SOLIDARITY NETWORK an interview with Petar Grimani by Claudio Zecchi
How does Solidarity Network born and why? From which need? We have borned in 2012. Part of us already had experience with demonstration at University and part was already activist, but the core of the group came from the anarchist movement. Network of solidarity became a new kind of hybrid mental space; a place where sharing ideas without any ideological program. A network connected with real acts and experience on the field of real space with real people. I’m interested to know more about your work and your practice in general. The first thing I would like to focus on is the way you decided to join: you are not a collective in the proper sense of the term, but you are also not a simple set of artists. How we can define you and why you choose this hybrid formula? We started to visit workers on the factories and discuss about the problems they have. Soon we realize that, from another point of view, we had similar problems and one of the main goal became share together feelings of solidarity in-between human being with different social background and not leave them anymore alone. In your practice you use to leave the specific place dedicated to art to embrace the public realm. You define yourself as Art Activists. You declare your statement since the beginning. Why you feel the need to be so clear?
We are art activists because we believe in art as a tool of activism. Art has the power to change and create.
Your practice is a participatory practice. You use to go into the abandoned factory and, using art as a tool, you give them a new birth, a new life, involving, and this is the most important thing, in this process the powerless worker. It’s a way to turn a light on some specific social issues. How do they react to your request of collaboration and how do they feel into this process? Participatory practice is very clear: all the people involved inside the process are happy and satisfied to participate. As I told the border between Art and Activism are very thin. Where do you think art finish and activism begin? Do you think that art can add some value to the social action? Absolutely! Art can add some value to the social action and any open art exhibition is a real social action. So choosing venues and works for the exhibition it is a kind of statement. Do you think that art and artists (as well as curators, critics and Institutions I would say) have a social responsibility? If yes, why? Art and artists, including curators, critics and Institutions, have a social responsibility because they are all together part of the society and they all contribute to build it up: this interaction is very important in order to develop a message and a system of values. For this reason it is so important determine what art is, what is inside of the system, what is on the spotlight, what we think, what we see and what we are correlated with.
You also participate to some exhibitions in Institutional place like for example the 16th Mediterranean Biennial – Errors Allowed, that took place in Ancona. Could you please talk about this experience and the work you present there? Participate to an exhibition in the Institutional place is a very delicate issue for us: we should be aware of it because the idea to be part of an art show is sometime very superficial and artificial and any real things can change the essential reasons of being. Art spaces are very powerful and it is not so simple to answer especially with the attitude we approach to the work itself. The most important thing for us is the contact we build one to each other – person to person – the metaphorical place where art is only a medium and not a purpose or something to sell. When you participate to an exhibition you have to show a formalized work. How do you use to give back – in a visual perspective – the sense of the entire process you built before finalizing your work into the set up of the exhibition? This question is very important according to me because if in one hand the intention is to stress a particular and socially delicate situation to open a debate around certain topics, which is of course the positive side of the issue, on the other hand install the result of the entire process into a specific art venue could take it away from its “natural” environment/territory to put it into an institutional system. Don’t you think it can lose its strength? Even if we are used to create situations where a warm communication is very important, the artefacts cannot be undervalued in our approach: take process and “objects” that come from factories and put them into the galleries, it’s always a kind of esthetic transformation. The things we are used to create are objects, art works, videos, documents etc., with something real inside; some real information, real emotions, things that communicate and survive inside different media and environments. But we’re also used to put things-objects or artwork coming from outside into the factories: that means the main goal is not territory itself but the idea which still remain more important. What we try to do is in fact to create an idea of solidarity and an ideal world in real space and time, to exhibit and somehow create a dialog with the official art scene even if it is big task and not simply at all but we cannot quit. According to Foucault, knowledge is what we can talk about in a discursive practices, the space where the subject can take a position and talk about things with which he is used to have a confrontation in his discourse. Using in most of cases discursive practices, like lecture, debate, panel discussions, workshops etc., can I define you as a performer? Someone who knows how to behave and how to play/perform his role on the public stage? Yes you can, especially when we dance and play instruments which is also an important part of our practice. Play music – improvisation – allowed us to create in real time and space something common together. The problem with theory and language can be this: sometimes when is too intellectual it become cold. It is better to create and do something, than being passive but we also need theory and knowledge. So what we do is try to be connected with reality, with real people and real problems.