida Escobedo, Serpentine Gallery, London (15 June – 7 October 2018) © Frida Escobedo, Taller de Arquitectura Photo Ste Murray

previous page Serpentine Pavilion 2016 Designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) (10 June – 9 October) Photo Jim Stephenson

Enzo Mari Exhibition Installation view Nanda Vigo and Dan Vo Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist with Francesca Giacomelli Courtesy Triennale Milano Photo Gianluca Di Ioia

Serpentine Pavilions From Paris to London, from the first curatorial tests to the prestigious role of co-director, with Julia Peyton-Jones, of the Serpentine Galleries. Founded in 1970, the public exhibition complex located in Hyde Park is now composed of two different buildings - Serpentine Gallery and Sackler Gallery - which can be quickly reached thanks to a bridge crossing the river of the same name. Every year, since 2000, a temporary summer pavilion has been added to these permanent structures, each time designed by a different architect. The first project was entrusted to Zaha Hadid, who built a large steel structure in the shape of a marquee. Since 2005 the architects have been selected by Hans Ulrich Obrist. Although not directly conceived by the Swiss curator, this project highlights an ephemeral approach to architecture that is fundamental to understand his concept of exhibition and the evolution of the exhibition process. The artistic event is no longer a passive occurrence that ends in a certain time and place but a broad, episodic device, open to migration and evolutionary confrontation every time it is related to different places and social contexts. There is no rectilinear time in Obrist but a dynamic of circles that influences each other in space, repeating each time different. The exhibition format changes, enters into a critical relationship with the works: whether the exhibition takes place in a minimal place like the one occupied by the Nanomuseum - a small photo frame within which to create micro exhibitions - or in a gigantic panorama like that of Cities on the Move - traveling exhibitions, curated together with Hou Hanru, which dialogue with the idea of the contemporary city - we are no longer at the source of a finite event but of the narration of stories that make up a potentially infinite episodic novel. Museum Robert Walser

Brother of the painter Karl, Robert Walser is Obrist’s youthful hero. Rediscovered in the 1970s, he is now considered one of the greatest Germanspeaking Swiss writers of the 20th century. In his works the linearity of the narrative falls and the attention is often placed on details, on accidents and subjects that may appear of secondary importance. Fundamental to Obrist are the themes of exile and walks, exterior and interior, which form the guiding thread of the writer’s life and which give theoretical form to new expository attention. If the exile refers to the biography of the curator, to his escape from Switzerland, the walks become a medium through which to conceive the museum and the curatorial practice. If with the series of exhibitions that make up the Migrateurs project, inaugurated in 1993, an analysis of the museum begins as a device that is no longer static but exploded, with works and ideas that invade every place, from offices to signage, it is in the Museum Robert Walser that we can better understand the figure of liquid space conceived by Obrist. Founded in May 1992 as a moving museum with its starting point at the Hotel Krone in Gais, it consists of a mobile display cabinet, the kind used to display elegant goods. Thus it appears as a non-monumental, discreet building, which can be confused in the various spaces in which it is inserted. Versatile and easily transportable, he questions his own function and can dialogue with works by contemporary artists, often designed especially for him. By placing at the center the possibility of overcoming the boundary between important and not important, it highlights a precise way of conceiving the relationship between center and periphery. With Obrist, the place where a cultural event can be realized becomes a metaphor for a non-hierarchical landscape in which to walk, a panorama where the magnificence of the sunset is combined with the magic of a small butterfly placed on a flower. The museum moves because we are the ones who take a journey inside and outside it.

Enzo Mari Exhibition Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist with Francesca Giacomelli Installation view Courtesy Triennale Milano Photo Gianluca Di Ioia

Take Me (I’m Yours) exhibition view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2017 Courtesy Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan Photo Agostino Osio

Take Me (I’m Yours) exhibition view Francesco Vezzoli, Take my Tears, 2017 Courtesy Francesco Vezzoli and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan Photo Agostino Osio

Take Me (I’m Yours) exhibition view Félix González-Torres. Untitled (Revenge), 1991 Installation view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2017 Courtesy Barbara and Howard Morse, New York, and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan Photo Agostino Osio

Take Me (I’m Yours) exhibition view Patrizio Di Massimo, Self-Portrait as a Model, 2017 Courtesy Patrizio Di Massimo, T293, Rome and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan Photo Agostino Osio

Take Me (I’m Yours)

Dipped on a pile of colored fabrics. In this playful pose Obrist offered himself to the press preview of the Milanese leg of the Take Me (I’m Yours) exhibition project, held in 2017 at the Pirelli HangarBicocca. Born from an idea conceived with Christian Boltanski in 1995, the successful format offers a new way of experiencing works of art. The aura of the artistic artefact has disappeared for decades, now you can touch, modify, use and even take home with you some works present on display or made at the moment. In Milan, an elegant character with a cane loudly pronounced the name of each person who entered the exhibition hall: the spectator placed at the center of the art world. The relationship between works, public and artists is one of the key themes of Obrist’s activity. Not being trapped in relational poetics or abstruse theories of public art, the Swiss curator proposes a key to interpretation that does not make competence and quality disappear, making the artistic experience accessible and in line with the needs of our contemporaneity. If with Take Me (I’m Yours) there is a playful discovery of new possibilities, it is through the “Do it” project that begins to redefine the relationship between curator, artist and public. The idea was born thanks to a conversation with Bertrand Lavier and Christian Boltanski, held in 1993 at the Café Select, and to the contribution proposed by Andreas Slominski to the exhibition created by Obrist, in the same year, in room 763 of 40

Take Me (I’m Yours) exhibition view Höller, Zukunft (Future), 1990/2017 2. Jeremy Deller, More Poetry is Needed, 2015 Lost Children, 2015 3. Alex Israel, Self-Portrait (Lapel Pin), 2016

1. Carsten

Installation view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2017 Courtesy Carsten Höller and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan Photo Agostino Osio

the Hotel Carlton Palace. On that occasion Slominski faxed instructions through which the curator could do a new job or event every day. In the 31 days spent carrying out the indications provided, the desire to develop the theme of the instructions began to take shape through an infinite challenge to which new artists always submit. Today “Do it” is also a large catalogue in the making, a document that tells how a widespread practice over the centuries has now been problematized and contextualized, showing how the importance of a curator is not determined by the number of positive reviews or the amount of receipts obtained but from the ability it has to tell the contemporary in its making, getting its hands dirty with the news.

Take Me (I’m Yours) exhibition view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2017 Courtesy Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan Photo Agostino Osio

CONTAINERS

Take Me (I’m Yours) exhibition view Gilbert & George, Dispersion, 1991-2017 Installation view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2017 Courtesy Gilbert & George, White Cube, London and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan Photo Agostino Osio

DAVID BERNSTEIN, A DIALOGUE. BY FABRIZIO AJELLO

Fabrizio Ajello: The words ‘thing’ and ‘object’ have different meanings both in Italian and in English. Things are in a certain way living objects. There is a daimon inside. Daimon is the old Greek meaning of an entity between humans and gods, and at the same time it means deliver, spread, in relation to fate. In the southern tradition things can save and at the same time ruin individual destinies and entire communities. Things can also be devices that generate legends, tales, bringing back old memories and indicating future trajectories. David Bernstein: Well, to be honest, I don’t think so much about the linguistic difference between the words ‘thing’ and ‘object’. As far as I know the difference is that when you say the word ‘thing’, it can be anything: ideas, words, colors, or physical things. And the word ‘object’ is more related to physical / tangible things. There was a moment in which people were interested in Object Oriented Ontology, I remember it was in vogue when I was studying from 2011 to 2013. Graham Harman was very popular, but for me, I was mostly thinking about how I could make fun of this philosophical trend. l was interested in how humor could free us from the seriousness of the subject but also shift the way of thinking about it. For example, I made a sculpture of a wooden 46

spatula, a kitchen tool that was flipping inside of itself. This work is related to the concept of ouroboros, the snake that returns to itself by biting its tail, but at the same time I was thinking about the ontological object and the expression of a thing that speaks. I wondered if a thing speaks, does it ever talk to itself? In a way this was about an introspective object, but also about the humor of talking to oneself, like a crazy person does while walking down the street. Obviously my Spatula is a formal exploration, but at the same time it’s a linguistic game. It’s part of the thinging process, which is an idea that the artist Jurgis Paškevičius and I developed in a text we wrote together in 2012. Thinging is about thinking with things or the production of thought by things and how this affects the way we perceive what surrounds us, and how it could change things in an endless process of thinking and making. This text was also a way for us to explore text as something tangible. So, for me it is not important the distinction between objects and things, but more how we relate to them, how we produce meanings, emotions and associations from things. I’m interested in apperception, the psychological term for how our perception is influenced by what we already know. I experiment with apperception through narration,

David Bernstein and Rosa Sijben Something To Hold On To , 2019 Presented at SculptureCenter, NY, USA Photo Kyle Knodell

The dialogue that we propose with the American artist David Bernstein is aimed at bringing out the fundamental knots of his work, through a comparison on the operating methods and the research philosophy that has led him over the years to consolidate a relational work that involves handmade objects, people and spaces both public and private in a redefinition of what we could call relational art. David Bernstein (1988, San Antonio, Texas) is an artist based in Brussels and Amsterdam who makes objects and finds ways to activate them, creating situations that serve as starting points for stories and performances. His projects deal with a range of subjects: psychology, wellness, fetishism, and spirituality. Next to his individual practice, he collaborates with a variety of people especially with his cosmic cowboy collective, Self Luminous Society.

manipulation, reminiscence, and all the possible connections. F.A.: So things themself do not exist, in a certain way? Are they already generated as thought? We manipulate and use them with respect to our apperception? D.B.: I think things exist, but I’m also interested in the Buddhist ideas around the illusion of the world we live in. It reminds me of a line from John Giorno’s poem God is Man Made where he says “Everything is delusion, the play of emptiness awareness and bliss”. But when we start talking about these issues on an abstract level, I immediately wish to find a physical and concrete way of dealing with things, because when we have tangible stuff in front of us, then we have to deal with all kinds of information that we couldn’t expect in the abstract world of thought. I also like the humor that comes from taking abstract ideas and bringing them into the physical everyday. It reminds me of a joke about the ouroboros, that I heard once from comedian John Hodgman. He said, on the one hand an ouroboros is a symbol for infinity, and on the other hand, maybe it’s just a dumb snake that doesn’t know what to eat. I like his joke but at the same time it is so banal. This banality is so inspiring, because you are shifting a metaphor by thinking through the logic of a snake. A friend of mine went with her young nephew to a museum, and while looking at a portrait on the wall, the nephew said that it was a painting of a man with no legs, because the painting was only showing the top half of the person! This way of thinking is radical, it takes seriously our framed condition in a framed world. F.A.: Speaking of frames. We are surrounded by frames, squares or rectangles. Windows, doors, screens, tables. Today more than ever, with these 48

David Bernstein and Rosa Sijben Something To Hold On To , 2019 Presented at SculptureCenter, NY, USA Photo Kyle Knodell

continuous lockdowns, it would seem that reality has flattened out on the screens of PCs, smartphones, televisions. Our own thinking seems to have fallen into an unbsunstancial two-dimensional state. Instead your work revolves around the relationship between people as well as the relationship through objects. I think, for example, about your work Saunra of 2017. What could develop in the future after this constraint and this distancing? D.B.: It’s an accelerating version of something that had already been in action for a long time. Virtuality begins in the moment that you close your eyes, and you start to imagine. If you talk with somebody that is not in the same room as you, it becomes an imaginative process. The same happens if you are reading a book or sitting in front of a computer. We are experiencing different limits and extensions of a virtual experience. It is very interesting what happens when the virtual interacts with the tangible, because it is never only a book, a phone call, a computer screen, since something else always happens outside the frame. I can hear the 50

David Bernstein I & I , 2021 Solo performance exhibition Presented at Artist Club Coffre Fort, Brussels (BE) Photos Lola Pertsowsky

David Bernstein Saunra, 2017 Sauna in a Fiat Multipla playing the music of Sun Ra Photo Jean Pierre Stoop for HART Magazine

David Bernstein Saunra, 2017 Sauna in a Fiat Multipla Presentation at Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, 2018 Photo Franzi Mueller Schmidt

noises behind me, check my phone, have a hot drink. We DJ our reality, mixing continuously our perceptual dimensions. It happens when we are jogging and listening to music. Of course our phone today is the centralization tool for everything, but it creates a new relationship to the community through different network platforms. At the same time young people use it in a physical way, think about tik tok, with all the choreography and dances. It’s mediated through the phone, but it is still physical. We all still need to enjoy physical things in a tangible world. We need to eat, we need to sleep, we need to breath, we need to have sex with each other, we want to move our body. I don’t believe in the Matrix future where we will float in a bubble. Devices are not enemies to fight, but of course at the same time, we need regulations because these tools have power and can affect our lives tremendously. With my artwork, I don’t want to reject technology, but find ways of bringing together a physical experience of the world with virtual mediations. I do this sometimes in small ways by including a video or phone call during a performance, or listening to an audio piece in relation to a specific space. F.A.: Most of the objects you made are rounded. Is it a choice by a softening of the forms? In Italian language there is a way of saying, a proverb that sound like this: to square the circle (quadrare il cerchio) and the meaning is looking for the ideal solution for a certain problem, but it also means trying the impossible, because the problem to be solved is too difficult and the search for a solution is only mere illusion. D.B.: With my girlfriend Sophia Holst, who is an architect, we talked a lot about the concept of roundness. She studied in a Steiner school, confronting anthroposophist ideas where roundness is important as an aesthetic philosophical approach. She also made a work about roundness, turning a square corner of a room into a round corner. I liked this idea a lot and it made me think about how so much of the world we live in is rectangular and how that is often a result of tools and production methods. Sometimes making something round can be a provocation, challenging our ideas of practicality and efficiency. F.A.: About materials and influences then, I’m sure of the extreme meticulousness in the choice of the materials you use. Warm ones, cold ones, soft, resistant, smooth, rough. You work on things, but at the same time things change your way of feeling, of perception. So, how much is important manual work and choose the correct material for the individual object? D.B.: I’m comfortable with woods, for example, it’s very warm, and not so toxic. I can work very slowly sanding it, feeling myself just like a sand-man while I’m working. I like the act of sanding something because I enter a certain kind of meditation and slowly it gets smoother and smoother. I also like the sand-man story, referring to the man that comes in your sleep to rain dust on your eyes to bring you dreams. Maybe I’m sanding to produce future dreams. Sanding with my hands is important for me because things change relating 54

David Bernstein Between the Soup and the Potatoes, 2017-18 Duo exhibition with Rosa Sijben Presented at Billytown - The Kitchen, The Hague, NL Photo Jhoeko

David Bernstein Introspective Spatula, 2014-15 Oregon pine wood Installation view at 76,4 Brussels, BE

to my hands, which is absolutely different from using a machine. Machines are based on straightness, but hands are imprecise, producing irregular objects. I like the unexpected forms which relate to your body and imperfections. I often make mistakes and then I have to figure out how to deal with it, learning from it, or going in a completely new direction. F.A.: While you were talking about this process I was

thinking about Penone’s work Essere fiume of 1980. An attempt to create a copy of a stone smoothed by the river, trying to simulate the work of water and natural events. This issue of copies and the attempt to work manually to simulate a natural product has always fascinated me. What do you think about it? D.B.: I’m really interested in that desire, and I think that a lot of artists are involved in that desire, to create a perfect copy of something that is unique in nature. I once took a wooden Buddha and carved away the outside to show an abstract inner core. I then took a second piece of wood and carved a copy of the first object. Does this new object also have the spirit of the Buddha? It brings up questions of authenticity. A friend of mine who studies mimesis said that in the moment you make a copy, you actually produce the original, because before the copy there was never a thought about something being original or not. But when the original and the copy are so similar, then you might forget which is which and you could be thrown into a situation of doubt. This is the case in a story artist Emilio Moreno told in a performance 56

I once saw. He spoke about taking an important sentimental object from his friend, having a perfect copy made of it and then he returned the original and the copy to his friend but he didn’t indicate which was which, so the sentimentality became confused with the question of authenticity. I don’t know if his story was real or fiction, but it’s the idea of the story that is important. F.A.: False and True. ‘In a world that is really upside-down, the true is a moment of the false’, it is a quote from Debord that has always fascinated me but at the same time left me baffled. I don’t really know what the truth is and I don’t know if I really care about it too. In my opinion, artificiality is already a natural character and is certainly a distinctive trait of the human being and his interpretative, narrative and productive process. When you talk about the power of things, immediately comes to my mind the power of the relics of the saints, especially in the southern areas of the world. The power of what remains. In the Catholic faith, especially the remains of the saints are so important that they are present in everyday Italian language. We usually say of someone that is really a decent man that he is a saint’s shin (uno stinco di santo) referring to the tibia of the saint preserved inside Italian churches as a relic. There is at the same time magic and irony in this double way of perceiving and using this space in which we deal with objects. D.B.: Relics and ex-votos are records of something miraculous. Sometimes they are proof of the holiness, but

David Bernstein I & I , 2020 Oak wood

the holiness is something that can never be proven. I am fascinated by the way we try to give weight, love and value to something that cannot be explained. We even build precious containers and enormous churches to house them. It would seem fetishism, but I am very interested in the power of these sacred objects, linked to an individual’s gratitude, feeding into that collective belief through a physical gift. I found an ex-voto online from Mexico where someone was thanking the Virgin of Guadalupe for bringing back his voice after he lost it when seeing an alien coming out of a spaceship! Aliens and Christianity, it sounds crazy, but why not? We are talking about stories and legends, some people believe, others not, but these stories and legends have the power to influence what we think, the way we make decisions. This leads to another fundamental question: What is our responsibility for the stories we tell and how we tell them? Is there an ethical dilemma of lying in art? I try to deal with these problems by exposing the mechanism of lying in my performance, making it clear to the audience that I’m tricking them. This decision is important because it brings them inside the story, breaking some barriers, and revealing that it’s all fiction, but a fiction based on real ideas and questions. It’s kind of like the placebo effect, where the medicine supposedly doesn’t do anything, but actually the power of suggestion does a lot, it can work better than some ‘real’ medicine. For example, I perform as an alter ego cosmic 58

David Bernstein Self Luminous Society, 2020 Nappezoid Performance Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, LT Photo Dainius Putinas

cowboy called Slim Denken in a collective called Self Luminous Society together with Marianne Theunissen, Juan Pablo Plazas, and Bernice Nauta. We are tricksters who tell stories and play with words. In one of our performances I start the story by inviting the audience to take a placebo pill while telling them that it contains no medicine. I like this tautological offer because you normally don’t reveal that a pill is a placebo, because that ruins the placebo effect. But I thought it’s a nice challenge to the audience because I’m telling them from the very beginning that I’m a liar, I’m a trickster cosmic cowboy alter-ego, but then I am also telling them the truth when I offer them the placebo pill. It asks the audience to trust me with their bodies, to ingest an unknown pill from a stranger. Of course some people were uncomfortable with this. I was a liar telling the truth, and the truth was that the medicine I was offering was false. In a way it returns to the ouroboros process, as we are eating the tail of our own doubts and beliefs. F.A.: In Italian language we are used to saying:

I give you good advice, don’t ever accept any advice. Anyway, we live in a metaphorical world. We speak with visual words, generating images while we are talking. Sometimes this unconscious way of expressing ourselves opens up unexpected scenarios, new interpretative opportunities. A strange kind of worlds in between, ambiguous, but generatives. D.B.: Yes, we live in a metaphorical world, we

David Bernstein The Water Party, 2019 Solo Exhibition Presented at A Tale Of A Tub, Rotterdam, NL Photo LNDWstudio

produce metaphors, but what interests me most is when the metaphor leaves the plane of ideas to descend into the tangible level of things. As in my placebo performance, it was not just words or ideas, but something physical that could change or affect us. What is important is living the metaphor, which is also what happens in religion with many rituals. In Jewish culture, we celebrate the holiday of Passover remembrering the exodus from Egypt, the passage from slavery to freedom. There is an evening event with a big dinner, but before anyone can eat, you must perform a lot of rituals, tell the story, and drink two glasses of wine. It takes a long time and you are getting a bit drunk and more and more hungry until finally you can eat the dinner. In a way, this waiting and hunger parallels the story of suffering that is being told, so you are embodying the story; physically feeling the ideas. It also reminds me of the book Emotional Design by Donald A. Norman that I read during my studies. The book divides our relationship with objects in three ways of experiencing them: the functional, the behavioral, and the reflexive. The first is about how the things work, “does this hammer put nails in wood?” The second is about how you feel during the action, “does this hammer have a smooth and sexy handle?” And the third is about a meta thought, what you think about the experience and what will you remember, “This hammer belonged to my grandfather and I think about him whenever I use it.” This third aspect of the reflexive has always fascinated me. I’m really interested in how to create physical experiences of art that simultaneously have meta layers of meaning. I try to do this with my work, the Saunra, which you mentioned earlier. It’s a sauna that I built inside of my Fiat Multipla. Inside the car plays the music of Sun Ra and his Arkestra while you sweat. I like the idea that this sauna is simultaneously a functional object, while having reflexive elements that make you think about the meaning of your experience. What does it mean to take a sauna in a car and especially this car which has its own story? And the music of Sun Ra is both relaxing and at other times full of chaos and thoughts on nuclear war. The work was meant as a healing space for our troubled times; a place of warmth, hope, and humor. F.A.: Again I have the feeling that Saunra is a work that insists

on a circularity, both on the point of view of a closed and circular space, and at same time on the peculiar moment, as you say, of reflection and relaxation. We never get rid of the ouroboros. D.B.: I think it’s funny that we keep coming back to the ouroboros. I guess it’s the nature of the symbol! I think you’ve captured a real core in my thinking with this talk about circling, but actually maybe the core is not about the

David Bernstein Between the Soup and the Potatoes, 2018 Chinese ink on inkjet print by Rosa Sijben, 29.7 x 21 cm

loop or the circle, but it’s really about the spiral. I’ve been thinking about the spiral again recently because of a master class I attended on rethinking / queering a Jewish ceremonial object called the Shofar (a spiraling rams horn blown on the new year). During the class, I started realizing that many Jewish objects have spiral forms, and when I asked the guide of the course about it, she commented that the spiral is an important symbol for understanding time in Judaism. Time is thought of as returning to the same place, but at a new location; a progression towards a better future. We tell the same story, but we are always seeing it in a new way. The circle implies returning to the same place, but the spiral suggests new perspectives. Perhaps it’s the ouroboros who is so stupid that when it goes looking for its tail, it can’t find it and instead enters into an endless spiral. Maybe this snake will spiral on in an unexpected direction, leading towards a wondrous unknown. Or maybe it will just become a vegetarian.

V-SPACE A DIGITAL AND ANALOGUE PROJECT

A PROJECT BY GIANLUCA GRAMOLAZZI 62

During the last year the life of many people has changed, as has the gaze on reality and relational ways. The health emergency has highlighted fragilities, distortions and gaps of the production and economic systems. The crisis has affected many areas in different ways, but the most affected is culture and entertainment. Among them, contemporary art developed, more or less, new ways for economic sustenance and survival.

bilities. We therefore resorted to increasing our followers, which, however, does not find a real benefit in the relationship between costs and revenues. We have created better and better images, more and more emotional contents, recreated convivial moments but we did not take advantage of the possibility to stop everything, to take a moment of solitude to develop an awareness of what is necessary and how we use the digital media.

On April 15, 2020, in the first months of the pandemic, the association of Art Museums Directors were allowed to sell artworks in the permanent collections to buffer the economic crisis. For this reason, several museums have relied on auction houses to sell duplicates or works that are (almost never) shown, including the MET, Metropolitan Museum of New York. The museum had already faced a severe crisis in the 1940s, which was passed with the establishment of the very famous fundraising evening, the MET Gala. Unfortunately, the current crisis is part of a context where it is not possible to create events in presentia: museums, art spaces and galleries are necessarily empty. Most of the missions of contemporary art places are based precisely on the movement of people, on the creation of relationships and on the stimulation of reflection on the contemporary. The point is: the art system, in many cases, sells experiences, knowledge and unique products to experience before being purchased, but this is denied. For a long time, in the hope of finding economic sustainability while remaining within the limits of their mission, digital contents have multiplied, to create engagement and interest for the destiny of culture. The proliferation of live streaming, videos, podcasts and images has colonized every virtual space, leading the viewer into a senseless bulimia of contents, that caused unfortunate claims by politicians, such as Giuseppe Conte who described artists as those “who made us entertain so much”. So, not only virtual tours, digital performances, animated comics on the new everyday life, but also debates, conferences, artworks created ad hoc or modified to be digital, have crowded the days of enthusiasts and workers of the art system. In some cases, technology alone has succeeded in overcoming emotional and experiential limits, thus allowing the dissemination of usable content in absentia. However, it was not the way to cover all the economic loss, nor to develop a critical thought on the need to create digital contents.

With V-SPACE we take a moment to reflect on the relationship between digital and real, through articles created by curators and critics. Each text, accompanied by an image gallery, will be broadcast on two channels: first the image gallery on Instagram, then the text in the paper issue. Through this mode, it is possible to create a short circuit: if we normally pay more attention to images instead texts, now the images become part of a narration that cannot be understood until at the end of the process, with the reading of our guest’s text, which will be usable without images. Thus we intend to immediately pay attention, or not, on how the superabundance of digital images no longer conditions us, which is a fact, in the hope that a clue becomes a real signal for a non-transitory reflection. Federico Montagna inaugurates the first release.

Many artists and art professionals already had investigated on the relationship between art and its digital use, but today it takes on a new value. During the last year we have seen many contents that have had media relevance for their being signs of reflection, such as the 24h performance by Nico Vascellari, but once again the possibility of going into the operation was lost because others have created additional signs that overlapped, then were buried by data and statistics on the progress of the infections. Thus, isolated and alone, artists and art professionals cemented their frustrations, without a salary (which in many cases was a reward) or satisfaction in the encounter, or hopes in the creation of possi-

BY FEDERICO MONTAGNA

THE ARTWORK AND ITS IMAGE:

I want to start my discussion with a brief introduction. As the first person invited to participate in the V-SPACE project, Made in Mind asked me to contribute with a critical text on the relationship between art and new technologies. My intention is not to dwell on the processes of “digitization” and on the “rush to renewal” that has characterized many institutions and cultural realities in this last period of health emergency / pandemic. Enough discussion has already been made on the ineffectiveness of most of these operations carried out and launched in recent months (many of which are already extinct) and on the overabundance of contents, formats and improvised online direct without any reasoned planning and, above all, without real skills and a real underlying goal.

everywhere, bounced, digested, shared, commented on, loved and criticized while its physical copy is still stationary in the artist’s studio or kept in a museum.

As a young curator and operator of contemporary art, my will is to introduce a deeper and delicate concept which, in my opinion, represents the real change that digital is silently triggering in art, that has always been governed by immutable and pre-established rules and dynamics. Today, for better or worse, everything is changing. Even the unique and unrepeatable experience of the encounter with the work of art as a physical “object” in a real space, considered eternally irreplaceable, is seriously questioned.

From direct experience, I can say that today many exhibitions, projects and collaborations are born for the potential of being (and not becoming) an online content, framed in the perfection of an image and in the validation of a community, rather than a public. The digital is therefore not an extension, but a starting point for the conception of an exhibition and even for an artwork (and we are not talking about works by new media artists designed for these mediums). The experience of our own reality has changed significantly with the massive use of these new media: when we participate in an exhibition, we already think about the best image to upload on social media, to document a presence more than an experience of the artwork, as we had the camera lens imprinted on the retina. These new behaviors (unimaginable even just 10 years ago) are not necessarily to be considered as a problem, but it is clear that they completely overturn all the paradigms and perspectives with which we usually approach art.

In our contemporaneity it makes little sense to make distinctions between the digital and real world, between online and offline, in a historical period where our whole life is immersed in incessant rhythms on these new platforms. It is also true that, compared to other sectors, the advent of digital in art necessarily implies deeper and more complex reasoning. In fact, technology cannot be considered as a way to deepen and support, or as a simple ally that acts on a parallel track, it is already revolutionizing the logic of production-use-validation-exposure of the work of art, questioning its very reason for existing. In my opinion, it is precisely there where the dilemma of the relationship between digital and real materializes and it is truly urgent to be investigated. I am not talking about the usual “digital will replace the real”, but in a more radical meaning, in which the work is a real object and, at the same time, thanks to its nature, an immaterial image. As we know, the Internet has opened up countless paths and possibilities of transmission and use of the artworks, or rather, of its digital extension: the image that today allows it to be seen

The proliferation of images of artworks, that are published every day on the web and on social networks and the infinite interactions, tell us that this process is now in the midst of its evolution and that it can no longer be ignored. The digital revolution has introduced new dynamics within the old art system that has necessarily had to adapt to these changes, but has also profoundly influenced the meaning of producing art. What happens, in fact, when our reality is conditioned by the digital and is even at the service of it? In the art world, this question then becomes more delicate.

My theses take on a great responsibility because they actually arise from a strong awareness that comes from within. In fact, since 2017 I have been the founder and director of the online platform Artoday, created with the aim of promoting, supporting and narrating today’s art in today’s world through the work of emerging talents of international contemporary art. It can be said that my professional career in the art system actually began on the net. My intense experience with digital, however, gave me the opportunity to fully understand all its logics, its potential, but also its weaknesses, moving away from many of the dynamics I mentioned a little while ago and approaching art with these means in a diametrically opposite way.

TAKE CARE OF ITS DIGITAL HABITAT In fact, in Artoday we are Digital Curators, as many professionals define our activity. This term, that even a few years ago could be considered utopian and almost senseless, perfectly defines our work of selection, storytelling and sharing of art through online. We use Instagram as if it were our ‘gallery’ to present artists chosen every day through a careful process of study and research which, however, takes place outside the network. Our offline research avoids the risk linked to deception of numbers: “the more an artist has followed online, the more valid he/she is”. For us these channels become fundamental, however, to take our business to a next step which consists of interaction (e.g. with international artists), in the meeting (Studio Visit) and therefore in the construction of a vast network (currently composed of more than 16k users). Today the overproduction of content and the pollution of images on the net has made our work necessary and urgent also to implement a slowdown, an understanding and a “real” proposal for the dissemination of more sensible and reasoned art. Our goal has never been to be prosumers of this continuous flow of images because what has always interested us is what is behind the artwork, the artist’s thought and above all, its story. This approach has allowed us to evolve all these virtual interactions into real and professional relationships, as curators, outside the network, for exhibitions, projects and collaborations with artists (eg. The Wall Project), but also to create a real ecosystem of professionals such as gallerists, curators, collectors and art-lovers all over the world who actively follow us today. In this way, the digital becomes a medium and not a mere end, creating extraordinary opportunities also to design and live new experiences. With Artoday we have applied a process that is exactly the opposite and different from all the others: we started from the digital to arrive in reality. In order to find a balance between a dynamic -but almost spasmodic- production and use of the digital image and an immobile thought, “conservative” of the intrinsic experience in the work of art, it is necessary to re-evaluate an issue up to this moment still not raised: the concept of “exhibition”. The exhibition dimension is, today, the most important tool for recontextualizing and reviewing artworks in their complexity of experience linked to the real dimension and the immaterial one, as an image, where it is also possible to see fragments of eternity. Addressing a discourse on the exhi-

bition display means becoming aware of the meaning of the artwork, of its reason for existing in a certain space-time, of its action in the world and of its potential in reformulating it. We could somehow go back to talking about that intervallo perduto (lost interval) mentioned by Gillo Dorfles himself in the 1980s. 40 years after that empty space, that necessary pause for reflection between us and the artworld, appears as a distant memory. Technological progress is unstoppable and will continue, through ever new and different media (eg. virtual and augmented reality are already entering their phase of adoption), to revolutionize all sectors, including art. Real-digital, two words that together make up a perfect combination. Unlike many others, in fact, I am convinced that one dimension will never replace precisely the other one because they are strictly interdependent. The choice of the starting point and which side of the coin to dwell on is up to us. For new generations, however, it will become increasingly important to be able to trace and discover the generating moment of the artwork, and the first motion and intrinsic thought that gave meaning to its existence in the world; and to take care of the virtual context in whose image will inevitably come back to life again, again and again.

THROUGH THE PRISM OF SOUND CORAL NIETO IN CONVERSATION WITH THE COMPOSERS CLÉMENT ÉDOUARD AND OKTO

With the development of Sound Studies during the 1990s, the question has been raised of radical change in the way of conceiving, working and perceiving sound. A sensitive territory and field of research, sound will be the prism from which to establish any object to be studied. From the visible to the audible sphere, this shift in speed makes it possible to reconsider the nature of sound by focusing both on its physical and sensitive character, but also on the figure of the listener and the listening point. From this perspective, it is about rethinking the way we approach the sound and sensory environment, while affecting ourselves and in turn affecting it. It is thus fundamental for researchers, but also for composers, sound artists, etc., to start from a double questioning: on the one hand, how we approach reality, that is to say, the way in which we make the world out of sound and, on the other hand, how we grasp the sound sensitive to produce new meanings. Affiliated to the electronic and electroacoustic music, composers Okto and Clément Édouard share a performative and sensitive approach to 66

sound and voice. Starting from an interrogation on the perception of reality and its representation, they use a mix of sound universes launching new senses and sensations. On the one hand, Okto, a young composer based in Paris, is carrying out an investigation of the “minor” sound universes resulting from the transfer of symbols of our time. His research results in sound images, namely mental images that are both sound, visual and bodily between reality and fiction. In this perspective, Okto designs spaces-times from common and audible imaginaries as a reminder of the relational modes and rhythms of society. Then, he delivers the listener to an off-camera where a whole rhizomatic system

Clément Édouard

Soudain Toujours, 2020 (Guillaume Cousin / Clément Édouard) Photo Guillaume Cousin

of sensitive and sound dialectical images is deployed. In his music, this translates into suspended moments during the piece that can be re-appropriated and affected by the audition. On the other hand, Clément Édouard, musician, sound artist and composer living between Lyon and Ardèche, wonders about the nature of sound, namely its sensitive power acting on the territory of perception and on the nature of listening in all its forms (imaginary, physical, internal). Clément takes a path allowing him to grasp all the sound matter referring to the organic substance of things to make soundscapes of them. Thus, he uses the symbolic and intersemiotic universe to reflect on the way in which the individual relates to his environment. By rewriting these elements in the sound weaving, they reach a new geography by the deterritorialization and decentralization of the experience for the benefit of a new sensitive anchorage. 67

WITH CLÉMENT ÉDOUARD

Clément Édouard 2020 Photo Grégoire Édouard

Coral Nieto Garcia: Taking as an example Soudain Toujours (work in progress), Partir (2019), could you tell us about your intermedial work with people from other creative fields, whether in the visual, sound, cinematographic domain, etc., and therefore of the transfer of supports and mixing of writing that this implies? Clément Édouard: I have worked exclusively with musicians for a long time, and I have actually worked with artists from different backgrounds for a few years. These meetings are very enriching because they allow me to shift my relationship to sound. Associated with another media, it enters into a dynamic relationship with it, possibly opening up dimensions from within which new relationships to time, memories and senses are perceived and deepened. So, I like to delve into with the associated artist these interconnections to feel what they can reveal, move ... In the theatrical piece Partir, the director Jean Daniel Piguet has a very sensitive and attentive relationship to the presence of bodies on the set, and the way in which one presence can influence another. I transfer this vision to the sound, wondering how such a type of texture modifies the environment, and disrupts the reading we can have of a scene and its actors. For the monumental installation Soudain Toujours, the sound system is made up of 8 tubes 2 m high, its pillars diffusing the sound upwards, resonating the architecture of the place. With this piece, the builder Guillaume Cousin offers a sort of smoke choreography revealing the vacuum in motion. The sound is composed of a frequency beat inviting the audience more or less explicitly to a kind of hypnotic state, significantly modifying the relationship to space and time, opening up a different perceptual space. The viewer does not just observe, but he enters into a relationship and dives into the movements of the smoke. The sound participates in the immersive phenomenon, it creates the dispositions of the narrative as of the contemplative. These encounters and experience lead me to rethink the notion of diffusion, abandoning the frontal relationship that we have most often in theaters or concert halls. This question has become central in my current work, I constantly wonder: Where does sound

come from? By what material, surface is it transmitted and colored? In which direction is it going? Who does it meet? What nourishes and transforms it on its way? Or does it die? (And, of course, when it is faced with another artistic proposition, silence is an activating force.) C.N.G.: When I listen to Dix Ailes (2018) or Des choses, des ondes, des bois (working title, work in progress), I wonder about your fragmented perception of the environment through the prism of sound. Could you tell us about it? C.É.: I like to use different sources, to create multi-dimensional soundscapes, kinds of cosmogonies where sounds from the living environment interact and come to be juxtaposed with electronic materials, fragments of voices, whispered words. I often associate each of these elements with a time relationship that is unique to them, they then follow their path while meeting more or less randomly, evoking the principle of “synchronicity” mentioned by C.G Jung. It is by staying for a long time in observation in the forests that this relation to action and time came to me, by observing the course of a bird which crosses another, an ant which meets another insect, branches that fall to the ground for no apparent reason, and the interconnection of all its actions. These fractal arrangements allow me to destabilize our senses and make them (at best) more available, enroll us in a broad presence, in a state of reciprocity with sounds and their environment. It is also for these reasons that I mix my compositions myself, so that the dosage between each source, the space it generates, their duration of action is as close as possible to what I want to offer. Then, these re-assembled fragments make it possible to establish a multiplicity of specific relationships, to offer unexpected encounters, establishing a dialogue with our imaginations. The project I am currently working on (Des ondes, des choses, des bois) plays with just that, by a sound device of several speakers where there are in each of them vegetable matter, mineral, collected in the surroundings… They are both independent and linked to others by principles of composition influenced by algorithmic music, giving the impression of an organization, even chaotic, like the multiplicity of sounds in a forest, and the feeling that together they form the voice of this one. C.N.G. :How do you consider the phenomenon of listening, and therefore the listener’s state of readiness to be pierced by sound? What is the relationship between listening and meaning? Is it a listening which goes through the sensation and / or the touch? C.É.: I have always loved spending time in designated places of worship. I often find special listening. People are attentive to their movement, to the sounds they cause, all this gives a feeling of great listening, which I find again quite rarely in other spaces. It is for these reasons that the project Dix Ailes plays exclusively in places with great reverberation. The place then plays the role of an amplifier of the sound sources emitted, but above all an amplifier of the public’s attention to things. The sound no longer comes only from the musi-

cians, but from the place, as if the instruments became its vocal cords. This habitat then gives things to hear, offering a sound reading of its architecture and its history. We all react differently to sounds, the auditory sense has been very important for our species to be able to protect itself, to feed itself, to survive… Today this role hardly exists any more. We live in a society which favors the visual sense until saturating it. So, I like to think that attentive listening allows us to rediscover an ancestral, inaugural dialogue with the surrounding environment. Once the question of aesthetics and its judgment is gone, we can assume that sound is a language made up of a complex arrangement of frequencies causing resonance and vibrations. He would then address itself directly to our sensitive bodies, going beyond the mind and its reasoned analysis, then summoning the physical, emotional and spiritual spheres, which can all also refer in their own way to the notion of touch, to through the expression “Being touched by” a hand, an attention, grace. C.N.G.: Are your sound proposals more on the transitive side (that shows) or intransitive (that tells)? C.É.: I do not wish to prove or to show (“(dé)montrer”) anything in my proposals, just to try to offer stories, in a humble way, echoing the disorders that cross our societies, the changes of reference and relationship to the world that it will be important to establish and to work to live with a larger “Us”; to overcome the multiple crises that are before us. I use a fragile language, composed of several voices, everyone is free to hear and interpret my proposals in their own way. I just want to participate at my level in shaping the conditions for the development of inter-species relations, with the idea of enlarging the frontiers to include the other forces, the other kingdoms around us. C.N.G.: As a composer and sound artist, the sound writing you propose is almost a scenic writing (a kind of “scénephonie”) borrowed as much from literary sources as from life itself (in the natural and urban environment). This refers to pieces like Sédiments (2019). How do you organize and dispose of these plural sources in order to relate to the listener the objects and atmospheres that inspire you? C.É.:My work is joyfully linked to a current of thought opened by Philippe Descola who criticizes the dualistic vision of Nature / Culture. And many thinkers who echo this idea and extend it, among others the philosophers Baptiste Morizot and Vinciane Despret or the biologist and feminist Donna Haraway. Their vision of the world connects me to my deep feelings, speaks to both my head and my heart. They also connect me to the experiences I had as a child in the Cévennes forests. They offer in a singular way another non-fatalistic account of ecological collapse, by maintaining the idea of working a sensitive listening to living things to profoundly change our relationship to the world. From his visions, my way of arranging different sound sources proceeds from both reflection and intuition. I

certainly make choices, but I do not think of myself as a creator of the demiurge type. I feed on literary sources, sensations, encounters, and I let it all happen. I explore the creation space a bit like a “cauldron”, in which things with multiple specificities are slowly transformed. I work more and more with organic materials that I put in motion thanks to the physics of sound. These materials are collected during long walks, in the vicinity of restitution places, in parks, borders, gardens, and help in a non-direct way to offer a scenography or more precisely as you quite rightly suggest: a “scénophonie”. These harvests establish a direct relationship with living things, the seasons, the peculiarities of the territories explored They allow to replace the space of exhibition in its extended environment and to link interior / exterior. In the audiovisual piece Sédiments and with the installation Flux (2 projects in collaboration with the artist Pierce Warnecke), we focus on the mineral, by exploring its strata as so many dimensions of our universe; by placing our Anthropocene epoch in a geological time on a larger scale; by asking what trace would this era of destruction of the living environment carried out in an unprecedented way by a single species leave in the larger scale of geological time. C.N.G.: The voice element takes on great importance in your work for its sensitive and physical abilities; as a place of dialectic between sound and semantics. Could you tell us about the way you work on its sound texture? Why this interest in mantra chanting (Sieste ambiant, Des choses, des ondes, des bois)? C.É.: The voice has undoubtedly always been the means both to express our emotions, and to come into contact with

Clément Édouard Sieste ambiant, 2020 Playlist Photo Rama Taupia

the surroundings and other species. It deeply connects us to our human history and our habitat, the land we share with countless other species. It has capacities within it that cannot be measured, it is a high-tech instrument that is constantly renewing itself, singling out each Being. It also offers direct access to the power of sound. It is for all its reasons that I have started with Dix Ailes a work of vocal research with Swedish singers Linda Oláh and Isabel Sörling. In the rest of this work, I recently needed to turn to semantics, to open up to a new palette of texture and meaning. The idea was to make it malfunction so that the words and their evocations could get lost in order to better reinvent themselves, reorganize themselves, and propose that language not only bind humans, but also birds, rocks, trees… So, during the first confinement, I proposed to singers and poets’ friends to send me precise cutouts of words, to then compose, with its phonic textures, new pieces. During this confinement, the lucky ones had time to listen to the birds, to observe the flowers appearing, our leaders then spoke of “the world after”, more attentive to human and non-human. With its phonic materials, I then had the idea of proposing kinds of mantra: repetition of the phonetic formula which would suppose that the vibration of the sound would have the power to modify its environment. Considering the crisis in which we were all immersed, I liked this idea! For some of my work, I also make the choice that he can transmit softness, often considered in our societies as softness and lukewarmness, I am referring here to gentleness as a radical power. It was with this in mind that I composed a playlist, Sieste ambiant, by searching and unearthing the work that I have been carrying out on this subject for the past 5 years, broadcast on radio Station Station.

Clément Édouard Sediment, 2019 (Pierce Warnecke / Clément Édouard) Photo Tania Cognée

Clément Édouard Dix Ailes, 2018 Photo Alice Masera

Clément Édouard Dix Ailes, Antic spell, 2020

Clément Édouard Dix Ailes, par I, 2017

Clément Édouard Dix Ailes, 2020 (Album cover) Photo Grégoire Édouard Graphic design Didier Mazellier

Clément Édouard 2018 Photo Alice Masera

Clément Édouard Des choses, des ondes, des bois, 2020 Photo Clément Édouard

Clément Édouard Des choses, des ondes, des bois Possible, 2021

Clément Édouard Sediments, 2020 (Pierce Warnecke / Clément Édouard) Photo Pierce Warnecke

C.N.G.: Your approach is completely differ-

ent when it comes to a solo or collaborative production during artistic residencies such as Attrape Rêve (2019) or Résonne moi dans les yeux (2020). Could you tell us about this intermedial work with people from other fields, be it plastic, sound, photographic as opposed to your individual work? O.: My solo productions mostly start from an improvisation based on samples and synthesizers. I let myself be transported, test and resume, and I respond to mental images in order to create a sound and temporal space oscillating between narration and abstraction. I have been lucky to be able to work on the music by confronting it with other mediums. It is like a desire for new experimentation, to search for accidents that lead to the unexpected. Recently, with the two artists Clément Bellanger and Sven Ronceray, we were able to create a performance where music and painting meet during the opening Résonne moi dans les yeux (2020, Paris). This is a very powerful way to confront ideas (images-sounds) and make creation less rigid. Many of my artistic meetings have been in the world of images. Some of these even pushed us to organize ourselves around the music / image relationship and to create a collective called “Kill the Visual”. You can find visual artists like Rapheal Pelloille or even others from the digital world like Charlie Noirmain. The objective is to bring together our creative forces which combine music, image and events.

C.N.G.: In some of your plays, sounds relate the listener to factual sources. Could you tell us about your inspirations in this field of research? Do you have a particular interest in noise culture or Glitch aesthetics, in the way in which you work expressively and rhythmically the sound material? O.: I am close to a conception of sound coming from pop culture or the underground world. I was particularly influenced by the Bristol trip-hop of the 90s, filled with effects of distortions, delays, raw or saturated samples, on a heady beat. A vibrant space was born where image and sound are mixed, becoming almost cinematographic and which takes us into imaginary and emotional worlds, even nostalgic, activating specific psychic spheres in the listener. It is on this associative character of sound that I like to rely on. To tell you the truth, I am far from the theoretical questions around music, but the work of composers of the experimental music scene 76

Okto Slicing the falls, 2019

Okto and Ray La chambre, 2020

Okto Résonne, 2020 (Intersection)

OKTO Charlie Noirmain, Fill the Head Compositing, 2019

OKTO Charlie Noirmain, Fixed Arms Compositing, 2020

WITH OKTO

OKTO Charlie Noirmain, Looking for Noise Compositing, 2021

like John Cage calls into question not only the notion of sound but its relation to auditing, exploring unexpected sounds. The separation between noise and sound becomes less and less visible as one approaches it analytically. In this conception, anything can become sound. Taking this into account, each sound “object” is potentially rich to work with and to appropriate. C.N.G.: There is a sustained effort in your work to perform sound, like a handyman who begins to strip everything around him, whether by using tools like the contact-microphone (like Résonne, 2020) or the direct construction of new sounds by hand. Could you tell me about that way? O.: Today information travels at breakneck speed and this acceleration is also applicable to the musical world. A computer by itself can be an imitation of all kinds of machines. But more than with the arrival of the 16-track recorder when Pink Floyd was recording Dark Side of the Moon, the danger is the proliferation of information that we are able to integrate into a song, never stop in juxtaposition and trap yourself in an impersonal world. It is about using the power of digital while staying in touch with the reality that surrounds me. So, I came to turn more and more to microphones to make this connection between real / digital and allow me to listen to my environment in a different way. Recently, contact-microphone has allowed me to re-listen to the vibrations of everyday objects that I handle, sending singular sounds to the ear that I have fun fiddling with. By these means, I try to be able to explore the outside world to express an interior world, plural and changeable.

OKTO Charlie Noirmain, Forest Leaves Compositing, 2020

C.N.G.: There is more and more vocal attention in your production. Are you more interested in its sensitive or sound qualities? Does it act as a concrete or abstract material with the other sound elements? O.: The voice is a material directly related to language and therefore with “meaning”, which makes it a very particular tool for musical exploration. It is interesting to seek to manipulate it like a raw material, sensitive and acoustic, to the point of making it unintelligible and playing with its phonic tessitura. But also, its evocative power is such that a simple musical theme could last for a long time if a voice accompanies it. The ear forces itself to make sense of the sounds of speech by associating supposedly recognized ideas and creates these “ghost words”. It is in this capacity to “occupy” the sound space and to give it a linguistic dimension, therefore both concrete and abstract, that the voice is a matter that has become increasingly present in my productions. C.N.G.: What is your approach to sound? How do you let the sound pass

you by? O.: When we approach music, we have the feeling of being captivated by a universal, natural and deep language dialoguing with our inner being.

OKTO Sven Ronceray, Sans titre 2 Compositing, 2021

OKTO Sven Ronceray, Sans titre 1 Compositing, 2021

I plan to make my own language through a sound construction capable of challenging multiple subjectivities. It is the cathartic place of thoughts, leaving the listener to his reveries guided by sound waves. The power of iconographic symbols and the way they evolve in human minds have always fascinated me, especially through my reading of C. G. Jung. I will thus explore the links that exist between sounds and symbols. Today’s technology allows us to combine ideas in a ready-made or surrealistic way, making eclectic and heterogeneous elements react together in an irrational manner. It is this open path to intuition that is very close to my heart.

OKTO Charlie Noirmain, Vacuum Compositing, 2020

OKTO Raphael Pelloille, V5.2 Compositing, 2020

STREAMS

CURATED BY MARIKA MARCHESE

In this new addition of Streams, we decided to interview Giuseppe Stampone, an Italian artist, born in Cluses, France, in 1974. Stampone is based between Rome, New York and Brussels. His artistic production ranges from multimedia installations, videos and drawings made with Bic pen, a technique common to several of his projects. Stampone collaborates with various universities such as the Accademia di Belle Arti of Urbino where he teaches “Tecniche e Tecnologie delle Arti Visive”, IULM of Milan, the Federico II University of Naples and the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology of Toronto. He elaborates interventions of research and experimentation about art and new media with Alberto Abruzzese and Derrick De Kerckhove. Stampone’s work has been exhibited widely throughout Italy and abroad, in international Art Biennial and Museums including the 56th Venice Biennial (2015). (Prometeogallery.com/giuseppe stampone) Stampone was the first Italian winner of the residency at Villa Romana in Florence, Tuscany, financed by Deutsche Bank.

to live for eternity. The true artwork born from the study, dies in the moment of the public exhibition to be reborn after eternal life. Paradoxically the artwork when it dies, in reality, is reborn and needs death to continue living, not only in the collective memory. The black that is compared to death, darkness, emptiness, is a colour that I have adopted in my works. I decided not to use the blue of the Bic pen anymore, but black, due to the particular period of my life I am in. I have several artists dear to me. When I create, I imagine having a dialogue with Piero Della Francesca as he contributed to the improvement of perspective, a medium closest to me because it is a tool that allows you to mix more spaces and time in a single vision. The ink of the pen also contains a high percentage of oil and evokes the history of portraiture from a technical and artistic point of view. Piero Della Francesca for what he gave us, I compare it to Malevich who revolutionizes our way of seeing reality. He from the Russian icons comes to Suprematism with his black square. After Malevich, Duchamp arrives with the ReadyMade, which elevates a simple object to an artwork. Here too there is a decontextualized object that dies for its own purpose for which it was built and resurrects for eternity taking on a new value. In my works, for example, the portraits, become emblematic because they escape the rapid mortality produced by the environment from which the images used to compose them were taken; they become works because they rediscover the aspiration to eternity.

Giuseppe Stampone Portrait

STREAMS / Giuseppe Stampone

The keywords of this interview were chosen directly by the artist: time, breath and death. Time is the obsession of my life. In all my works, there is a desire to expand time, to regain possession of time. Today the global village, the frenetic rhythms, or even the art system require us to do, to produce, to create faster and faster. Within my works, I have decided to recover time. I want to disobey the speed of globalization and the incessant demand of the market. My obsession has existed since I was a child in which the greatest concern was and still is, that time is not endless but finite. Breath. When they ask me how do you create a new project? I reply that it is enough to breathe. Breath is the basis of life. Good breathing creates harmony between us and the world. All depends on your respiration. Without oxygen we don’t live, without oxygen, there is no life. Life and death are inextricably linked to the breath. Creation was also related to the breath. The third word I have chosen is death. Time and maturity make you aware of death. A time that inevitably ends, in which we will no longer breathe... Becoming aware of the passage of time, we are forced to estimate all the actions of our life. The artist, in an ecstatic evaluation of things, is the one who grasps certain aspects of reality more easily, because he detaches himself in a certain sense from the “normal” flow of things and reflects on existence. Art, on the other hand, has no death. The artwork does not die, if the artist were to die, his work would resurrect, as it is the only one who is allowed

Giuseppe Stampone Icona, 2020 Ball point pen on wood panel, 35x29,5 cm Courtesy the artist and Prometeo Gallery Ida Pisani Milan_Lucca

Giuseppe Stampone Gioconda con baffi, 2020 Ball point pen on wood panel, 29,5x35cm Courtesy the artist and Prometeo Gallery Ida Pisani Milan_Lucca

Giuseppa Stampone Sacra famiglia Maria Crispal Giuseppe e Jung, 2020 Ball point pen on wood panel, 29,5x35 cm Courtesy the artist and Prometeo Gallery Ida Pisani Milan_Lucca

TIME BREATH DEATH 89

Giuseppa Stampone Voluntary Quarantine, 2020 Ball point pen on wood panel, 29,5x35 cm Courtesy the artist and Prometeo Gallery Ida Pisani Milan_Lucca

TO EROTICISM, HAPPINESS AND BEYOND. BY ALICE LABOR

Pietro Ballero Thank you, come again!, 2019 Virtual diary More than 398 receipts, Instagram from Jannuary 1st to December 31st, 2019 Courtesy the artist

AN INTERVIEW WITH PIETRO BALLERO This interview took the shape of a long-distance conversation between Utrecht and Rome. Pietro Ballero (Turin, 1992) told us about his work from his new home in the Netherlands where he decided to move a few months ago to further his artistic research at the HKU. From inside a typical, vertically developed Dutch apartment under a sloping roof, Ballero told us his story: from training at the Albertina Academy of Fine Arts in Turin (2016) to the master’s degree in Visual Arts and Fashion at the IUAV in Venice, with periods at the École supérieure des arts Saint Luc in Liège (Belgium) and at the École Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris, up to residencies, such as BoCs Art in Cosenza (2019) curated by Giacinto di Pietrantonio. In 2019 he was then selected among the finalists of the eighth edition of the Francesco Fabbri Prize for Contemporary Arts.

Alice Labor: You have lived in Turin, Liège,

Venice, Paris and now you are in Utrecht. What was your relationship with these cities and how did they influence your work? Pietro Ballero: In Liège I discovered the world of communication and graphics which gave me a different vision and framework at the design level, acquiring more technical languages. In Belgium the air, from a cultural point of view, was magical. It was a breath of fresh air to live for a while in this slightly punk city where something always happened. Then, the transition from the Turin Academy to the IUAV in Venice was radical. It was then that I understood the real significance of an artist’s professionalism and the importance of precision in one’s practice. Working for seven months at Xavier Veilhan’s French Pavilion during the 2017 Biennale, I totally immersed myself in the Venetian and international environment of contemporary art. Living in close contact with the artist at the Pavilion for the entire duration of the exhibition was a human and professional experience that deeply marked me. He established his studio inside the Pavilion: it was incredible to see the development of his relationships and work on a daily basis, entering the heart of creative production. The Pavilion had

been transformed into a gigantic soundscape, a musical device capable of being an impressive and engaging immersive installation and, at the same time, a real recording studio, shared and activated by musicians, artists, visitors, technicians and mediators. Later on, in Paris, I enjoyed the rich and lively cultural offerings of the city in solitude. I was admitted to the workshop of Claude Closky, who encouraged the creation of new works every week, leading us to deconstruct them from time to time. Returning to Turin, I decided to rediscover my city. I met Alice Visentin with whom I shared a studio for a year. Among her giant canvases, I created my mental and physical space in which to work. It was very stimulating to confront myself daily with that space and with her. I have always listened to podcasts on Radio 2, like Babylon, leaving me contaminated by new stimuli and translating them into my practice. These contaminations inspired me a lot, often leading me to translate the present into forms of the past. A.L.: What impression do you have of life for

an artist in the Netherlands after these first months? What are the differences with the opportunities offered to artists in Italy? 93

P.B.: The passage from Turin to Utrecht was necessary for me to return to confront myself directly with my work, seeking the protection of an institution. I have always been attracted to the Netherlands for what seemed a particular attention to investing in art and creativity through a plurality of tools. The impression is that the Dutch system protects the path of artists and supports them throughout their career. I hope I will have the opportunity to verify this. Here I would like to strengthen my working methodology, delving into the forms of the creative process and systematizing the intuition process. A.L.: Your work often deals with the themes of memory,

consumerism and the precarious condition of work. Where do your research interests originate from? P.B.: Even when I was at the Academy I felt a strong urge towards the political and civic dimension of art. Art is always a political gesture. At that time, I developed a piece on mafia victims through the use of digitally reported pizzini, paper messages used as a means of international communication by mafia organizations. My reflection developed then maybe in a more poetic way by telling and deepening political issues, linked to my individual experience, trying to express this visceral tension. Today, even through theoretical investigation, I find the right dimension of my practice, giving voice to an urgency and a movement that I feel I have to express. Pietro Ballero Buono a nulla, 2020 Spazio Su, Lecce, IT Courtesy the artist and Spazio Su Photo Grazia Amelia Bellitta

A.L.: Buono a nulla/Good for nothing (2020), your latest

solo exhibition at Spazio Su in Lecce, addressed some crucial themes for this historical moment: the crisis of the neoliberal and psycho-immune collective and individual system through the imposition of a constantly competitive condition and the achievement of mandatory happiness. Tell us about the creative process of this project. P.B.: Sometimes I am intimidated by my own research, related to the themes of work and precariousness. I wonder about my position of privilege and the authenticity of my voice in this debate and how I can actually contribute to problematizing certain issues. At the same time, however, talking about my personal vision allows me to offer a different perspective on these crucial aspects of contemporaneity. In the case of Good for nothing I was kidnapped by an object: a trolley used to distribute flyers, which I came across one day in Turin. It was abandoned in front of a building. It was an unexpected encounter with a plastic and sculptural object. It was inundated with leaflets that read “bargains”. This word revealed an aura that evoked something within me. I photographed it and kept it in my gallery for a few months. Sometimes I am inexplicably kidnapped by objects. I file them in my mind and in my “atlas of objects”, a diary in which I note images that strike me on a visual and poetic level. When I was invited by Gianni D’Urso and Grazia Amelia Bellitta to produce a site specific work for Spazio

Pietro Ballero Buono a nulla, 2020 Spazio Su, Lecce, IT Courtesy the artist and Spazio Su Photo Grazia Amelia Bellitta

Su, I felt it was time to bring out the image of this cart. My research and theoretical readings related to the precariousness of our time, from Mark Fisher to Franco Bifo Berardi, have led me to investigate this difficult condition even more in this period of pandemic. The flyers I created for this occasion were reminiscent of spam and the language of assault advertising that offers quick illusory solutions to the most common problems. I like to work on the border, in the gap between the real and the virtual world which, even if part of the same cosmos, becomes an instrument of investigation of the present. It’s like working with chiaroscuro. Printing the spam you usually receive by email, producing a physical object in the form of flyers, creates the disorientation that allows us to question ourselves as individuals and part of a community.

A.L.: What role can empathy and eroticism play

in this context? P.B.: Bifo’s eroticism, intended as contact with the human being and contact between two bodies, is increasingly lacking in this historical moment. In this sense, now the role of the body, which I have always believed to be tangent to my artistic research, becomes central to my work. The consumer’s body in the virtual dimension acquires a new self-awareness. The individual has a control over his own body and image that perhaps had never been achieved before. This transformed eroticism, on the one hand, is absent because there is no physical contact with the body of the other, while on the other hand the presence of our virtual body seems to counterbalance this absence. The intangible world becomes even more present in the face of this lack. My work invites to a possible awareness of

a disorientation, a search for orientation in the face of the language of the digital world that has transformed our lives. A.L.: From receipts, to calendars, to postcards, collecting is an integral part of your practice. Where does this need to collect come from? P.B.: I tried to transform a problem in a therapeutic way into an instrument of my artistic practice. Accumulation is a pathology of my family and I have developed, perhaps in contrast to this trend, a certain need for order. Accumulation as a collection also derives from the relationship I have with objects and the aura that some of them emanate. Collecting allows me to catalog and archive my relationship and my discourse with objects. These practices are certainly daughters of the era we live in, where archiving is an individual and shared social practice, also through social networks. A.L.: È amore vero/It’s true love is the title of

the winning project of the Lumina Award that you will realize in Salerno this year. The award is promoted by the Blam collective which promotes urban regeneration processes. How does your project fit into this regenerative path? P.B.: Blam is a collective of architects who carries out a series of ambitious projects in Salerno in conjunction with the city, other local associations and its inhabitants. I took part in the public call of the Lumina Award by presenting a project of light installations in the city that would come into direct contact with the citizens. This allowed me to reflect on the impact of art in public spaces, in close contact with the daily life of the inhabitants of a territory. Confronting myself directly with people is also an individual challenge. I like the idea of conceiving a collective work, born from the multiple visions of the people who live in the Salerno neighborhood where I will work. This collective creative process, which catalyzes many different energies, stimulates my practice a lot. The light installation È amore vero will be placed in the small square where Blam’s head-

quarters are located, inside a deconsecrated church. The title is a declaration of love for the neighborhood in which Blam acts through their projects. I would like to identify other writings that accompany people on their daily journeys across the city, part of the landscape and of a great urban poem. I like this idea of walls following you with statements that become a daily presence. I wondered about the rituality of those who live in these areas and what kind of relationship arises with these phrases written on the walls, not read as the degradation of a city, but as presences and companions of its life. The attempt is to re-read the streets and discover their stories through these words “highlighting them.” During a workshop, we will make urban explorations of the city in search of these wall writings that can be illuminated and reproduced with neon installations. A.L.: You participated in the BoCs Art resi-

dence in Cosenza and in Traffic - Festival of Gentle Souls in San Lorenzo in Campo. How did you live these collective design experiences? P.B.: The Traffic Festival was organized by Matteo Binci, Pietro Consolandi and Bianca Schröder. With Teresa Satta we carried out a relational work that confronted the local community of the town of San Lorenzo in Campo. Thanks to these exchanges, we created a project linked to the perception of homes’ plans. The layouts were created by those who lived in those rooms as guests in order to see the difference between the experience of a person living those spaces every day and that of someone experiencing it in transit. It was very interesting to create these bonds with the village, trying to convey the meaning of our work to a community, showing aspects of everyday life that often remain hidden and sharing beautiful life stories with them. This almost romantic dimension allows you to regain eroticism with people, in the sense we mentioned earlier. We installed our work Ciao, siamo umani strani/Hello, we are strange humans (2019) in the public washhouse of the village.

Pietro Ballero Ciao, siamo umani strani, 2019 Site specific project within the Traffic Festival Courtesy the artists Photo Pietro Consolandi

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A.L.: In your works Crolli/Collapses (2018)

and LOL (2019) the themes of war and the fragility of images in relation to time and the dichotomy between digital and analog return. Why do you feel the urgency to address these issues? What do you think are the effects of digital life on collective and individual memory today? P.B.: I like to highlight the contrast between real (IRL) and virtual (IVL) and to bring out the tension that exists between these two interpenetrating spheres. My work interacts in that grey area in the attempt to seek an orientation between these two dimensions, as I also did in the work The Dead Weight of History. Greetings from Venice (2018) where the cruel comments of social networks take on a physical dimension as postcards. The filter of a screen forces the reader to have a greater distance in the face of violent and racist statements, as in this case. Reading the same sentences through the lens of human handwriting links that thought to an act and an idea that have their own tangible individuality and physicality. In the work LOL, the singularity of the image responds to the abundance of online visual production and is a call to rediscover images omitted from history or memory. While in the case of Crolli, the images I collected on Google maps as a tourist on street view represent six Syrian UNESCO sites before they were damaged by the war. The crumpled sheets of paper on which I have printed these

disappeared images will deteriorate over time, physically bringing back the fragility of those images. A.L.: Your works often appear playful and

extremely colorful, as if to recall reminiscences of a returning childhood, however, revealing complex and sometimes traumatic realities of history or contemporaneity. Why do you think your practice often refers to the dimension of game? P.B.: I believe that, on the one hand, it is an exercise to see certain things from a different perspective, on the other, it allows me to bring out even more the contrast between certain themes. During the BoCs Art residency I created the work You still have time (2019). It was a children’s birthday streamer that created a strong contrast between the content of the message and the festive colors. Playful language allows us to exorcise the seriousness of the complex time we live in. A child’s eye can ease the burden of this forced perception. A.L.: I find that the reflection born from your

work You still have time (2019) is very interesting for the way in which you combine the use of specific local traditions with a political message of collective emancipation. Do you think local traditions can awaken us from the torpor of the capitalist system? P.B.: I am not convinced that the past is the belle

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époque to which we must aspire. Sometimes we have to look beyond and rethink the world by reinventing the future. In that work the contrast had emerged from an unexpected encounter. In the villages in the provinces of Cuneo and Turin, the friends of marrying couples hang sarcastic banners on poles that can often be seen in the roundabouts in the path between the house and the church. “You still have time” was one of these abandoned banners and I felt it as a direct warning to me. The strength of this sentence allowed me to examine its different meanings, simultaneously inevitable and optimistic. It gave me confidence and allowed me to question myself also on the precarious and performative condition of the artist. A child’s birthday party thus becomes a space in which to question existence. A.L.: In your work The happy young delivery man (2020) you question

the normative dimension of the optimistic imperative of contemporary societies. Tell us how this project was born. P.B.: I have always tried to approach life with a naive optimism of great openness. However, this led me to question to what extent this optimism was my choice and where it became an external imposition. The idea of being happy at all costs thus loses its centrality. The individual performativity of a society that wants us to be productive beings is questioned, just as happiness and optimism can be reinterpreted as fuels destined for mere production. From an iconographic point of view, I was inspired by catalogers of stereotypical images, such as Shutterstock, which have now become part of the world of memes. It is interesting to understand how an image cataloger wants to address a certain type of imagery through a title and certain characterizing adjectives that I have taken up in the title of the work itself. In this historical moment the reality of the delivery world and the work ethic make these images even more unreal. Hence the

Pietro Ballero Crolli, 2018 Courtesy the artist

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immediate contrast between reality and its virtual representation. The essay “Entreprecariat” by Silvio Lorusso (2018) addresses these issues through the oxymoron of the precarious entrepreneur, a condition that strongly involves art workers. The self-entrepreneur is called to sell and advertise himself as a company, but in a disarming, precarious condition. A.L.: Through micro-stories, your practice investigates contemporaneity.

What are the stories you would like to explore in the future? What are your next projects? P.B.: My atlas/notebook keeps this answer. It depends on the rhythm of the forthcoming waves.

Pietro Ballero Crolli, 2018 Courtesy the artist

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Pietro Ballero LOL, 2019 Conserveria, Turin, IT Courtesy the artist and Associazione Culturale Azimut Photo Marco Ronca

Pietro Ballero You Still Have Time, 2019 BoCs Arts, Cosenza, IT Courtesy the artist Photo Nicola Lorini

Pietro Ballero Il peso morto della storia - Greetings from Venice, 2018 Fondazione Francesco Fabbri, Pieve di Soligo, IT Courtesy the artist

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Pietro Ballero LOL, 2019 Conserveria, Turin, IT Courtesy the artist and Associazione Culturale Azimut Photo Marco Ronca