UNIDEE NOTEBOOKS 2019 | N.1

UNIDEE residency programs

UNIDEE NOTEBOOKS 2019 | N.1

Notes from the 2019 UNIDEE residency programs

Cittadellarte Edizioni, 2020 ISBN: 978-88-98698-23-3 This booklet is part of the series of publications “UNIDEE NOTEBOOKS”.

Designed by Annalisa Zegna Translations: Elena Pasquali

Cover image: Photo from the UNIDEE module “SELFORGANISATION AS METHOD” by Chto Delat, 2019. Credits UNIDEE.

UNIDEE residency programs

UNIDEE NOTEBOOKS 2019 | N. 1

Notes from the 2019 UNIDEE residency programs UNIDEE Modules ▶ SPRING TERM | COLLECTIVE AGENCY · PROSCENIUM by Adelita Husni-Bey · SELF-ORGANISATION AS METHOD by Chto Delat ▶ SUMMER CAMP | CLIMATE ACTION · PETRO-SUBJECTIVITY AND SOCIAL ECOLOGY by Brett Bloom · EVOLUTIONARY POPULATIONS: THE SEEDS OF THE WORLD WAITING TO GERMINATE by Luigi Coppola · TOWARDS AN EXPANDED LANDSCAPE by Fernando Garcia Dory · RITUALS OF THE CONTEMPORARY by Fiamma Montezemolo ▶ FALL TERM | MODES OF INSTITUTING · ASSEMBLY (MODES OF INSTITUTING)

by Kobe Matthys (Agency) and Stefan Nowotny · SITE FOR UNLEARNING (ART ORGANIZATION) HOW DO WE WANT TO WORK TOGETHER?

by Annette Krauss and Yolande van de Heide · TECHNIQUES FOR LIVING OTHERWISE: INSTITUTING WITH CARE

by Janna Graham and Valeria Graziano · WORKING TITLE: THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS by Bik Van Der Pol · CLIMAVORE by Cooking Sections

UNIDEE Residencies · Majd Nasrallah | A.M. Qattan Foundation, Palestine · Agil Abdullayev | Yarat Contemporary Art Space, Azerbaijan · Ryts Monet | Yarat Contemporary Art Space, Azerbaijan ▶ 2019 CALL FOR PAPERS

UNIDEE Organisations · Design + Change MA Programme Retreat 2019 | Linnaeus University · Learning for the future | Italia che cambia and Inwole association

UNIDEE residency programs 2019

Introduction

by Paolo Naldini Director of Cittadellarte

The end of 2019 saw the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. In the months of lockdown in Cittadellarte (where I’ve been living with my family since 2000), I decided to write an almost-a-manifesto to gather emotions, foster reflections and commit to action. It wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been in Cittadellarte. I would visit the exhibition spaces and the UNIDEE classrooms, listen to the river, come across birds, lizards, a couple of less and less shy hares. A great deal of silence. I was mesmerised by things always being in the same places, every day, a sensation in fact due to the fact that I wasn’t travelling, that I was extending my presence into a permanence, as it happens with habitual inhabitants.

I wouldn’t have written the almosta-manifesto of Pandemopraxy if I hadn’t been in the same spaces that had hosted the seminars and experiences of Petro-subjectivity, Collective Agency, Climate Action, Modes of Instituting and Rituals of the Contemporary.

Pandemopraxy (to which my almost-a-manifesto is dedicated) is the pandemicisation of the demopractic agency that at Cittadellarte we have been promoting and experimenting with on a daily basis: it passes through the practice of the rituals of the art of balance and through the joy of research and learning.

I don’t think my text could find better company than among the ones in this publication encapsulating the story of the 2019

Fact.

The consequences of the sudden pandemic of Coronavirus, that is, the measures taken to deal with it, have put the world in a situation that has never happened before in history: the growth trend of the global economy has almost stopped, the mighty flow of progress. We’re witnessing a slow down1 in the continuous growth of production and everything it needs and involves: commercial exchanges, movements of people and goods, operations of all sorts of equipment, machinery, and all the accompanying public and private events of any kind.

International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook, April 2020: The Great Lockdown: “... As a result of the pandemic, the global economy is projected to contract sharply by 3 percent in 2020, much worse than during the 2008–09 financial crisis”.

From pandemic to pandemopraxy

It matters little that some economic and financial sectors can experience strong growth precisely because of the pandemic: the lockdown and the total or partial closure of factories, schools and socio-economic activities is an epochal event.

Whether or not the measures taken are justified is not the main issue.

Because nothing exceeds the importance of the fait accompli: the spell of western modernity - which conquered the planet without ever stopping before - has been broken.

In this sense, the pandemic is exactly the opposite of war, since, generally, war actually leads to an acceleration of the economy and huge gains to the sectors that have contributed to blowing it up or have been able to ride it.

So the “fact” is not the epidemic, rather it is the impact that the measures taken to address it have had on the global development model.

Capitalist modernity has of course already undergone profound crises, in 1929, 1973, 2008, just to name a few, but in all these cases, the citizens (whether employed or unemployed) were not in quarantine.

Today, for most people in lockdown countries, it is the consumerist lifestyle that has stopped, 1

UNIDEE residency programs.

At the risk of sounding arrogant, I’ll say that the themes the postCovid community has “discovered” were already present in the awareness and practices UNIDEE has always welcomed and activated. Knowing that I might sound banal, I’ll say that the artists and activists (artivators, as we call them) who have participated in the UNIDEE modules and courses have anticipated the future, preperceiving what matters below the surface of what appears futile, and yet irritatingly ubiquitous, imposed, readily available to the polarised and deaf ruler. Knowing that I might sound naive, I’ll say that here, in these pages, we can already find many elements of the solutions the world really needs.

Some might say that the comparison with the loss of a parent is not appropriate because while death is incurable, the progress machine, now temporarily held back, will sooner or later restart at full speed and therefore everything will return as before. Nobody can deny that this prediction is possible and even likely. However, the impact of the events we are experiencing on our collective unconscious should not be underestimated. Above all, one should notice that the measures adopted to fight the spreading of the infection have also brought to circumstances which many - more and more in recent years - have hoped for and invoked.

Recommendations that mainly concern the growth model, if not the very idea of growth and development;

Harari, Yuval Noah. Homo deus. Brief history of the future. Bompiani, 2017.

The interpretation.

The pandemic means many things, and first of all the death of hundreds of thousands of people in a very short time. Let us ask ourselves what the “fact” mentioned above means, i.e. that the race for progress and consumption has (almost) stopped.

This is the collapse of the last certainty that has remained intact to humanity or - to put it in Y. N. Harari’s words - the defeat of the model of liberal humanist religion that triumphed with the 21st century2.

And now?

To look for clues to a possible answer, let’s look at what happens in a person’s life when a belief - considered up to then as a certainty - ceases to exist. The terms with which we refer to this event are generally those of the loss of an illusion, that is, disillusionment and disappointment or, more frequently, an unresolved mixture of both.

In life, people normally face the loss of illusion when the death (physical or ideal) of their parents occurs. As a consequence, people generally experience pain for the irreversible loss of a state of innocence mixed with a kind of courage deriving from the acquisition of a de facto maturity.

The experience of loss involves going through pain, dismay, bewilderment, anguish, mourning, finally leading to a sort of rebirth,

not happy, nor serene, however necessary for the continuation of life: also happiness and serenity, however impossible to believe at first, will return to our lives.

Can we therefore say that, following the fact that for the first time in history the huge machine of progress has stopped, humanity is dismayed in the face of the unknown and at the same time on the crest of an inevitable assumption of responsibility? This is the interpretation. As such, it is the result of a mixture of deductive analysis and projective inference, that is, wish and desire.

2

whatever the causes of this sudden halt.

I refer to more visible consequences such as the drastic reduction in air traffic or more personal ones such as the greater availability of time for one’s family and life companions. There is a striking convergence between the effects (probably secondary if not unexpected) of the contagion containment measures and the requests that a part of humanity has recently vividly made to public opinion and decision-makers.

In fact, the response to the pandemic has entailed a temporary adoption of behaviours previously considered incompatible with our way of life, some of these execrated (in some cases by all), others coveted for years, at least by some. In a brutally simple sentence: what was previously not possible, today not only can be done, but it is reality.

The present.

So here we are now. We did it.

We’ve almost stopped, we’ve slowed down almost everything, except of course the health management and the organization of the so-called cure. We spend more time with the people we most care about. We consume less. We have re-established a greater sense of proportion with the context in which we live, of which we are becoming more aware, for example in the form of the neighborhood or the urban or natural landscape that surrounds us. We feel, without the possibility of denial, that we are part of a single planet and of a single humanity that inhabits it, but at the

same time we live with immediate certainty the local dimension of our being there, situated in places that are the result of a continuous work of creation and modeling of communities to which we belong, more or less openly. We have rediscovered the vital civil mission of services provided by an army of peace made up of people with the vocation to take care of others: public or even private officials such as doctors, nurses, state bodies, volunteers. But also of administrators and maintainers of the (good or bad) functioning of the gigantic organizational articulations of the community. We have learned how technology can offer the opportunity to exercise on a large scale functions that until now were practicable only through the physical movement of our person and huge quantities of means and tools. We have found that science is the most direct way to reconnect with nature, to protect and take care of it, to understand it, and to fight its harmful aspects and organisms such as this virus.

Above all, we have rediscovered that we are fragile and connected to each other: by radicalizing this awareness a little, we have rediscovered that we are brothers of all the living and inanimate organisms on the planet.

Tomorrow. Today.

What, then, are we to bring in the post-pandemic era, in addition to the awareness that all this has happened, that it can return and that we will have to

6

The scenario.

When we exit the quarantine and

Paolo Naldini, the Art of Demopraxy.

See Wenger, Etienne (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. A good introduction is provided by Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.

The other algorithm with which to venture into the post-pandemic is the Demopraxy5 method, with its three phases making up the Demopractic Opera: the first is the Choir, in turn divided into census, mapping, exhibition; the second is the Performance, articulated in the forum; and the third is the Working Site, consisting of the actions carried out in the organizations involved and the institutional joint. The Demopractic Opera is a device that distributes people’s government among the people.

How is this achieved? By developing the practices that participants in organizations (of all kinds and types) carry out in their own context, that is, in their own community of practice6.

The practices exist regardless of ideologies and ideal instances, of the false myths and fictions that attempt to aggregate people by detaching them from the real source of power, i.e. doing and being able to do in everyday life.

Will we be able to bring the grammar of these two algorithms, the sixth sense of balance and the art of Demopraxy, into the post-pandemic world? This text is aimed at this goal.

5

3

Michelangelo Pistoletto, Theorem of trinamics. See also Pistoletto M., Ominiteism e Demopraxy, Chiare Lettere, 2019.

4 Michelangelo Pistoletto, The Third Paradise, Marsilio 2010.

prevent it, avoid it and – should it unfortunately happen again in the acute form that we are experiencing now – manage it better? Which viaticum should we provide ourselves with?

There are two principles, two algorithms that seem to emerge as the main integrators to the toolbox of knowledge and experience that we have so far put together to face the future, and neither is absolutely new; rather, they are the travelling companions we have neglected, if not really mortified, in our capitalist modernity. The first is the sense of balance; like a sixth sense, may it never leave us. I mean balance as entailed by the principle of trinamics3 and as expressed by the symbol of the Third Paradise4: the symbol and the principle represent the continuous search for a balanced relationship between different and even opposite phenomena. Phenomena, therefore also organisms, animals, people, peoples.

A balanced relationship also implies the possibility of changing, according to the changing of the specific features of each contingent place, of each situation.

The expression ‘sense of balance’ highlights the feeling and the consequent action of continuous rearrangement of the balance itself: it is therefore a tightrope and acrobatic balance, rather than a static balance.

How will you do?

At Cittadellarte7 we have experimented with this approach of fields and forces since the 1990s. We have brought it into many areas, making the city of Biella8 a full-size laboratory. We started by setting up a school, later called the UNIDEE Academy of the Third Paradise, a space dedicated to research, study, listening and practical experimentation. We applied, among the first fields, to nourishment.

Cittadellarte is a non-profit foundation created in Biella in the 90s on the initiative of Michelangelo Pistoletto. See Cittadellarte.

8 Biella, one of the world capitals of wool, became UNESCO Creative City in 2019 with the symbol of the Third Paradise as the logo and concept of the candidacy. Biella and Cittadellarte are models of a regenerative relationship between territory and culture.

How you will feed yourself. So how to cultivate the land. How to reap the benefits. How to distribute and transport them.

How to exchange them. How to consume them.

Local communities of practice have concrete answers to these questions. To reformulate them with the naive but informed approach of the above mentioned gaze, we have conducted the research and study of the various and most interesting answers that the organizations in our area are formulating.

Applying the Demopraxy algorithm, we decided to carry out a mapping of 7

lockdown phase, we will have to go back to dealing with every aspect of our lives and we will have the opportunity to bring about changes in the way we manage life. Or we can resume every activity exactly as before.

If we wanted to try to change, how could the algorithms of the Demopraxy method and the principle of balance be useful?

Where to start?

There is a song by Subsonica, a well-known Italian band, dedicated to the Third Paradise; the ending fades into a series of questions perhaps addressed to the listener, perhaps to each of us, perhaps to our children who will face the future. How will you smile? What air will you breathe? How will you dress? What language will you speak? How will you greet?

How will you work? What will you believe in? What dreams will you dream? How will you smile? What air will you breathe? How will you feed yourself? What language will you speak? etc.

Each of these questions indicates an area, a field, of our individual and collective needs. And all the questions identify an approach, a perspective, a way of facing reality.

If the scope is a field, the approach is a force.

In hindsight, the attitude recalled by the song is specific to the modus operandi of science and art: it is about placing yourself in front of things as if it were the first time and at the same time aware of everything that has been achieved so far.

How you will live. How you will learn. How you will communicate.

How you will express yourself. How you will do everything you do.

This is the programme of the school that was created in Cittadellarte in the 90s, a campus where to live and “share”. An Academy of the Third Paradise, called UNIDEE from the merging of the terms University and Ideas.

Where the radical faculty of creation, advocated by art, meets design in each discipline and in each field based on the principle “maximum freedom = maximum responsibility”.

So how can we restart from this pandemic experience?

Each city, each local context, will be able to face the postpandemic with pandemopraxy, a movement of re-appropriation of doing what we already do, learning from each other, accepting the idea that life and work feed on continuous research, which is not the prerogative of professional élite, but is the right, duty and joy of

Amongst the many resources, see Wikipedia: Environmental Impact of Fashion.

10 See Cittadellarte Fashion B.E.S.T. – Better Ethical Sustainable Transformation.

11 See UNECE, Enhancing Traceability and Transparency for Sustainable Value Chains in Garment and Footwear.

How you will dress. In the same way, but in different ways because different are the characteristics of the context, we have worked in the field of fashion. The force?

The pursuit of sustainability.

The second skin is the second most impactful industry9 as a factor of unsustainability in this Anthropocene. But fashion also has enormous symbolic power.

There is continuous creation and very rapid elimination. But this cycle, which we were under the illusion it was circular on a global level, leaves gigantic nonrenewable waste instead. What are the laws of real circularity, if it were really possible for fashion?

What criteria and standards?

With a pool10 of designers and companies (factories and brands), at Cittadellarte we are looking for the answers to these questions, which we have helped to bring to the United Nations, with an initiative of great momentum

dedicated to the Traceability and Transparency of the Textile and Apparel Supply Chain11.

9

these items and practices and then organize a forum for a thorough and structured comparative analysis, from which to generate proposals for concrete actions to be implemented within the participating organizations. This process takes place with the constant comfort and support of administrative institutions but also of research bodies such as universities.

In short, it is a matter of articulating the syntax of the algorithms of Demopraxy and the Third Paradise, proceeding with a sense of balance.

A new initiative.

With this document, I would like to mark the start of a new initiative of the school of Cittadellarte. I see it as an opportunity to resume the ranks of all the activities that Cittadellarte develops, especially the experimentation with the art of Demopraxia.

Looking to the immediate future, it is now a matter

See A. Appadurai, The right to research, Globalisation, Societies and Education, Vol. 4, No. 2, July 2006, pp. 167–177.

Only taking every field of human activity of the organizations that daily manage those same spaces of action we will be able to apply the lesson we learned from this pandemic experience.

The human intelligence that led to the Anthropocene has certainly also the ability to restore humanity

to the planet in a harmony that we have never experienced before.

The depth of our knowledge and the power of our technology, as we are still far from having everything included and everything under control, offer us an opportunity that we never dreamed of having: that of establishing a new pact with our planet and every form of life, human and non-human, that the planet hosts and supports.

If we still don’t know where exactly this virus came from and how it spread, we can decide where it will direct us. No one else will make this decision for us.

Each of us, in our own organization, whether it is a commercial enterprise or a charity, a public institution or an industry, each of us, after the pandemic, will have to ask themselves how they will dress, how they will build, how they will communicate, how they will learn ...

We will be able to reply the way we would answer before the virus.

Or we may look for new, concrete, practical, real answers.

12

every citizen12.

How to start again?

• after the pandemic we must be able to aspire to a future of sustainable prosperity, because not only have we been able to accomplish centuries of civil and technological progress, we can also govern the mighty theatre of production and consumption growth that seemed to govern us; • we can develop methods for making decisions that activate systematic initiatives; • we can broaden our knowledge horizon as much as possible without relying “only” on the research of the élite who propose “new ideas” and “new models”, but rather realizing that our own practices already offer us clues to a wider horizon and above all that we have the right to develop this action-based research ourselves, that is, to recognize the value of our practices in order to make systematic decisions; • this right to research (to use the expression of Appadurai) is a right to take part in the transformation of the world based on practices and therefore to make the transition from demo-cracy to Demopraxy. From pandemic to pandemopraxy.

of bringing the antibodies that we have developed or are developing in this quarantine to the restart.

In fact, I think that the algorithms of the sense of balance and the Demopractic method are the antibodies that we needed as a society.

The measures taken by governments to deal with pandemic infection have been like a cure for symptoms. But only we can decide to develop antibodies and apply them in everyday life. Where? In our specific communities of practice.

Indeed, many have been doing it, a few of us for some time.

How? What difficulties and opportunities have they encountered and are they encountering? We will ask some of those who are part of the network of cultural operators, administrators of manufacturing companies, officials of government organizations, teachers, journalists, farmers, designers, etc. that has grown around Cittadellarte in the last almost thirty years.

We will ask them: how do you enact this sense of balance in your practice? How do you share in the context of your community of practice the reasons for the different phenomena, opposing interests, conflicting cultural and economic points of view? How do you learn by connecting what you knew and what you didn’t know? How do you combine your individual being with personal needs and aspirations with your constituting a wider community, with its needs and objectives?

Meanwhile, we too, as we all wish, will try to start again, study these answers, transmit them to our students and those who follow us, make antibodies, or better probodies, balancing the reasons for the phenomena, of people, of ecologies in a dynamic balance always in motion.

As Pistoletto proposed in 2012, when a millennial contagion that imagined the end of the world spread, we propose today a rebirth from this pandemic. This virus did not come to exterminate humanity. There is no need for a new or old virus for this, we are already doing it. The lesson we can learn from this pandemic and the consequences of the strategies employed to fight it is that we can still save ourselves, just the opposite of what many associate with Covid-19. The lesson is that if the cure for Coronavirus has not yet been found, the one for our systemic disease already exists. And we can implement it.

We have the tools, the algorithms.

We have the motivation. Only one thing could be missing, and it is the most important for humans, the characteristic that has allowed us to make the evolutionary leap of the last ten, fifteen thousand years: it’s called cooperation and learning. The union of the ability to cooperate in small and large groups, up to entire communities of millions of individuals, with the ability to continuously learn from our and others’ experience, is the resource that can make us make the change necessary to survive and above all to live a good life.

That we will be able to defeat the pandemic is more than plausible, even if it will still involve a lot of suffering. That we will be able to find a balanced, fair, prosperous and sustainable way of life also depends on us. It can be done.

Starting from the concrete practices of our communities of practice: companies, associations, institutions, schools, families.

Paolo Naldini, Director of Cittadellarte (April 2020)

UNIDEE residency programs 2019

UNIDEE residency programs, here and now

by Juan Esteban Sandoval Director of UNIDEE residency programs

Not all residency programmes are the same. They usually respond to different ideas, needs, concepts and, above all, contexts. The residing is the common factor: we are all residents in a specific and definite place, where we live, eat, work and create. Around the 2000s, changing place of residence for a short time or moving elsewhere became integral part of the growth and development of the career of many artists. Residing elsewhere for a certain period of time also allows artists to shift their point of view on things, absorb and elaborate new experiences, get to know new languages and enter into a dialogue with their colleagues. Today, going on a residency doesn’t mean the same as it did twenty years ago.

Residencies are an essential part of the international artistic scene: they are organised by both big national institutions and small independent collectives based in suburban neighbourhoods, and they offer a wide range of different durations and objectives. Today, what artists look for in residencies has changed: some artists see residencies as educational experiences susceptible to clearly contributing to improving their practices and researches, some see them as a moment of growth – also on academic and professional levels – and not only as a series of experimental activities, whereas others see them as an opportunity to realise projects and works in contexts different from their own.

Cittadellarte has developed the UNIDEE residency program on the basis of these premises, with a methodology that combines theory and practice, and builds the learning process on doing and discovering, on exercising the imagination by encountering diversity and a plurality of languages; a process responding to the desire and the need to investigate things, phenomena and stories through relationships, dialogue and the exchange of opinions among the participants.

Encouraging these residential dynamics, UNIDEE conceives learning as a life experience and a social process characterised by the peculiar cognitive and emotional intensity of the exchanges among the members of the spontaneous community created during the residency period.

For fifteen years (1999 – 2013) UNIDEE residencies were devised as a laboratory in which for four months artists coming from all over the world could develop their projects starting from Biella’s local context and in connection with the different actors of the territory Cittadellarte collaborates with: local authorities, textile factories, food consortiums, artisans, centres housing immigrants, the local foundation helping cancer survivors recuperate, the prison, to name a few. The residency was conceived as a moment of learning through dialogue in a different context, where to understand the others’ languages, and where the others’ needs

and views were the trigger to acquiring new instruments to then apply in one’s own context.

From 2012 on, the four-month programme was designed to include “mentoring” artists, with the objective of analysing specific themes and leading the residents along a path winding in parallel to the development of their own personal projects; for two years, the application of this methodology helped investigate even further the theme of the relationship between the artist, as an activator of processes of social transformation, and the territory, highlighting some of the aspects that had to be taken into consideration, like for example the need to supply specific tools to carry out the projects or the importance of continuity in the relationship between the artist and their context. In 2014 we started experimenting with the methodology that we applied until 2019: a programme of short residential modules, each guided by an artist-mentor developing a specific line of research and supplying those tools we had identified as fundamental in the growth process of the artist’s practice. Maintaining a programme of residential modules, we then introduced another essential figure for the evolution of the residency, the visiting curator, an expert from the visual arts sector who for a limited amount of time establishes, in agreement with Cittadellarte, the lines of research and the names of the mentors that will lead the activities of the modules. Since

2015, first Cecilia Guida (director and curator of the programme from 2015 to 2017) and then Valerio Del Baglivo (curator of the programme from 2018 to 2019) have curated the realisation of 63 residential modules involving 98 mentors, 51 guest experts and 400 participants.

Today, in the first half of 2020, the challenges our programme, our institution and art in general are facing have radically changed.

The year 2020 is the first of the third decade of the UNIDEE residency programme, and we are working to respond to a global situation forcing us to respect physical and social distancing, not to travel, to stay at home‌ how can we propose a suitable residency programme without falling into the contradiction of a virtual residency? With Andy Abbott, the new visiting curator of the programme, we are once again re-elaborating our methodology, keeping clearly in mind that the encounter, the opportunity for dialogue with the other in that space of thought and action that the residency experience offers must be protected and, as much as possible, maintained.

In these twenty years of organising residencies, working in close collaboration with artists, curators and subjects involved in processes of creation pertaining to contemporary art, Cittadellarte’s view on residencies has expanded, it has generated new ideas and variations in methodologies, and has responded to ever-changing

scenarios, but the awareness of the importance of bringing art closer to the social processes and of using art as an instrument for social transformation has remained the fundamental element of the programmes and the philosophy on which we keep building our future activities.

Juan Esteban Sandoval, Director of UNIDEE residency programs (July 2020)

UNIDEE residency programs 2019

Constructive isolation

by Valerio Del Baglivo Visiting Curator UNIDEE residency programs 2018-19

I am writing this text in June 2020, after a long and difficult period of isolation due to the crisis generated by the Coronavirus pandemic. Throughout these past months, our houses and our flats have become our “new prisons of biosurveillance�, as Paul Preciado brilliantly explained in his article Le lezioni del virus (The lessons of the virus, Internazionale, issue no.

1356, June 2020), and the virtual world has suddenly invaded the space of our existences like a tsunami. This condition has quickly transformed our lives, challenging the modalities of social interaction: physical contact, sense of proximity, the movement of bodies in the public space and the use of structures and infrastructures have been drastically reduced and subject to government and police control. And, above all, the notion of time itself was revisited: the suspension of all working and productive activities has kept us in constant oscillation between the cyclic experience of all very much the same monotonous days, and the suspended experience of the uncertainty about how long the quarantine would last. This constant alternating of monotony and uncertainty has affected our love lives, our psycho-physical balance, but mainly our actual ability to imagine how we could overcome the crisis. We have lost lucidity.

Before continuing with my analysis, I have to admit that I am writing from the extremely privileged position of a white heterosexual

man who lives in a western country whose health system, if certainly not flawless, is well structured enough to face this type of crisis; and I am living in a comfortable flat that does not make me feel trapped. I am one of the lucky few, and I understand that admitting it is not enough anymore. The health crisis has reinforced inequalities and injustices between human beings, once more confirming the presence of social and economic unbalances. The virus has followed the lines of racial, class and genre evolution, claiming victims mainly among the most fragile and less protected groups of individuals.

For these reasons, in the postCovid period we will all need to facilitate a re-training of the sense of being a community; a new training that includes new ecologies of affectivity and, on the other, investigates new forms of interaction offering us ecosystemic approaches between living beings.

We will all have to fight to re-assert the centrality of the body, not only as a target of criminalisation, pathologisation, submission and control, but rather as a place of resistance in which to identify processes of emancipation, experiment with new models of life in common, and extend the concept of identity itself.

In this sense, art, more than any other cultural forms, will be instrumental in the aftermath of this serious crisis. First of all because, in its highest forms of expression, art does not comply with standards; it rather accustoms

us to constantly interfacing the unknown, something not socially taken for granted. And, secondly, because it asks us to pay attention: in our society of hyper-distraction, in which we have all developed a pathological teledependency, approaching and enjoying art requires an effort of concentration.

Many (including me) were not ready to face this pandemic. This unknown phenomenon took us by surprise because we had always refused to pay attention to the (actually strong and clear) signals the environment has sent us constantly in the last thirty years.

In this sense, art can really reveal itself to be an essential learning exercise teaching us how not to be caught distracted and not to lose control in the face of the unknown.

A, by now, inevitable process of empowerment that entails constant exercising of knowledge, and that I hope might lead all living beings to acquire a new sense of community, a new way of being a community.

It is also true that we needed this experience of suspended time to find reconsidering the scale of values governing our existences, which forced us to recalibrate the registers of reality. I believe that the time has come for us to oppose the exploitation of the rhetoric of the impossible, which doesn’t contemplate alternatives, and restart from accepting the value of multiplicity and polyphony as instruments allowing us to live on our planet in alliance with other (human and non-human) subjects.

I think I can say that places like Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto, even if isolated, are instrumental in facilitating processes in which learning, community life and political imaginary get woven together to propose moments of propositional participation. Through what I call experiences of constructive isolation, at Cittadellarte we discussed about collectivist and anti-authoritarian pedagogical methodologies, we analysed processes of emancipation of marginal communities active within and outside the art world, we experimented with forms of learning that involve the senses and propose non-competitive methods, we imagined a life style independent from the oil economy, we discussed about the role artistic organisations must assume triggering debates on these issues, and much more, which you will find detailed in this publication. To summarise, we embarked on a process of coimagination in which we tried to rethink the categories of reality, and imagine a future of change.

Brief history of the programme During the twenty months spent at Cittadellarte as Visiting Curator of UNIDEE – University of Ideas, I develop a programme that reinforced these premises. I arrived when UNIDEE was celebrating its twenty years’ anniversary and it was starting planning the beginning of a new adventure: the

expansion of the UNIDEE project to include academic courses recognised by the Ministry of Public Education like bachelor’s and master’s degrees, etc.

With the programme being in this delicate phase of evolution and transformation, from the very beginning I believed that its general architecture had to be kept intact, and that only limited but meaningful changes could be introduced. My objective was to strengthen the incredible work carried out in the course of twenty years of activity, implementing few elements that could help set the new direction and give a glimpse of the possible lines of development for UNIDEE’s next twenty, hundred years!

As already mentioned, I first of all decided to maintain the structure of the modules, dividing the fifteen-month programme into three macro-areas of analysis: Collective Agency, Climate Action and Modes of Instituting.

For the first cycle of workshops, called Collective Agency, I invited artists who work with groups, associations and communities operating outside the art-world to discuss the value and the political potential of group-acting in redefining contemporary life models. The artist Adelita Husni Bei proposed Proscenium, a workshop conceived to analyse three moments in the life of an institutional infrastructure, with the aim of exposing, together with

the participants, the methods and techniques through which they maintain and perpetuate power relationships. In Self-Organisation as Method, the collective Chto Delat, from Saint Petersburg, discussed the operational methods they use to question the role of the artist in society, which include micro-politics, alternative pedagogy and group performance experiments. Concluding the series, artist Fiamma Montezemolo proposed Rituals of the Contemporary a five-day workshop in which studies of anthropology, philosophy, theology and art intertwined together to reflect on how contemporary communities organize their collective rituals as a form of empowerment and affirmation.

Compared to the past, I tried to diversify the formats making the programme more dynamic and open to experimentation: in fact, in addition to the traditional three/five-days modules led by a visiting artist, the programme included a “summer camp”, in which, for the first time in the recent history of UNIDEE, three modules were combined together and happened at the same time.

Called Climate Action, the summer camp involved four artists who, through their practices, carry out actions to contrast the current climate crisis, with the aim of imagining a sustainable future.

Occupied for years in promoting actions and debates to free contemporary society from the grip of our dependency from oil

and its derivatives, artist Brett Bloom proposed, with his Petrosubjectivity and Social Ecology, a daily training preparing us to gradually abandon them.

With his workshop called Evolutionary Populations: the seeds of the world waiting to germinate, and combining theatre, philosophy and agro-ecology, the artist Luigi Coppola presented and discussed actions practised by various rural communities and with which he has been experimenting since 2011 with his House of Agricultures in Castiglione d’Otranto, with the objective of expanding biodiversity research and generating economies based on solidarity. Inspired by the methodologies implemented through his Inland, a nomadic institution producing agricultural knowledge, the workshop organised by Fernando GarcíaDory called Towards an Expanded Landscape brought attention back to the analysis of the landscape and its transformations, to generate future models of sustainable life. Along the same line of thought, but occurred later in December 2019, the collective Cooking Sections, who for years have engaged in studying methods and techniques to produce food in time of environmental crisis, held the workshop Climavore to investigate how local Biellese producers are facing this challenge.

Furthermore the ‘fall term’ was organised like a school with four modules dedicated to the same

group of participants, all founders of independent spaces: Agil Abdullayev (Salaam Cinema, Baku), Gaia Di Lorenzo (Castro Projects, Rome), Nicholas Ferrara (Hydro, Biella), Giulia Floris (Castro Projects, Rome), Carlotta Sofia Grassi (Ventunesimo, Occhieppo Inferiore), Majd Nasrallah (Tishreen Alternative Space, Taybe - Palestine), Yates Norton (Rupert, Vilnius) e Carolina Ongaro (Jupiter Woods, London). Called Modes of Instituting, the series of workshops involved artists who have created organisations to promote their artistic actions in society. The objective was to discuss what processes need to be activated in order to transform artistic institutions into places where social change, community building and political action are perpetuated.

In collaboration with philosopher Stefan Nowotny, artist Kobe Matthys, founder of The Agency, brought to light the case of choreographer Martha Graham and the legal action taken after her death to assign the rights of reproduction of her choreographies. The workshop centred on infra-institutional micropolitical relationships, and on the desire and legal implications of founding an artistic institution.

Subsequently, artist Annette Krauss and curator Yolande Van De Heide conducted a workshop developed from their Site for Unlearning, a research they carried out at the Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, where Yolande was deputy director:

through experiences and psychosomatic exercises, the workshop discussed how to promote a transformation of the artistic institutions by activating processes of un-learning, commoning and redistribution of powers.

Next, artists and activists Janna Graham and Valeria Graziano, who have been reasoning for years on alternative practices of public programming in artistic institutions, proposed the workshop Techniques for Living Otherwise: instituting with care, through which they analysed how to facilitate instituting practices able to revitalise the social fabric of the communities involved.

To conclude this extraordinary programme, the collective Bik Van Der Pol invited us to think in a speculative way about the territory surrounding Fondazione Pistoletto with a workshop called Through the Looking Glass, which applied the methods of their ongoing project The School of Missing Studies reflecting on how we would change CittadellarteFondazione Pistoletto in the next three, five and ten years.

Two more decisions were taken with the intent of strengthening the programme and making it more comparable to a university department with conferences and publications. First of all, during the ‘fall term’, well before the invasion of similar online programmes, I launched Fondazione Pistoletto’s first curated series of presentations and conversations online. As an extension of the series of

workshops called Modes of Instituting, I invited four directors of European museums who in the last fifteen years have developed activities of institutional experimentation to discuss about how to start instituting processes; how to transform museums into places of socio-political debate; how to create connections with the local communities in such a way as to turn spectators into active members; and how to reflect on the notions of privilege, hierarchy, social control and racisms to create artistic organisations practising forms of cultural decolonisation. In the course of these video conferences we had the opportunity to listen to the programmes of Charles Esche, the director of the VanAbbemuseum in Eindhoven; of Francis Mckee, the director of the Centre for Contemporary Art in Glasgow; of Mélanie Bouteloup, the director of Bétonsalon - Centre for Art and Research and Villa Vassilieff in Paris; and of Cecilia Widenheim, the director of Tensta Konsthall in Stockholm.

Secondly, I – for the first time – issued a call for papers addressed to contemporary artists, offering to publish their essays written in response to our three annual topics. We received one by artist Anna Moreno, a fictional text about the year 2068, in which, at last, human kind has discovered how to achieve a sustainable society by studying the bees’ social system; and one by artist Julian Day, a reflection on his project

24 Hour Choir discussing the power of singing together and the possibility of making community.

Finally, I tried to review the politics and logics behind the application process of selection, creating grants opportunities for more fragile categories of people (like immigrants, artist-mothers, etc.) and reducing the cap on the participation fees. We organized 15 workshops with over 150 participants coming from all over the world and hosted 6 artists in residency.

I would like to conclude thanking my two partners in crime: Annalisa Zegna, who was with us for the first part of this long endeavour, and Clara Tosetti, who is still currently the coordinator of the UNIDEE programme. And of course a special thanks goes to all the visiting artists and the participants in the programme, without you all this would not have been possible.

Valerio Del Baglivo, Visiting Curator UNIDEE residency programs (June 2020)

UNIDEE Modules SPRING TERM

•

COL LEC✳ • TIVE • AGE →NCY •

How do we shape the reality of our living and acting together?

Since 2014, Cittadellarte has been coordinating the International Rebirth Forums connecting different civil organisations with the aim of promoting social change. Each Forum gathers together a diverse range of formal and informal groups (such as associations, foundations, enterprises, governmental organisations, non profit spaces, committees, etc) to implement a collective one-year concrete plan discussing the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which require an urgent call for action by all countries.

In a global partnership with different participants, Cittadellarte has promoted more than 235 meetings worldwide and coined a new word defining its method: Demopraxy. Derived from the word ‘democracy’, the neologism replaces the term cratòs (power) with the word practice (in Greek praxis), converging its meaning into collective agency and cooperation.

Starting from these premises, the 2019 UNIDEE Spring Term invited artists of different generations to map out the issues surrounding collaborative art from a practitioner’s perspective.

Exploring the potential of collective action as art work, the invited artists develop working relations with other producers, extensively collaborating with groups and communities to facilitate the creation of different

infrastructural conditions and assist them in taking control of their futures. Advocating solidarity and peer-to-peer relationships to develop new ways of regulating everyday life, the artists initiate community-embedded projects combining together discussions, performances, pedagogy and forms of self-organisation. In response to the political, social and economical conditions of post-capitalism, the invited artists experiment with community forms of resistance and participation to organise alternative ways of living.

Valerio Del Baglivo, Visiting Curator UNIDEE residency programs

UNIDEE Modules SPRING TERM

PROSCENIUM

by Adelita Husni-Bey 20 / 22 May 2019

Photo: OKNO studio, courtesy of Fondazione La Quadriennale di Roma.

Courtesy of the artist and Laveronica arte contemporanea, Modica.

Participants: Bianca Buccioli Gabriella Dal Lago Giulia Pozzi Irene Angenica Sandra Wazaz Sara Fiorentino

In her work, Adelita Husni-Bey uses anarcho-collectivist and antiauthoritarian forms of pedagogy as means of understanding power relations which give rise to political agency and processes of emancipation, haptically and through embodiment. Challenging rules and the ways we approach togetherness, Adelita’s projects often include poetry and the use of performance involving the authors. Her employment of pedagogical methods leads to the collective creation of mise en scènes that allow participants to come to terms with their own relation to the social and economic power dynamics of our era. For her ongoing project “White Paper: The Law” (2014), the artist initiated a series of Public Drafting Meetings involving stakeholders such as jurists, undocumented migrants, squatters, housing right activists and lawyers in the writing of a para-legal document called the ‘Convention on the Use of Space’ (CUS). The CUS proposes social use (or use value) as predominant over exchange value and holds all the tension that such a claim generates, in contrast with the enclosures of private property and the adoption of the squatting ban across Europe.

For her film installation “The Reading / La Seduta”, presented at the Italian Pavillon of Venice Biennale 2017, the artist worked with a group of young people and artist, friend and astrologer Tina Zavitsanos. Using a specially designed tarot deck and

exercises based on the Theatre of the Oppressed, participants reflected on their own connections to the environment and to the exploitation of the earth, examining a series of complex questions related to ideas of extraction, threat, technology, use, value and vulnerability.

Taking the notion of the institution as a stand-in for centres of power, during her module PROSCENIUS, Adelita Husni-Bey proposed to explore the institution as a form reliant on performance to operate and maintain control, through the participatory use of performance and writing. By discussing and mimicking institutional procedures, functions and services, she choreographed, with the participants, three moments of the “arc of an institutional birth-death continuum”.

MODULE DESCRIPTION A proscenium is the arch that frames the stage and delimits what is within and outside the performative space. The workshop focused on understanding how institutions are formed and shaped through performativity within varying frameworks, including museums, prisons and heterosexual relations.

“Law is not literally internalized, but incorporated, with the consequences that bodies are produced which signify that law on and through the body.” http://criticallegalthinking.com/2016/11/14/ judith-butlers-performativity/

How does performativity give institutions their form? What is the role of performativity in operations that claim ‘justice’? How is naming (nomos) an operating principle in both performance and law? What do we mean by scenographic/theatrical elements of institutions? How do theories of complicity, accompaniment and mis-recitement offer ways to go off script?

Over the course of three ‘moments’ that represented the arc of an institutional birthdeath continuum, participants were tasked with discussing and performing institutions of their choosing under the guidance of Adelita’s use of creative writing, performative exercises, and seminar-style reading sessions.

The first day focused on the birth of the institution, the ‘naming’ of the institution and the analysis of its primary functions and services, the second day was ‘peak institution time’, when the institution’s operations were harmonised — on this day the institutions interacted. The third and final day explored the decline or death of the institution including explorations of what had lead the institution to wither or develop into another form. Understanding this exercise as an intersectional analysis of power, each participant created or used a pre-existing institutional framework as a starting point in developing their pathway through the workshop.

The workshop relied on works by Achille Mbembe, Denise Ferreira Da Silva, Michelle Castaneda, Michel Foucault, Jackie Wang, Fred Moten among others.

CAConrad’s (SOMA)TIC POETRY EXERCISES The (Soma)tic Poetics is a poetry which investigates that seemingly infinite space between body and spirit by using nearly any possible THING around or of the body to channel the body out and/or in toward spirit with deliberate and sustained concentration.

The writing of (Soma)tics is an engagement with the thing of things and the spirit of things.

In (Soma)tic Poetry THE FILTERS are words which function as focal points for the information and

notes gathered from the exercises.

With THE FILTERS you take all of your notes and begin to write poetry about or through these words, shaping and editing as you go. But it’s important to note that THE FILTERS are only guides, and to help you shape the poem. Also it’s good to use at least 2 FILTER words to prevent the conversation from becoming entirely internal or confessional, meaning that with the extension of extra filters the worldview will broaden as the poem takes shape.

The participants did an exercise based on the original exercise by CAConrad: “AMERICAN poem, AMERICAN poet, the roots the roots the roots there are roots”.

ADELITA HUSNI-BEY Adelita Husni-Bey is an artist and pedagogue interested in anarchocollectivism, performativity, law and urban studies. She organises workshops and produces publications, radio broadcasts, archives and exhibition work focused on using non-competitive pedagogical models through the framework of contemporary art.

Working with activists, architects, jurists, schoolchildren, spoken word poets, actors, urbanists, physical therapists, athletes, teachers and students across different backgrounds, her work focuses on unpacking the complexity of collectivity. To make good what can never be made good: what we owe each other.

Recent solo exhibitions include: Chiron, New Museum, 2019; White Paper: On Land, Law and the Imaginary, Centro de Arte dos de Mayo, Mostoles; A Wave in the Well, Sursock Museum, Beirut, 2016; Movement Break, Kadist Foundation, 2015; Playing Truant, Gasworks, 2012.

She has participated in Being: New Photography 2018, MoMA, 2018; Dreamlands, Whitney Museum, 2016; The Eighth Climate, 11th Gwangju Biennale, 2015; Really Useful Knowledge, Reina Sofia museum, 2014; Utopia for Sale?,

MAXXI museum, 2014; and has held workshops and lectures at ESAD Grenoble, 2016; The New School, 2015; Sandberg Institute, 2015; Museo del Novecento, 2013; Temple University, 2013; Birkbeck University, 2011 amongst other spaces.

She is a 2012 Whitney Independent Study Program fellow, a 2016 Graham Foundation grantee and has represented Italy at the 2017 Venice Biennale of Art with a video rooted in antiextractivist struggles.

UNIDEE Modules SPRING TERM

SELF-ORGANISATION AS METHOD: the case of platform Chto Delat

by Chto Delat

Participants: Alessia Brancaccio Chiara de Maria Danilo Mariniello Eva Durovec Ginevra Ludovici Isabella Nardon Ornella De Carlo Stefano Volpato Tsamani Tovar Nino Vanessa Mona Yuliya Say

Photo: The Slow Orientation in Zapatism #2017- ongoing, by Chto Delat. Courtesy of the artists.

28 / 30 May 2019

The heterogeneous composition and the different backgrounds of the nine members of Chto Delat is reflected in the variety of their interests and activities: activism, political philosophy and aesthetics, counter-education and labour conditions are some of the themes that play a continuous and vital role within their methodologies and practices. Using a wide range of media — such as film, theatre plays, radio programmes, publishing, murals and public campaigns among others — and referring to a provocative reexamination of socialism’s past, present and future, Chto Delat interrogates the role of the artist and their engagement in society, contributes writing a “dramaturgy” of anti-neoliberalism thinking, and attempts at constructing emancipatory collective practices acting inside and outside the art world. With the aim of politicising the production of knowledge, in 2003 the group started publishing the Russian/English newspaper CHTO DELAT to discuss relevant current international political issues and at the same time confront the Russian social and political situations where basic democratic freedoms are under threat. In 2013 they opened The Rosa’s House of Culture, a space in St. Petersburg that questions the legacy of the Soviet tradition of Houses of Culture, a well-spread state-supported infrastructure for leisure and educational activities of people in the Soviet Union. The space hosts different organisations working in the field of activism

and alternative education with the aim of imagining a new model for a counter-public sphere. In the same year, they founded The School of Engaged Art, a radical art education initiative aimed at establishing a community of creative workers who use art language as a tool for the transformation of society based on the values of justice and equality.

The school is a non-accredited programme that has worked closely with about 120 young professionals who now play a decisive role in local public life, organising public campaigns and actions. Its curriculum is intentionally hybrid to experiment with collective practice and challenge the status quo of artistic life, and appeal to society at large.

For UNIDEE, artists Nikolay Oleynikov and Dmitry Vilensky from Chto Delat organised a module based on an ongoing experiment in performative dramaturgy and film-making, where the very notion of collectivity was questioned and considered as a message, a method, a tool, a desire, an obstacle.

MODULE DESCRIPTION The main idea of self-organised structures is to keep under their control the full tasks of the creation, production and distribution of art. They carry out their activity in form of creation of “Art Soviets” able to politicise cultural production

through a process of collective subjectification. The main goal of these structures is to cultivate political instincts, educate class consciousness and provoke an emancipatory activity in the spheres of labour, politics and aesthetics.

The workshop addressed many of our concerns, such as collective agency, convivial tools for education, anti-capitalist practices, the Russian situation, the public as co-creator, radical poverty, inner temporality, a quarrel concerning the common, how to choose between entrism and exodus, nonalienated relations, comradeship, social impact of micro-political interventions, heated editorial process, local optic, experiencedbased solidarity, and how art doesn’t simply reflect the world, but takes the risk to change it.

The structure of the workshop was centred around Chto Delat film practice to analyse different forms of communal living, group working, activist politics and aesthetics.

Everyday, participants watched a body of films as a starting point for discussion and activities on collectivism. For example, in Builders (2005) the artists reimagine the significance of the pose assumed by workers in the famous Soviet painting “The Builders of Bratsk” (1961) by Viktor Popkov; while “The New Deadline #17 Summer School of Orientation in Zapatism” (2017) documents the life of a group of

young people that lived for two weeks in a commune in an attempt to become one politicised body; or One night (2019), which reasons on how current populist politics is shaping our collective emotions manipulating our sense of self.

Through a number of body exercises — such as practices of comradeship —, a series of communal activities — such as cooking together — and discussions — such as asking while walking —, participants considered things like consent, care, solidarity and resistance.

At the end of the workshop and at the request of the mentors, all participants, including the mentors Nikolay Oleynikov and Dmitry

Vilensky, chose a book from the UNIDEE library which represented all the notions discussed during the 3-days all together.

CHTO DELAT The collective Chto Delat (What is to be done?) was founded in early 2003 in Petersburg by a workgroup of artists, critics, philosophers and writers from St. Petersburg, Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod, with the goal of merging political theory, art and activism. The group was constituted in May 2003 in St. Petersburg in an action called “The Refoundation of Petersburg”. Shortly afterwards, the original, as yet nameless, core group began publishing an international newspaper called Chto Delat?. The name of the group derives from a novel by the Russian 19th century writer Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and immediately brings to mind the first socialist workers’ self-organisations in Russia, which Lenin discussed in his own publication “What is to be done?” (1902). Chto Delat sees itself as an artistic cell and also as a community organiser for a variety of cultural activities intent on politicising “knowledge production”.

In 2013, Chto Delat initiated an educational platform — the School of Engaged Art in Petersburg — and also runs a space called Rosa’s House of Culture. From its inception, the collective has been publishing an English-Russian

newspaper focused on the urgent issues of Russian cultural politics, in dialogue with the international context. In 2014 the collective withdrew from the participation in Manifesta 14 in Petersburg as a local protest against the development of the Russian military intervention in Ukraine and with this act triggered a current debate on the participation in and boycott of art events.

Their artistic activity is carried out across a range of media — from video and theatre plays to radio programmes and murals — and includes art projects, seminars and public campaigns. The works of the collective are characterised by the use of alienation effect, surreal scenery, typicality and always case-based analyses of concrete social and political struggles. The aesthetics of the group is also based on heretically unpacking the artistic devices offered by Bertolt Brecht, Jean-Luck Godard and Reiner Fassbinder. The collective strongly focuses on the issue of cultural workers’ labour rights.

These activities are coordinated by a core group including Tsaplya Olga Egorova (artist), Artiom Magun (philosopher), Nikolay Oleynikov (artist), Natalia

Pershina / Glucklya (artist), Alexey Penzin (philosopher), Alexander Skidan (poet and critic), Oxana Timofeeva (philosopher), Dmitry Vilensky (artist) and Nina Gasteva (choreographer).

Recent exhibitions include: MUAC (The Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo), Mexico (solo show 2017); KOW BERLIN (solo shows 2017 and 2015), San Paulo Biennale (2014); Art, Really Useful Knowledge, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2014); Art Turning Left: How Values Changed Making 1789–2013, Tate Liverpool, Liverpool (2013); FORMER WEST: Documents, Constellations, Prospects, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2013); 10th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju (2012); Chto Delat in Baden-Baden, Staatliche Kuntsthalle, Baden-Baden (2011); Chto Delat Perestroika: Twenty Years After: 2011–1991, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2011); Ostalgia, New Museum, New York (2011); Study, Study and Act Again, Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana (solo show 2011); The Urgent Need to Struggle, Institute of Contemporary Art, London (2010).

Museum collections: The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Museum Reina Sophia, Madrid; Le Centre Pompidou, Paris; MUDAM, Luxemburg; Tretyakov Art Gallery, Moscow; KIASMA, Museum for Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco; Museum of Conteporary Art, Belgrade; and many others.

UNIDEE Modules SUMMER TERM

SUMMER CAMP:

•

• CLIM

ATE • ACTI ✳ON →

•

We are living in a time in which the human impact on our planet is having irreversible dramatic consequences on the decline of the natural world. Rather than the soft definition of climate change we should refer to the current situation as a climate breakdown, as artist Brett Bloom deliberately pointed out. In fact, the living conditions of modern Western society are based on forms of ferocious land and people exploitation that penetrates our bodies and minds, and ways of being in the world remain dependent on oil-based infrastructures without considering the effects.

In the meantime, hundreds of thousands of teenagers are demonstrating all around the world in an unprecedented protest against global warming and pollution, vowing to miss school and continue protesting until governments take action.

Since 2003, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Cittadellarte have been considering environment sustainability, promoting the Rebith Day: an annual international event dedicated to social change and eco-responsibility, to build a balanced relationship between nature and artifice. The Rebirth Day represents the celebration of the Third Paradise, a concept developed by Pistoletto to describe the beginning of a new phase for humanity (in the first paradise humans were fully integrated into nature, whereas the second is the artificial paradise),

in which to promote forms of social change and environmental sustainability.

Starting from these premises, the 2019 UNIDEE Summer Term was organised around the Summer Camp: Climate Action, led by three different artists, to respond to global warming and consider possible actions. During the camp, the participants discussed their relation with fossil sources, experimented with agroecology techniques and considered climate agency to organise alternative ways of living in relation with our landscape and other organisms.

Artists Brett Bloom, Fernando Garcia–Dory and Luigi Coppola are all committed at various levels to promoting different practices that re-examine our dependencies from energy exploitation and how we might begin to de-industrialise our individual and collective sense of self. Through the recovery of old rural traditions, participatory processes, collective control of the means of production and art, their practices propose alternatives to address how humans relate to nature.

Valerio Del Baglivo, Visiting Curator UNIDEE residency programs

UNIDEE Modules SUMMER TERM

Brett Bloom’s workshop was part of the summer camp titled CLIMATE ACTION, addressing the human impact on our planet.

During the five-day camp, two other visiting artists (Fernando Garcia-Dory and Luigi Coppola) concurrently promoted their workshops, stimulating joint activities and group discussions.

Although each participant had the possibility to approach the practices of three artists at the same time during common activities, they were divided into three groups, each led by a single visiting artist.

PETRO-SUBJECTIVITY AND SOCIAL ECOLOGY

by Brett Bloom 8 / 12 July 2019

Mediator: Sara Cattin

Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

Participants: Myrto Leventaki Alexander Gallegos Sorto Nicola Biagetti Laura Faraone Alix Cerezal Orellana

Brett Bloom is an environmental activist, artist and publisher working mainly in collaborative groups and situations. In 1998, together with artist Marc Fischer (and five others) he co-founded the Chicago-based art group Temporary Services (www. temporaryservices.org). Started as an art space, Temporary Services has continued operating, with several changes in membership and structure, producing exhibitions, events, projects and publications. Temporary Services is considered one of the most prolific art groups, with a long track record of projects in the fields of social critique, activism and communitybased art. Addressing survivalism, knowledge sharing, ecology, visionary design, collaboration and non-competitive structures, they produce temporary public services questioning the role of art in society and creative approaches to radical living.

Since the early 2000s, Temporary Services has conducted extensive research on the political, social and economic circumstances of group-working in the arts, launching the web-database Group and Spaces (subsequently upgraded to Groups and Spaces and Self-Publishers with a new web site launched in the autumn of 2019: groups.temporaryservices. org) to document the existence of artist collectives worldwide.

They published the book “Group work” (Printed Matter, NY, 2007), which provides a multitude of perspectives on the theme of creative group practice from the 1960s to the present. In 2009 Temporary Services launched Art Work: A National Conversation About Art, Labor, and Economics, a newspaper and programme of talks, exhibitions and actions on the current state of labour conditions in the art world. It was a response to the global financial collapse brought about by bank deregulation and predatory lending. The project generated public discussions in art spaces, museums, art schools and beyond for two consecutive years, initially in 98 cities in all 50 US and Puerto Rico, eventually spreading to Canada and multiple countries in Europe. Temporary Services has produced over 118 publications, as well as numerous posters and ephemera documenting their projects and exploring a range of issues from how people informally alter cities to the excesses of capitalism. In 2008 they started Half Letter Press

(www.halfletterpress.com), a publishing imprint that produces and distributes book-length works, to promote their publications and to offer support to people and projects that have had difficulty finding financial and promotional assistance through mainstream commercial channels.

In 2006 Bloom started collaborating with artist Bonnie Fortune Bloom on themes of ecology, sustainability, land and community economics. They are deeply invested in exploring the intersections of culture and ecology insisting that artists have an essential role in the global shift from lives based on a petroleum continuum to more resilient ways of being in direct relation to landscapes. Projects organised

by Bloom and Bloom include the Library of Radiant Optimism for Let’s Remake the World, the Alphabet of the Anthropocene, and making Deep Maps of PetroSubjectivity and the social-ecology of a conservation organization.

In his own practice Brett coorganises Breakdown Break Down camps, workshops and publications (www. breakdownbreakdown.net) through which participants can work to deindustrialise their sense of self and prepare for the Great Turning of climate change.

MODULE DESCRIPTION The module reflected on Brett Bloom’s long-term research on issues surrounding climate

breakdown and how we imagine the future. The artist asked a series of open questions about our relation to fossil fuels: How does our all-pervasive use of fossil fuels effect the way we see ourselves and experience the world around us? How deeply does petroleum penetrate our bodies, minds and ways of being in the world? How might we begin to deindustralise people’s individual and collective sense of self? How might you begin to think about the future in terms other than those that oil has forced upon you?

Starting from these considerations, Bloom created the neologism ‘petro-subjectivity’ to define the sense of self that arises in the industrialised world, and asked how we might begin to unravel it. In 2015 he wrote the book titled ‘Petro-Subjectivity: Deindustrializing Our Sense of Self’ setting his terms of reference for his questions (download here: https://goo.gl/vImZSX).

Petro-subjectivity, he affirms, is something that you experience constantly. It is a sense of self and the world that shapes who you are and how you think. It stems in part from the fact that the use of oil is present in everything you do.

It has shaped the concepts that govern your thinking. Your use of language and the basic concepts that structure your existence are breathed through the logic of oil relationships and form the metaphoric universe you bathe yourselves in when you speak to others about who you are, what

you do and what the world around you consists of.

During the five-day module, artist and educator Brett Bloom initiated immersive exploration of petro-subjectivity. He used various embodied techniques like Deep/ Earth Listening, which uses sonic meditations as a way to isolate and focus on very specific experiences and awarenesses of yourself and your world. He introduced Deep Mapping techniques to visualise the complexities of each person’s dependence on fossil fuels, and practical exercises like noting every time we either touched plastic or did something that relied on fossil fuels in the course of a day.

There were other special exercises, developed by Bloom, that were used to help us understand what petro-subjectivity is, how it shapes our lives, and how it limits our capacities to envision the future of our culture.

SCHEDULE DAY 1 – 8 JULY 10 – 12 am: Guided tour of Cittadellarte 12 am – 1 pm: Presentation of the whole week and first presentation of the first Visiting Artist 1 – 2,30 pm: Lunch break 2,30 – 4 pm: presentation of the other two Visiting Artists 4,30 – 6,30 pm: Visit at The Wool Company to have a presentation of wool production in the area of Biella and the activity of the Wool Consortium by Nigel Thompson.

Brett Bloom’s presentation on: Gaia Meditation Petro-Subjectivity Sonic Meditation DAY 2 – 9 JULY 10 am – 1 pm: Workshop divided in groups - Introduction to Deep Listening, Global/Focal and Heart Beat. One or two more DL exercises 1 – 2,30 pm: Lunch break 3 – 6 pm: Listening to Fossil Fuel Biella Sounds of Hope & Trauma - based on Memorial Sonic Meditation DAY 3 – 10 JULY Trekking day Lago della Vecchia (Piedicavallo, Biella) and group exercise: Extreme Slow Walking (20 minutes), followed by a silent walk (20 minutes) to a site where we do Forest/ Mountain Meditation (20-30 minutes) Introduce exercise for Day 4 Your Daily Plastic DAY 4 – 11 JULY 10 am – 1 pm: Your Daily Plastic and Deep Mapping of PetroSubjectivity 1 – 2,30 pm: Lunch break 3 – 6 pm: Continue Mapping PetroSubjectivity and Continue with Your Daily Plastic DAY 5 – 12 JULY Presentation and exchange between groups.

Brett Bloom’s presentation on his projects: Gaia Meditation, PetroSubjectivity, Sonic Meditation.

Exercise of the fourth day: Your Daily Plastic and Deep Mapping of Petro-Subjectivity.

On the final day, Brett Bloom and his group held a Deep Listening session open to everybody, on the site of the Third Paradise.

“They were all invited not to produce any noise with objects extraneous to their bodies.

At first they were arranged in a circle, sitting on the ground.

Bloom read a short text, and he then invited everybody to assume a comfortable position and close their eyes. At the sound of a xylophone, they all started modulating their voices in longlasting sounds, leading themselves and at the same time the group through a long “meditative” session. After about 45 minutes, the exercise was concluded by the repetition of the xylophone sound.”

From Sara Cattin’s report

BRETT BLOOM Brett Bloom is an artist, restoration environmentalist, publisher and certified instructor of Deep Listening. He is a co-founder of the art group Temporary Services (1998-ongoing). For the past 20+ years, he has worked in collaborative situations with others, on socially and environmentally engaged projects. In 2011, Bloom began facilitating workshops, camps and gatherings for those wanting to develop their ecological emphatic capacities with other than human landscapes, populations and processes. He creates situations and facilitates immersive experiences for people to practice what it means to live in a post fossil fuel world. Bloom has published guides with sonic meditations so people can do this work on their own or in groups. Bloom works directly in communities on ecological issues. Recent work includes a collaborative Deep Map of the conservation group ACRES Land Trust that visualises the complex social and ecological relationships they unleash through the simple act of protecting land.

Selected exhibitions, camps, commissions: Prisoners’ Inventions, Angelo & Temporary Services, at

multiple venues: MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; Athens Biennial, Athens, Greece; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; Halle 14, Leipzig, Germany, and others, 2003-2007; Collective Creativity: Common Ideas for Life and Politics, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany, January 5 - July 17, 2005; Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art, multiple venues: Smart Museum of Art, Chicago; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Museum of Art & Design, NY; Museum London, London, Canada, and others, 2006-2009; Living as Form, Creative Time, New York, NY, 2011; Alphabet of the Anthropocene (public performance by Bonnie Fortune Bloom and Brett Bloom), ACTS Performance Festival, Museum for Contemporary Art, Roskilde, Denmark, May 2014; A Proximity of Consciousness: Art and Social Action, Sullivan Galleries, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, September - January 2015; Abandoned Signs, Temporary Services at The Museum of Capitalism, Oakland, CA, June 18 – August 20, 2017; Ecovention Europe: art to transform ecologies, 1957-2017, De Domijnen, Sittard,

The Netherlands, September 3, 2017 - January 7, 2018; Breakdown Break Down Workshop, 2 Degrees Festival, Artsadmin, London, 2015; Breakdown Break Down Camp, Scottish Sculpture Workshop, Lumsden, UK, FRONTIERS IN RETREAT: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Ecology in Contemporary Art, 2013–2018.

UNIDEE Modules SUMMER TERM

EVOLUTIONARY POPULATIONS: THE SEEDS OF THE WORLD WAITING TO GERMINATE

by Luigi Coppola

Participants: Alizee Gazeau Tizo All Marilou Van Lierop Julien Prost Mediator: Sara Cattin

Photo: COME BACK TO SPINACETO, with Davide Franceschini. Fondazione Giuliani Roma e MIBACT, ROMA, 2017.

Courtesy of the artists.

8 / 12 July 2019

Luigi Coppola’s workshop was part of the summer camp titled CLIMATE ACTION, addressing the human impact on our planet.

During the five-day camp, two other visiting artists (Brett Bloom and Fernado Garcia Dory) concurrently promoted their workshops, stimulating joint activities and group discussions.

Although each participant had the possibility to approach the practices of three artists at the same time during common activities, they were divided into three groups, each led by a single visiting artist.

The work of artist Luigi Coppola occurs at the boundaries between performance, video and public art. His research is oriented towards participatory practices and politically motivated actions, which attempt to activate new collective imaginations, starting with the analysis of specific social, political and cultural contexts.

After some initial experiences in experimental theatre, the artist developed his practice researching on mechanisms for relationships and the representation of social dynamics.

In 2011 Coppola participated in establishing the House of Agricultures at Castiglione d’Otranto (Lecce). The project organises the agriculture festival “Notte Verde: Agriculture, utopie e comunità” with the aim of discussing themes such as biodiversity, permaculture and sustainability. Within this platform,

Coppola established in 2013 the “Parco Comune dei Frutti Minori” (Common garden of minor fruits) to regenerate plants of the Salento fruit heritage (the many varieties of figs, the jujube, the cornula, the rowan, the mulberries and many other native species to be protected) on reclaimed lands.

In addition to being an everexpanding educational garden, where to host laboratories and seminars on agricultural and environmental issues, the park is also a viviterium, a place of memory and spirit.

Moreover, in 2018 the artist initiated the Scuola di Agriculture (the School of Agricultures), which combines agro-ecological learning with the artistic strategies of theatre, philosophy and music, and builds upon the participatory and commoning dynamics of the community of farmers and activists who formed the cooperative Casa delle Agriculture (House of Agricultures). In a region brutally affected by industrialised agriculture, Scuola connects to the cooperative’s work of recovering and revitalising abandoned land, generating solidarity-based economies, and strengthening community. In collaboration with migrant and asylum-seeker associations, local elementary and secondary schools, agricultural institutes and associations for the elderly, the Scuola is an experiment in social solidarity. This extended community of farmers, migrants, artists, activists and citizens carry out actions.

MODULE DESCRIPTION At the summer camp, artist Luigi Coppola shared, expanded and contaminated the practice he initiated in Castiglione d’Otranto, South of Italy, called Scuola di Agriculture (School of Cultures and Agricultures). The project is a pedagogical platform that combines agroecological learning with the artistic strategies of theatre, philosophy and public art, and builds upon the participatory and commoning dynamics of the temporary community.

One of the main themes and practices explored was the “Evolutionary Populations”.

The term refers to the practice of participatory genetic improvement, which is spreading more and more on a global scale and offers an interesting outlook on a number of present day issues. This movement focuses on: ensuring food security despite climate-related uncertainties, promoting agrobiodiversity in order to improve the nutritional characteristics of the crops themselves, giving control of the seeds back to the farmers thus creating strong participatory and commoning dynamics.

The chances that evolutionary populations have to act on these issues are directly related to their ability to evolve over time. The method involves sowing mixtures containing hundreds of different varieties of seeds which come from different geographic areas of the world and leaving it to the earth to choose the varieties to

grow depending on climate and soil conditions. This agricultural choice lends itself to becoming a metaphor of how to welcome diversity without prejudice while challenging the false idea of indigenous (autochthonous) species, spreading the seeds of a new and ever-changing culture.

The notions of reproduction, crossbreeding, belonging, evolution/order/complexity, social/political engagement/ entanglement were central elements. The holistic approach of permaculture was combined with physical and theatrical exercises of Legislative Theatre (Augusto Boal’s legacy), critical observation of the monocultural landscape with experiment of polyphonic composition, and techniques of plant propagation with the comprehension of the patterns (frontiers) of commoning.

SCHEDULE DAY 1 – 8 JULY 10 – 12 am: Guided tour of Cittadellarte 12 – 1 pm: presentation of the whole week and first presentation of the first Visiting Artist 1 – 2,30 pm: Lunch break 2,30 – 4 pm: presentation of the other two Visiting Artists 4,30 – 6,30 pm: Exercises on relational dynamics and polyphony What is in a name?

Implications of language and terminologies embedded in dominant monocultural approaches.

How can one challenge the existing vocabulary underlying the politics of traditional botanical taxonomies and classifications? What new signifiers can agro-political practices articulate in order to question the power exercised through dispossession and exploitation of land, communities and biodiversity?

Luigi Coppola’s presentation on: 1. The engagement in Casa delle Agriculture: Restanza, Agricultures, Utopias and commoning process 2. Art and political engagement: exercises on political chorality 3. Evolutionary Populations DAY 2 – 9 JULY 10 am – 1 pm: Visit at The Wool Company to have a presentation of wool production in the area of Biella and the activity of the Wool Consortium by Nigel Thompson.

1 – 2,30 pm: Lunch break 3 – 6 pm: Exercises on relational dynamics and polyphony. The historical processes of cultural domination and domestication of the nature. Evolution, plant breeding and biodiversity.

DAY 3 – 10 JULY Trekking day Lago della Vecchia (Piedicavallo, Biella) and group exercise: proposition of exercises about resonance of the voice, harmony and conflict with the (natural) environment.

DAY 4 – 11 JULY 10 am – 1 pm: Exercises on relational dynamics and polyphony Artistic commoning: how art process can subvert the structure

of sovereignty and construct the common biodiversity?

1 – 2,30 pm: Lunch break 3 – 6 pm: Group walk. Principles of Permaculture and Agroforestry.

Ev. reading of some extract of texts (Holmgrein, Mollison, Fukuoka, Ceccarelli, Morton...)

DAY 5 – 12 JULY Presentation and exchange between groups.

Trekking day at Lago della Vecchia (Piedicavallo, Biella).

Luigi Coppola’s presentation on: 1. The engagement in Casa delle Agriculture: Restanza, Agricultures, Utopias and commoning process 2. Art and political engagement: exercises on political chorality 3. Evolutionary Populations

The final presentation of the group who had worked with Luigi Coppola took place on the site of the Third Paradise.

“The group started with warm up exercises for the body, also involving the use of voice in relation to both the space, and the bodies and voices of all the other components of the group.

Arranged in a circle in the round central element of the symbol drawn on the ground, they reproduced sounds, led in turn by a different person and moving in a circular pattern as a sort of human clock. In the second phase, each of them in turn became an orchestra’s conductor directing with improvised movements the others’ voices, creating compositions of sounds, screams,

etc. In the third phase, the participants were scattered across the room, and the individual, as well as the collective, combination of the extemporaneous sounds assumed a more organic character, playing with volumes, echoes, the architecture and everybody’s need to express themselves. The exercise lasted about an hour.”

From Sara Cattin’s report

LUIGI COPPOLA Luigi Coppola (Belgium/Italy) is an artist, activist and promoter of participative projects and politically-motivated actions.

His artistic practice is connected with the process of social reappropriation of the commons, which starts with an analysis of specific social, political and cultural contexts. He trained both as a scientist and in the field of art.

Luigi is involved with Casa delle Agriculture, a project in Castiglione d’Otranto, Southern Italy, which seeks to revive abandoned land, repopulate the countryside, generate a sustainable economy and strengthen community cohesion. As part of this, Luigi is co-director of the Green Night festival, which combines agroecological learning with artistic strategies, and builds upon the participatory and commoning dynamics of the community of migrants, farmers and activists.

He has developed projects, performances, installations and exhibitions in international contexts, including: Fondazione Merz Turin, 2018; BAK Utrecht, 2018; Kunsthaus Graz, 2017; Quadriennale Roma, 2017; Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn, 2017; Teatro Continuo, Milan, 2016; Parckdesign, Brussels, 2016;

Athens Biennale, Athens, 2015; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, 2012; Steirischer Herbst, Graz, 2012; and Democracy Biennale, Turin, 2009.

Luigi was joint artistic director with Michelangelo Pistoletto of the Bordeaux Urban Art Biennale – Evento 2011, Art for an Urban Reevolution, and part of the research group Art in Society at the Fontys Academy of Tilburg, NL. In 2017/2018 he was a fellow at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, NL.

UNIDEE Modules SUMMER TERM

Fernando García-Dory’s workshop was part of the summer camp titled CLIMATE ACTION, addressing the human impact on our planet. During the five-day camp, two other visiting artists (Brett Bloom and Luigi Coppola) concurrently promoted their workshops, stimulating joint activities and group discussions.

Although each participant had the possibility to approach the practices of three artists at the same time during common activities, they were divided into three groups, each led by a single visiting artist.

TOWARDS AN EXPANDED LANDSCAPE

by Fernando Garcia Dory 8 / 12 July 2019

Mediator: Sara Cattin

Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

Participants: Jessica Piette Bianca Lee Vasquez Gabriele Dini Trine Bumiller Owen Griffiths Nicolas Amaro

Contrary to its dormant or idyllic image, the countryside has become host to some of the most pressing issues of our time: acculturation, autonomy, ecological models and food production, the enclosure of the commons as well as the resurgence of functional art. In seeking strategies to engage with these issues, Fernando García-Dory conceived INLAND (2009–present), which he defines as a “para-institution of polyvalent specialist mobile units working in emergency contexts that always operate in relation to an ‘official’ institution, that is, a state, a company, or an art institution.”

INLAND’s research centres on probing the role of territories, geopolitics, culture and identity between the city and countryside.

Its projects are rooted in a wide variety of communities and places.

And while each project has its own character and duration, it is

always connected to a specific department of INLAND such as “Knowledge”, “Training” and “Production”, as well as to the larger self-organised and self-sustained INLAND system.

INLAND’s activities include: study groups; publications; training schools for shepherds, peasant leaders and craftsmen; newly commissioned projects by artists and farmers; involvement in local politics; and solidarity networks.

In sum, INLAND is an imaginative, inquisitive and practical method for relating with our environment that gleans insight from peasant and indigenous resistance while also appropriating institutional means.

MODULE DESCRIPTION The workshop was inspired

by INLAND methodologies, a nomadic para-institution GarcíaDory set up in Spain to examine the role of territories, geopolitics, culture and identity between city and countryside, art and agriculture. The course was furthermore connected to New Curriculum, INLAND´s inquiry into “composition of knowledges” and how to develop a multisensory and interdisciplinary reading of landscapes and forms of intervention that also look at “community economies” which aims to bring hidden or undervalued economies and commoning practices to light.

As the economic, environmental and cultural model in which we

live continues to collapse, every day more people across the world are starting to realise that the once promised lifestyle, now dictated to them by capitalist governance, is no longer (and for many has never been) fulfilling, meaningful or even viable. Hence the need to understand historical resistant realities (as the peasant or indigenous) and their knowledges as the commons model of management of resources.

As activist and theoretician Silvia Federici states: “For me the idea of the commons is that of a society built on the principle of solidarity rather than the principle of self-interest and competition. It is a society in which wealth is shared, there is collective decision making, and production is for our wellbeing and not for monetary accumulation. It would therefore involve a radical change. I would not call it a takeover, however.

That society is still only on the horizon. But we can begin to create new types of relations.”

For García-Dory, those new types of relations are tactically more accessible and visible in rural and peripheral areas, where the most pressing issues of our time are being played out, from questions of acculturation, autonomy, ecology models or food production to the enclosure of the commons. By reuniting the city and the countryside, moving away from urban-centred discourses towards local, peripheral and non-

anthropocentrical knowledges and sites, forms of experience linked to a new materiality and sustainable living may be possible.

With the commons as our plane of interest and the land we live on as our research topic, we aimed at questioning our understanding of economy and the role of the cultural producers within it.

Initial research questions for the workshop were: How is the current landscape the result of local, rural and urban peasant’s practices and knowledges as well as industrial and urban dynamics? How to move toward more sustainable futures?

How could cultural interventions contribute to that movement?

Which draft ideas, possible tools or actions could be suggested?

Participants were invited to take part in different form of drafting, from actual landscape drawing to the design and narration of possible futures of the context of work. Gathering perceptions, experiences, visions and challenges from local actors they were in exchange with was also part of the learning process.

SCHEDULE DAY 1 – 8 JULY 10 – 12 am: Guided tour of Cittadellarte 12 am – 1 pm: presentation of the whole week and first presentation of the first Visiting Artist 1 – 2,30 pm: Lunch break 2,30 – 4 pm: presentation of the other two Visiting Artists

4,30 – 6,30 pm: Workshop divided in groups - presentations of participants and approach to the objectives and methodology of the workshop.

DAY 2 – 9 JULY 10 am – 1 pm: Visit at The Wool Company to have a presentation of wool production in the area of Biella and the activity of the Wool Consortium by Nigel Thompson.

1 – 2,30 pm: Lunch break 3 – 6 pm: Workshop divided in groups: Different forms of reading landscape.

DAY 3 – 10 JULY Trekking day at Lago della Vecchia (Piedicavallo, Biella) and group exercise: (tbc).

DAY 4 – 11 JULY 10 am – 1 pm: Workshop: Fictional landscapes: a speculation on possible evolutions of a place.

1 – 2,30 pm: Lunch break 3 – 6 pm: Workshop: Forms of place-making and cultural strategies on rural resignification.

DAY 5 – 12 JULY Presentation and exchange between groups.

Visit at The Wool Company with Nigel Thompson.

Fernando GarcĂ­a-Dory presented his research and projects.

Fernando García-Dory and his group presented the workshop’s contents in the Let Eat Bi’s garden, interpreting the space as a sort of both “natural” and “domestic” micro-environment.

“García-Dory’s group presented the idea - in phase of development - of creating a glossary of new terms, either invented (landemology, landimacy, monteritic, unmetafore, etc.) or already existing but reinterpreted (nature, roaming, landscape, etc.), with the objective of starting a process of re-contextualisation of our dialectic and of the paradigm Nature/Culture, the binomial pair separating mankind from the so called “natural environment”.

During the presentation of the words, a discussion among everyone present opened on the importance of reasoning about our language, of identifying the ancient root that emphasises the politics implied in Western culture, of defining contemporary terms and concepts in order to recognise fascist demagogies, of the operations of translation, and more. García-Dory’s group decided to keep working on the glossary remaining in touch after the end of the module.”

From Sara Cattin’s report

FERNANDO GARCÍA-DORY Fernando García-Dory´s work engages specifically with the relationship between culture and nature as manifested in multiple contexts, from the landscape and the rural to desires and expectations in relation to identity.

Interested in the harmonic complexity of biological forms and processes, his work addresses connections and cooperation, from microorganisms to social systems, and from traditional artistic drawing of languages to collaborative agroecological projects and actions. He studied Fine Arts and Rural Sociology, and is now working on his PhD in Agroecology. He has developed projects and shown his work at Tensta Konsthalle, Van Abbe Museum, Reina Sofia Museum, SFMOMA, dOCUMENTA 12 and the Biennales of Gwangju, Istanbul and Athens.

Since 2010 he has been developing a project about a system called INLAND, in which he dissolves his authorship.

INLAND is an arts collective dedicated to agricultural, social and cultural production, and a collaborative agency.

It was started in 2009 by Fernando García-Dory as a project about an organisation that engages

territories, culture and social change. During its first stage (2010-2013) and taking Spain as initial case study, INLAND carried out an international conference, an artistic production with 22 artists in residence in as many villages across the country, and nationwide exhibitions and presentations. This was followed by a period of reflection and evaluation, launching study groups on art and ecology, and a series of publications. Today INLAND functions as a collective and works as a para-institution to open space for land-based collaborations, economies and communities-ofpractice as a substrate for postcontemporary artistic cultural forms. Appearing in different forms in different countries, whilst dissolving individual agency in the collective, INLAND publishes books, produces shows and makes cheese. It also advises as a consultant for the European Union Commission on the use of art for rural development policies while facilitating shepherds’ and nomadic peoples’ movements, and is recovering an abandoned village in an undisclosed location for collective artistic and agricultural production. It was presented at the Istanbul Bienniale (2015), and

has collaborated with Casco Art Projects in Holland, PAV Torino in Italy and the Maebashi Museum in Japan. In 2017 it worked at Contemporary Arts Glasgow, MALBA, Matadero Madrid and Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellin, and developed field actions in Italy (TRANSART Festival Bolzano and Puglia) and at the Jeju Bienniale, South Korea.

INLAND was then awarded the Council of Forms, Paris and the Carasso Foundation prizes for finalising New Curriculum, a project devoted to training the artists and rural agents of the future. In 2019 it worked with Serpentine London and Pompidou Paris.

UNIDEE Modules SUMMER TERM

RITUALS OF THE CONTEMPORARY

by Fiamma Montezemolo and the guest Cristiana Giordano in partnership with Fondazione Zegna

Participants: Vitalij Strigunkov Elena Artemenko Antonio Ianniello Amy Pekal Eleonora Roaro Lucandrea Baraldi Mediator: Mariacarla Molè

Photo: Neon Afterwords, by Fiamma Montezemolo, 2016. Courtesy National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rome.

14 / 20 July 2019

This module aimed at reflecting on the notion of the ritual, its current meaning and practice. In the last years many disciplines (religion studies, anthropology, philosophy, art, socio-biology) have approached the ritualistic and its role in making ‘visible’ a certain order in a specific context, in showing ‘the proven way of doing something’, which is the etymology of the word. As Catherine Bell says, ritualisation is “a way of acting that is designed and orchestrated to distinguish and privilege what is being done in comparison to other, usually more quotidian, activities”.

The ritual involves, in general, a series of choreographed practices based on images, words, activities, objects, symbols that are organised in a performative act. The ritualistic act requires whomever is involved to cross 3 phases: separation / threshold / aggregation (V. Turner). The initiated is pushed to ‘plunge’ in a sort of liminal phase in which he/she is immersed in an antistructure/chaos (changing clothes, food, hallucination, dwelling in unusual spaces, loss of usual cultural references, etc.) for a definite period of time and in a specific space in order to reemerge to a renewed status and way to influence the cosmos.

The participants were invited to reflect on the ritual and envision their own performative act. They did so by recreating a ‘rite of passage’, or ‘seasonal rite’, or ‘life event rite’, or ‘rite of exchange’

of their own choosing, through an investigation of the ritual in art, focusing the module on contemporary socio-cultural rites in the territory of Trivero and Oasi Zegna. In classic anthropology, the main understanding of the ritual is that the ‘liminal phase’ ultimately brings to an act of reintegration into a certain societal group. In contrast, their main question was: could an art work make the liminal a more permanent condition and bring us to a new order instead of a pre-established one?

The participants worked on the association of performance and ritual stressing their processual, indefinite dimension, and transformative possibilities, thus making the threshold of the liminal the main source of their creative acts.

SCHEDULE SUNDAY 14 JULY morning Introduction of mentor and participants afternoon Concept: the ritual / the liminal MONDAY 15 JULY morning 9.30 am: Guided tour of Cittadellarte.

How artists have used the ritual (Yoko Ono, Gina Pane, Joseph Beuys, Ana Mendieta, Hermann Nitsch, Adrian Paci, Guillermo Gómez Peña, Karrabing Collective, Zhao Yao, Susan Hiller, Jeremy Shaw)

afternoon Guest speaker Cristiana Giordano on performance as ritual TUESDAY 16 JULY morning 8.20 am: Trip to Trivero 9.15 am: Welcome and visit to Casa Zegna 11.30 am – 1 pm: Visit to Lanificio Ermenegildo Zegna factory and lunch in their restaurant afternoon 2 pm: Guided tour of Opere all’Aperto and Trivero with Linda Angeli, overview across the Panoramica road and Italian aperitif at Margosio 7 pm: Check in and dinner at Castagneto WEDNESDAY 17 JULY 9 am: Check out from Castagneto 9.30 am: Session of individual / group work in Trivero Packed lunch Return journey to Cittadellarte in the late afternoon THURSDAY 18 JULY Individual work and discussion with mentor FRIDAY 19 JULY Project finalisation SATURDAY 20 JULY morning Finalisation of the participants’ projects and set-up afternoon Public presentation of the projects and discussion about the outcome of the workshop

Introduction to the module with Fiamma Montezemolo: the concepts of ritual and liminal.

Bibliography: • “3000 Years of Algorithmic Rituals: The Emergence of AI from the Computation of Space”, Matteo Pasquinelli • What is the Contemporary?, Giorgio Agamben • The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin • Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, Catherine Bell • Purity and Danger. An analysis of the concept of pollution and taboo, Mary Douglas

• From Ritual to Theatre. The Human Seriousness of Play, Victor Turner • Deep play: notes on the Balinese cockfight, Clifford Geertz • The Effectiveness of Symbols, Claude Lévi-Strauss • Marking Time. On the Anthropology of the Contemporary, Paul Rabinow • The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Victor Turner • Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology, Victor Turner

Visit to Casa Zegna, Lanificio Ermenegildo Zegna factory and guided tour of Opere all’Aperto and Trivero.

Affect Theater: Ethnography and Theatrical Composition Co-developed by Cristiana Giordano (University of California, Davis) and Greg Pierotti (University of Arizona)

Note: In this four-hour workshop, we encourage participants from both theater and social sciences to include their own empirical material (field notes, interview transcripts, archival material, images, legal and medical documents, soundscapes, etc.) as a part of the source material we utilize in our devising practices. This is not a requirement of the workshop.

This workshop is a cross-pollination between social research and narrative practices in performance and anthropology.

We use the practice of Affect Theater, to create a dialogue between these disciplines in a laboratory format, using theatrical techniques to engage empirical questions and material. Rather than merely enacting or performing ethnographic findings, we put the elements of the stage (lights, sets, objects, sound, bodies etc.) into conversation with our research material. This method of theatrical composition generates surprising and often more affective analyses. In this workshop, we explore how anthropologists can develop a more performative and visceral understanding of narrative through theater composition and how performers and artists can develop a more nuanced understanding of political and cultural contexts using social science methods.

Here are some guidelines on how to prepare for it: 1. Please dress comfortably and for movement as we will start our afternoon with a short and easy physical warm up, and of course I suggest you bring water for the day. 2. Bring a few costume/clothing pieces - these can be anything really. It would be nice if we had some pedestrian items as well as some more theatrical or frivolous things. If you have one or two of each, great. Otherwise, just bring a couple of pieces of clothing that interest you for whatever reason, color, shape, weight, texture, pattern.

Could be anything really!

3. Please bring some objects/ props to explore as well. Again, a wide spectrum from pedestrian to extraordinary is great. The only thing to bear in mind here is that we will be looking at the theatrical capacities of the objects with the audience experience in mind, so if it is something super tiny, it may not read. I would encourage you to bring something small if it interests you, but if it’s teensy weensy maybe bring a couple of other options as well!

4. Please bring some text (1 page max) from your ethnographic/ empirical/research material: it can be from interview transcripts, field notes, newspaper articles, poems, paragraphs from your favorite novel, etc. It has to contain some language.

5. Please highlight, write out or type up a few sentences from any of the research materials that you have chosen to bring to the workshop. This needn’t be too labor intensive. Maybe you already remember a striking image or phrase from something you have already read. Just one or two lines that are compelling to you for whatever reason is sufficient.

6. We may work with some sound. if you would like to bring links on your smartphone to sound samples that interest you, please do.

7. Bring in one light source (nonflammable). Your phones and computers are light sources, but you can also bring a flash light, a pin light, etc., if you are so inclined.

We were in the dynamic space of Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto, in an extremely concentrated time frame, i.e. the international artists’ residency programme of Unidee – University of Ideas, this year curated by Valerio Del Baglivo.

The totemic element from which to build a shared discussion was the rituality developed in the area around Trivero (BI), suspended between the work dimension linked to Lanificio Ermenegildo Zegna and the recreational dimension linked to the natural reserve of Oasi Zegna.

Against this very special background, in the week of the 14th July, Fiamma Montezemolo, artist, anthropologist and mentor of the module, led six artists coming from Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Russia and the United States - through the theory and practice of rituals.

THE THREADS In a contemporaneity that has replaced the time of bells with the time of watches, the ritual — intended as a meta-category connecting religious and secular, human and non-human, prescribed or spontaneous events

Rituals of the Contemporary wanted to investigate rituals in contemporaneity, seen as a time not saturated in what we are living, but asking to be inhabited without ever completely adhering to it, always keeping a certain distance, an unalignment, and going through its anachronisms and atopicality (G. Agamben1).

F.M. led the participants — a quite diversified group in their interests, ranging from performance to video, design, visual art — on a journey through the anthropological tradition linked to the ritual, highlighting the most salient points.

Giorgio Agamben, What is the contemporary?

Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: toward theory in ritual, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, London, 1987.

Text by Mariacarla Molè

2

OF THE MODULE RITUALS OF THE CONTEMPORARY

— might seem to be obsolete and impracticable. But on more attentive examination, we realise that we are immersed in rituals, both in their more improvised, frivolous and private forms and in their prescribing and social relevant ones — public ceremonies, sports events, fleeting trends, ‘coffee and cigarette’ moments, carnivals and Christmas lunches.

1

LIMINAL THINKING FOR A TRANSFORMATIVE PRACTICE | A STORY

The first step was the identification of the constituting elements of the ritual: a special place, a special time, a special action, able to mould a reality alternative to the ordinary.

The workshop then continued with an investigation of the different positions in the scientific debate, starting from J. Z. Smith2,

Arnold Van Gennep, Rites of Passage.

Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre.

According to V. Crapanzano 6’s reversed perspective, born from the observation of circumcision practices in Morocco (with an approach focusing on the subject involved and on the psychological implications), the ritual would grant the individual a place

8

3

Ronald L. Grimes, The Craft of Ritual Studies, Oxford University Press, 2014.

4 Émile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life.

5 Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (curated by), The invention of Tradition.

6 Vincent Crapanzano, Tuhami. Portrait of a Moroccan.

A theoretical tradition long rooted in a conservative attitude emerged, in which the ritual has a strong congregational value for the community, which — seeing its unity reflected in an object of cult, a fetish or a totem — experiences a strengthening of social cohesion among its members (E. Durkheim4). From this same perspective, rituality keeps the tradition healthy, be it real or invented 5, with the aim of legitimising values and rules that would be grounded in a glorious past.

in the community, and therefore in history, not with a progression from one phase to the next, but through a form of Oedipal deprivation and detachment from an original condition, generating feelings of fear and pain. The ritual would therefore be a cultural creation relying on human neurosis as its fundamental instrument.

From yet another perspective, the ritual shows itself able to modify a pre-defined order, besides maintaining it.

A vision in which the ritual becomes a connecting device between different existential conditions or social categories, as a margin dilating the moment of separation, emphasising it, imbuing it with the typical gradualness of the ritual (A. Van Gennep 7). Borrowed from Van Gennep, this concept assumes a central role in the thought of V. Turner 8 in the form of the liminal, intended as an area of passage and threshold between defined cultural systems. A phase in which the structural form of society can be inverted, its temporality suspended, and a hint of subversion introduced.

So that the breakdown of culture into its constituting factors can generate new models, symbols and paradigms by freely reassembling them.

7

who considers space the crucial element in the construction of a ritual environment, and the necessary condition for empty actions to become rituals within it. A perspective reversed by R. L. Grimes 3, who attributes major relevance to the actions performed within the space, reducing the objects and the place of the ritual to mere facilitators of these actions, which remain at the heart of the practice.

By repeating and reproducing itself, the ritual acquires the power to become the driving force of transformation and

10

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition.

Richard Schechner, Performance Theory.

THE WARP With the idea of the ritual as a dimension with a beginning and an end, circumscribed in a special place and time, comes the invitation to inhabit what is inside as a creative moment.

In this sense, a fundamental passage in the elaboration of a collaborative device was the afternoon spent with Cristiana Giordano, anthropologist and creator, who, together with actor and playwright Gregor Pierotti, had devised a workshop formula combining social research and narrative practices, to develop theatre performances called moments, for their creative

9

an activator of difference starting from repetition (G. Deleuze 9).

The ritual would therefore have a deeply transformative matrix, in its drawing from past behaviours each time modifying them. It is a “recuperating of a behaviour giving individuals and groups the opportunity to become what they have already previously been or even, and more often, what they have never been, but they wish to become� (R. Schechner 10).

Each of these contributions to the debate came to be an instrument in the hands of the six participants, threads on which to build their individual reasoning, and with which to feed their individual practices.

immediacy.

Starting from the deconstruction of the traditional hierarchy placing the text as the main element of the theatre composition, the workshop opened with a phenomenological investigation of the structural elements of space, of its light and sound sources, and of the gestures they can originate; discoveries that each participant shared with the group and that subsequently gave life to performative moments dazzling in their brevity and intensity, in a temporal arc included between the words we begin and we end.

The performance was the result of a collaborative process physically interacting with the site-specific elements discovered, and with the objects and texts each participant had brought with them.

The narrative and textual approach therefore became only one among endless possibilities to create traces destined to the public. Traces that at the end of each presentation were analysed on a structural level (in the elements that had revealed a narrative potential) and on an interpretative level (in the meaning they had generated and hence conveyed to the public). In the economy of the whole module, the method evolved into a model for a collaborative performative practice, in the measure in which it provides the instruments to develop a shared discourse starting from the specific elements of a place, in a strict and restricting time.

With these precious instruments,

added to the original theoretical elements, the visits to Lanificio Ermenegildo Zegna and Oasi Zegna assumed the characteristics of a field research.

The space of the factory thus represented an opportunity to analyse its components, as if they were elements of a potential ritual practice.

The compartmentation of space, linked to the different phases in processing raw materials, continually creates a detachment between an inside and an outside, between semantic ecosystems, with the subsequent mutation of the conditions of light and heath, smell and sound.

The temporality was the one typical of work, defined by sirens marking the beginning and the end of a shift, while on the inside the gestures were determined by the interaction with the machinery, in its obsessive and obstinate repetitiveness, or in the meticulous and maniacal care in the research for imperfections in the fabrics.

A reality that was apparently quite far from a ritual dimension revealed itself to be an incredible source of elements on which to reflect, to invest them with a narrative meaning and use them as performative material.

Equally, the visit to the Oasi highlighted the importance of the specificity of the place in the production of practices that have become relevant and transformative for the Trivero community. Particularly, their being able to rely on the quality

of water (extremely soft thanks to its molecular composition), which, being used to wash the wool, has made a difference and therefore the fortune of Lanificio Zegna.

Here, water has acquired the value of a totemic element, giving the area a sort of a magical charge, creating a context in which to carry out transformative practices.

If the theoretical elements, the practice of the workshop and the field research at the Zegna factory and reserve had brought six very different practices to align in a common sensibility, like the aligned threads of a warp, in the following phase — of production, made of individual work and continuous exchanges, adjustments, epiphanies and diversions — the warp became weft, with the various practices crisscrossing each other contaminating, flanking and colliding with one another.

THE WEFT We were at the end, at the restitution phase, and the metaphor of the ritual had become more and more vivid. A siren activated by Fiamma Montezemolo — who welcomed us, sitting at a desk, in a black skirt suit, clearly the officiant of the ritual — called everybody to order, tearing through ordinary time, and invited us into an out-of-the-ordinary space-time dimension.

The entrance door to the UNIDEE room — which throughout the week had been classroom, stage and studio — had been screened

The image of the hanging curtain was perfectly superimposed on the surface of the installed sheet, blending together to create a threshold, an opening, as illusory as real-like, into the space of the ritual we were participating in.

In the video installation To Exit Is To Enter To Enter Is To Exit, Eleonora Roaro, interested in

moving images and proto-cinema, emulated one of the first films by the Lumière brothers, La sortie de l’usine (France, 1895), to represent the entrance to the factory in the form of the liminal, the entry into a dimension, i.e. work, or specifically the one of the ritual.

→

with a semi-transparent plastic sheet recalling, in 1:1 scale, the doors separating the different departments of the factory. On the opaque surface, a projector cast in loop the frame of one of the internal areas of Lanificio Zegna, which became a ghostly presence, in the regular repetitiveness of the space, punctuated by neon lights and symmetrical pillars.

Eleonora Roaro installation

→

Beyond the opening, a series of totemic objects placed on the floor and hanging from the ceiling punctuated the space of the ritual and moulded the environment.

Their softness was an invitation to get close to them to stroke and handle them to discover their forms, while their smell transported us far away from that room, to the machinery, the products and the vapours of the factory. Amy Pekal embodied in her practice the liturgy of the movements repeated by the machines, stretching and twisting the yarn, weaving waste material into sculptures with organic forms: a river, a nest, an upside-down mountain, a tree trunk. Her body completely lent itself to the mechanics of the machinery, absorbing its repetitive

Amy Pekal installation

gestures, even its smell, and its temporality entirely based on the mass of raw material, which she continued to weave until it finished.

The manipulating dimension of the movements of the machines

where to stand or what to do, even if nothing had been explicitly forbidden. The device was simple but explosive, and it illustrated in clear and unbearable terms how our bodies are completely tamed by prescriptions not always clearly expressed but absolutely introjected.

Back in the UNIDEE room, Lucandrea Baraldi presented his alchemic box, made of wood, divided in three sections, dedicated to organic material, artificial material, and the middle one — the biggest — to the meeting of the two. Moving across the space of the factory and the surrounding areas,

→

was the central element also in the work of Elena Artemenko, who used it as a starting point to develop her performance in Fondazione Pistoletto’s Sale Auliche, where she invited guests to enter to then ask them to gradually move towards the end of the room. It was a mute request, performed by progressively delimiting the space accessible to the people present, stretching a thread of red wool from one end to the other, proceeding with a decisive and inexorable stride. The limit, well visible at the end of the performance, a red crisscrossing suspended between the wooden floor and the stuccos, eventually saturated the space leaving the guests squeezed at the back, in the awkward state of not knowing

Elena Artemenko performance

In a smaller, darker room, Antonio Ianniello, extremely smart in an Ermenegildo Zegna suit and

→

in their liminality, through his practice the materials had become sensitive and vibrant, having lost every form of passivity.

Interested in objects for their ability to modify our relationship with the environment, he acted like Lévis-Strauss’s bricoleur, gathering fragments through which to analyse reality and experiment with new possibilities.

The crossing of categories and the discovery of new elective affinities between forms, lines and colours had activated the incredibly transformative potential of materials, from which he derived new narratives.

Lucandrea Baraldi installation

laced shoes, introduced us — through the performance lecture Sclera — to the object of his study in progress on the Cooperative eye hypothesis (elaborated by Michael Tomasello), according to which the white sclera is what distinguishes us from primates in

→ our ability to collaborate, inasmuch as it allows us to communicate and therefore cooperate. In the presentation, slides followed one another, while the voice of the narrator was gradually being drawn out by a deafening screeching of monkeys eventually dominating the sound landscape.

The discomfort was acute to the point of seemingly disrupting the projection, and the writings started to erase themselves leaving room for thicker and thicker lines that ended up obscuring the whole screen. The condition thus created was profoundly disturbing in its prolonged duration, and, with sadistic irony, it was imposing a time that had to be gone through for the catharsis to be total. It was a reversing process, primates

Antonio Ianniello performance lecture

were bursting in with a certain arrogance to reoccupy the place they had lost in the course of evolution, closing an ancient circle.

The taste of a rite of passage, with its share of pain and humiliation, was strong, with the same opportunity to be transformed by it.

Much more delicate were the tones of the work by Vitalij Stringunkov, in which the ritual assumed the traits of a daily practice, of taking care, repeated in the simplicity of its smallest but necessary gestures, in this case reserved for artworks.

Caring was in video format, and presented three moments in which the artist himself was taking

Some transformations were evident and incisive, others were minimal but effective. Some were left ingrained in matter, others in a concept, others in practice. Some belonged to the there and then, others – barely seen or touched –

to the future, but the hope is that they might come back, over and over again, in the form of violent backwashes, unforeseen outbursts or acute drippings.

→

care of some of the works in the project All’aperto, promoted by Fondazione Zegna, featuring works of contemporary artists installed in public spaces in Trivero, and of one from Fondazione Pistoletto’s collection. The dedication of the finely measured gestures revealed an attention of both a cultural and a social kind, performed with the precision of movements that characterises rituals. The siren blared again, the ritual was complete.

Vitalij Stringunkov installation

FIAMMA MONTEZEMOLO

CRISTIANA GIORDANO

Fiamma Montezemolo is both an artist (MFA, San Francisco Art Institute) and a cultural anthropologist (PhD, Universita’ degli Studi Orientali di Napoli).

She is an established scholar in border studies and an Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema & Digital Media at the University of California, Davis.

She works mainly with installation and video. Her artwork has been widely exhibited both nationally and internationally, and she is represented by the Magazzino gallery in Rome. She authored and co-authored several articles and books, among them: Tijuana Dreaming: Life and Art at the Global Border (Duke University Press), Here is Tijuana (Black Dog Publishing), and Senza Volto: l’etnicita’ e il genere nel movimento Zapatista (Liguori).

Cristiana Giordano is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis.

She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

Her book, Migrants in Translation.

Caring and the Logics of Difference in Contemporary Italy (University of California Press, 2014), won the Victor Turner Book Prize for ethnographic writing (2016) and the Boyer Prize in Psychoanalytic Anthropology (2017). This book addresses the politics of migration in Europe through the lens of ethno-psychiatry and its radical critique of psychiatric, legal and moral categories of recognition of foreign others. Her current research investigates new ways of rendering ethnographic material into artistic forms. Together with playwright and director Greg Pierotti, she has created and produced Unstories and Unstories II (roaming), two 50-minute performances roughly around the current “refugee crisis” in Europe.

UNIDEE Modules FALL TERM

•

→ MO

• DES

•OF

INS✳ •TITU TING

When Michelangelo Pistoletto founded Cittadellarte in 1998, he questioned the social and political role of artists and the function of art organisations in society, with the aim of conceiving an institution fully dedicated to promoting sustainable social changes. How can we inspire the raising of a self-critical art institution that intervenes in the current political debate? And how can we create organisations where people of different class, gender and race interact to find possible solutions to improve civic society? These were some of the main questions that animated the founding of Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto. Today, the foundation coordinates eleven International Rebirth Forums in which a network of civil organisations implements the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in several local-scale community projects.

migration flows towards the West.

Perhaps the art field, in spite of all its contradictions, still represents today one of the agoras where to actively promote collective debates on current political disputes.

After twenty-one years from the establishment of Cittadellarte, the political, economic and social conditions that motivate artists constituting art organisations have changed drastically. We are experiencing times of profound and rapid transformations, whose impacts cannot be in any way addressed on a one-person scale.

Particularly, a sense of anxious urgency pervades our lives when confronting two of our major (and interrelated) current concerns: the apparently unrestrainable phenomenon of global warming and the increase of uncontrolled

Bringing together a plethora of international experts, the Fall Term was dedicated to discussing how we can establish ethical principles to shape art organisations not only as centres of power, hierarchy, control and discipline.

Specifically, on the traces of Michelangelo Pistoletto’s methodology, we discussed what are the ways in which art institutions can (un)learn from artistic practices that engage and create communities around issues of concern, and how to shape organisations where audiences are not considered as passive

The Fall Term titled Modes of Instituting aimed at investigating how artists engage in stretching the very notion of artistic practice beyond the dominant model of art making (Jason E. Bowman, 2016), to invent new organisations that expand art’s intervention into society. We refer to this methodology as instituting — i.e the process of building institutions as a cultural and critical act. At Cittadellarte, the act of instituting responds to four principles: engaging in long term projects, promoting social critique, favouring collective participation on local scale and endorsing multidisciplinary discussion.

receivers of predefined contents, but as active members of a constituent body, from which to be provoked, getting inspired and learning, in order to bring those same issues of concern to public attention.

FORMAT The Fall Term was dedicated to imagining the role of art organisations in times of perennial crisis, and to discussing what their future(s) in the next twenty years would be.

A group of eight young artists and curators from Italy and beyond were selected to follow the one-month programme and to produce a final document on how contemporary art organisations should work as places for political agency, community building and social change: Agil Abdullayev, Gaia Di Lorenzo, Nicholas Ferrara, Giulia Floris, Carlotta Sofia Grassi, Majd Nasrallah, Yates Norton and Carolina Ongaro.

In addition to the workshop programme, a series of conferences on streaming were organised with directors of European art institutions to discuss forms of instituting otherwise: Charles Esche (Director Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven), Melanie Bouteloup (Director Betonsalon - Centre d’art et de recherche, Paris), Cecilia Widenheim (Director Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm) and Francis Mckee (Director CCA Glasgow).

The whole Modes of Instituting Fall programme was entirely supported by Cittadellarte’s historical partner illycaffé S.p.A., also with a workshop exclusively dedicated to young creatives and designers conducted by the duo Cooking Sections called “Climavore”. The duo proposed to work on the production and consumption of foods that react to climatic events induced by man and landscape alterations.

Valerio Del Baglivo, Visiting Curator UNIDEE residency programs

PARTICIPANTS

AGIL ABDULLAYEV Agil Abdullayev (b. 1992, Baku, Azerbaijan) is a multidisciplinary artist and social art practitioner, based in Baku. Primarily working in the fields of moving image, performance and photography, his practice examines the Caucasian queer identity that has been shaped by the historical, cultural and social background.

Abdullayev’s works aim at facilitating a dialogue of identity and society with a contrast of the subjects such as femininity and masculinity, public life and private life, politics and society, western and eastern cultural standards, bridging the spaces between these subjects. Agil graduated with a BA Fine Arts with First Class Honour at Nottingham Trent University in 2018, and has been selected for several awards and grants, such as Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2018 “Attic Residency” by One Throsby Street in Nottingham, UK; and the “Arts and Culture” grant by the Swiss Corporation Office. Abdullayev’s works have been shown in group and solo exhibitions such as Tbilisi Photo Festival, 2019; Photographers’ Gallery London, 2019; Liverpool Biennial, 2018; The Wrong - New Digital Art

Biennale, 2017; Tate Modern, 2016; 4th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, 2012.

Currently, Agil Abdullayev lives and works in Baku.

GAIA DI LORENZO Gaia Di Lorenzo is an Italian artist.

In 2013 she graduated in Literature and Philosophy at the University of Tor Vergata, and in 2016 in Fine Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London. Since 2013 she has been writing about contemporary and aesthetic art on Tempo Presente.

Between 2014 and 2016 she continued the SHIFT exhibition project in London. In 2015 she organised an artistic residence in Ansedonia, Tuscany. In 2017 she was nominated finalist for the Menabrea Prize. Her most recent exhibitions include: We Contain Each Other, at the Galleria Ada, Rome; Sitting Amongst, in collaboration with Pietro Librizzi from Jupiter Woods, London; An Entertainment in Conversation and Verse, curated by Maria Adele Del Vecchio, at the Tiziana Di Caro Gallery, Naples; and the Goldsmiths Degree Show in London. In 2018 she founded CASTRO in Rome.

NICHOLAS FERRARA aaron inker (Nicholas Ferrara) works with a variety of media, most frequently installation, audio and video. The medium is always selected looking for the best interaction between the main idea of the work and the expressive potential of the medium itself.

Materials, look and feel are chosen for their link with the basic ideas, in order to create an effective uniqueness with the best possible ability to show the work complex and establish connections with the audience. The use of this variety of media, intended as an instrument for communicating the inner value of the piece, provides a huge range of experimentation and research and the best possible way for the work to be intriguing for the viewer. To stimulate discussion, generate thought, invite people to reflect, be critical and curious, investigate questions about reality and everyday life — things that are usually unnoticed — are the main aims of the artistic process. Working often as an educator and a cultural operator has brought his research towards a relational approach, focusing on the connection between his own practice and the community, environment and context in which he’s operating. Building on this approach, he is co-founder and part of the team animating an

independent cultural space named Hydro — hosted in the Fondazione Pistoletto complex — active in the design, development and experimentation of new forms of cultural experience and audience engaging strategies for artistic, social and cultural content.

GIULIA FLORIS A BA Art History and MA Curatorial Practices graduate, Giulia Floris (b.

1990, Livorno, Italy) started as an art market professional in Milan at Christie’s and Galleria Tega.

She is currently collaborating with Istituto Villa Adriana e Villa d’Este (VILLAE) in Tivoli as Exhibitions Manager and with CASTRO in Rome as Funding and Events Manager. With Giulia Ratti she is co-founder of Italian Cluster, a research platform about project spaces for contemporary art in Italy. The contents collected through the platform were published in 2018.

CARLOTTA SOFIA GRASSI Carlotta Sofia Grassi (b. 1993) works in performing arts and

community engagement as an artist and curator. Her works deal with models of informal resistance, engaging with ideas of co-presence, collectivity and otherness, and investigating their possibilities of implementation through the lens of a poetic perspective.

After earning a degree in Psychology, she graduated in Theatre Applied to Educational, Community and Social Context from Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2018. Within salt project collective she is curating ventunesimo, an international artists’ residency programme focused on artistic research.

MAJD NASRALLAH Majd Nasrallah is a social, political and human rights activist based in Palestine. In his former capacity as General Director of the Tishreen Association — a grassroots social empowerment and civic activism organisation in the Triangle area — Majd initiated popular and informal educational programmes that focused on identity building, critical thinking, knowledge acquisition and the creation of a sense of social responsibility.

His work included the formation, training and capacity-building of several groups of artists, youth, young adults and women.

He established the Forum for Cultural Expression as a collective of artists and producers, and founded the “Alternative Space” as a hub to advance the creation of autonomous, critical and independent cultural content.

Majd is also a coordinator at the One Democratic State Campaign, which advocates restorative justice, social equality and the dismantlement of oppressive structures of domination.

YATES NORTON Yates Norton is a curator and researcher currently working at Rupert, Vilnius, where he is the curator of public programmes and works closely with the residency and alternative education programmes. His exhibitions curated or co-curated at Rupert or elsewhere include Undersong: Lina Lapelytė and Indrė Šerpytytė (2018), the first presentation of the artists in Latvia (in partnership with Kim?, Riga); Entangled Tales (2018), a group exhibition; Jonas Mekas: Let me dream Utopias (2019); Prospect Revenge (2019), the first UK solo show of Robertas Narkus at the David Dale Gallery, Glasgow; and Living Ornament (2020). He has also sung for the Lithuanian 2019 Venice Biennale Pavilion and will be touring with the artists in 2020. Most recently,

he has been working with issues of care and interdependence, particularly as informed from the perspectives of disability rights, which he has explored through different formats, including a talk with David Ruebain at the Serpentine Gallery, London (2019) and at the ICA, London (2018) as part of their In Formation III programme. He completed his studies at the University of Cambridge, Harvard University and the Courtauld Institute of Art.

CAROLINA ONGARO Carolina Ongaro (b. 1989, Vicenza, Italy) is a curator based in London.

She holds a MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths, University of London.

She is co-founder and director of Jupiter Woods, a non-profit arts organisation and platform for research and practice, established in 2014 in South-East London, where she has been initiating artists’ residencies, exhibitions and research-based projects, collectively and individually, with an interest in exploring and testing different formats of projectmaking. She often works on a collaborative and conversational basis with a focus on the crosspollination of disciplines and practices. Recent projects include: If Words Could Float at Sissi Club (Marseille), co-curated with Juliette

Desorgues; Florilege, ongoing project with artists Rebecca Jagoe and Nils Alix-Tabeling; Winnie Herbstein: Brace at Jupiter Woods (London); Building Space at South London Gallery (London); linealinealinea, with Minia Biabiany, at Obrera Centro (Mexico City); Modus Operandi, with Attilia Fattori Franchini, at CASTRO (Rome). She has recently received the Arts Council England award to undertake further research around policy-making and best practice in the arts, with a focus on feminist methods of curating and instituting.

Photo of the eight participants with two of the mentors, Janna Graham and Valeria Graziano, and the UNIDEE Visiting Curator Valerio Del Baglivo.

UNIDEE Modules FALL TERM

ASSEMBLY (MODES OF INSTITUTING)

by Kobe Matthys (Agency) and Stefan Nowotny

Participants: Agil Abdullayev Gaia Di Lorenzo Nicholas Ferrara Giulia Floris Carlotta Sofia Grassi Majd Nasrallah Yates Norton Carolina Ongaro

Photo: Courtesy of the artists.

8 / 10 November 2019

For Assembly (Modes of Instituting), Agency called forth a selection from its list of things, speculating on the question: “How can collectives become mutually included within artistic practices?”

For Assembly (Modes of Instituting), Agency focuses on collectives. Copyright law revolved around the romantic notion of the author, who was believed to make expression through a predominantly individualistic manner. According to copyright law, the contribution of the individual “author” justifies his or her status as the sole proprietor of an expression. This copyright has given rise to incomplete and misguided understandings of what creative processes involve, who takes part in them, and how their results ought to be rewarded.

This conception of solitary authorship often seems to ignore the embeddedness of creation.

Many artists have turned to nonprofit organisations to support them in their artistic endeavours.

Artists employ non-profit organisations in order to support their creative working processes and hire themselves as salaried employees. What many seem to forget is that the copyrights mostly go to the non-profit organisation.

The rationale behind the “work for hire” doctrine is that when an employer hires an employee to create a copyrightable work, the fruits of the employee’s endeavours properly belong to the employer, the non-profit.

Only exceptionally reciprocal relationships between artists and

patrons, audiences, models, actors, technicians, assistants, researchers, etc. result in joint authorship.

On the first day, Agency proposed a selection from the list of things specific for Modes of Instituting: Thing 000955 (Martha Graham’s choreographies). In the late 1920s, Graham founded a dance company. In 1948 Martha Graham incorporated a not-for-profit corporation called Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance.

The purpose of the centre was to free Graham from the burden of administrative aspects so that she could devote herself more to the cre-ative aspects of dance. The choreographer was hired by the centre to create choreographies.

In 1991 in her last will, Graham named Protas her executor and bequeathed to him her personal property and her residuary estate, including “any rights or interests in any dance works, musical scores, scenery sets, [Graham’s] personal papers and the use of [Graham’s] name. Protas claimed all the rights of Graham’s choreographies. But because of the works for hire doctrine, the centre claimed that all rights belonged to the centre.

Protas ar-gued that the work for hire doctrine was inapplicable because of Graham’s central role with the centre. During the case Martha Graham School and Dance Foundation, Inc. v. Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, the court had to decide if the rights went to the artist or to the institution created by the artist.

Other cases involving working

relationships and artistic control in legacies were discussed, like for example Thing 000798 (Third World America) and Thing 002334 (Captain America and other drawings by Jack Kirby).

On the second day of the workshop there was a discussion with Stefan Nowotny, who teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London, and has been involved in various research projects of the eipcp – European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies.

He has a long-standing interest in new constellations of critical knowledge production and collaborative modes of practice across disciplinary boundaries.

The discussion, on the one hand, took its clue from the notion of instituent practices (as proposed in Nowotny/Raunig, Instituierende Praxen. Bruchlinien der Institutionskritik, 2008) and, one the other, focused on the question of an ecology of practices (as termed by Isabelle Stengers).

One main interest here was the interrelationship between a micropolitics of the infra-institutional and the desire to open up spaces and times of exchange between different or divergent practices.

On the third day they looked into the legal persona of cooperatives as an alternative to the capitalist mode of production. Cooperatives are collective enterprises owned, controlled and run by and for their members to realise shared economic, social, ecological goals and aspirations. They discussed

examples like Mondragon, Coop, etc. and artist run cooperatives like mutantspace.ie, etc.

Kobe Matthys introduced some of Agency’s works: Thing 000955 (Martha Graham’s choreographies), Thing 000798 (Third World America) and Thing 002334 (Captain America and other drawings by Jack Kirby).

Discussion with Stefan Nowotny about care citizenship, citizens rights, etc.

Some references: • The undercommons. Fugitive planning & black study, by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten • Emile Benveniste, about two linguistic models of the city (the Roman civis/civitas, and the Greek polis/polites) • Etienne Balibar, about the Sanspapiers, 1997

• The group Precarias a la deriva proposes the concept of a care citizenship (cuidadania), a Spanish neologism which conjoins state citizenship (ciudadania) with care (cuidado) into a new form of socially, politically, legally, and economically living togheter beyond the (nation-)state border regime, in which the relationality with others is not to be broken off, but is instead considered fundamental.

Precarias a la deriva, 2014

• Kanak Attak is a community of different people from diverse backgrounds who share a commitment to eradicate racism from German society.

https://www.kanak-attak.de/ka/about.html

AGENCY Agency is an international initiative that was founded in 1992 and has office in Brussels. It constitutes a growing list of “boundary things” that resist the radical split between the classifications of nature and culture. This list is mostly derived from controversies and juridical cases involving intellectual property (copyrights, patents, trade marks, publicity rights, etc.) from the start of the enclosures of the commons around the 17th century until today and from various territories of world integrated capitalism. The colonial concept of intellectual property relies upon the fundamental assumption of the split between culture and nature, and consequently between expressions and ideas, creations and facts, subjects and objects, humans and nonhumans, originality and tradition, individuals and collectives, mind and body, etc. Each controversy included on the list witnesses a resistance in terms of these divisions. Agency calls these “boundary things” forth from its list in varying “assemblies”, which combine the formats of exhibition, performance and publication.

Each assembly speculates around possible inclusions. All of Agency’s assemblies look at the operative

consequences of the apparatus of intellectual property for an ecology of diverse art practices and aim at caring for practices their singular modes of existence.

STEFAN NOWOTNY Dr Stefan Nowotny was trained as a philosopher (PhD in Philosophy, University of Leuven, Louvain-la-Neuve). His research focuses mainly on political theory, the linguistic and social complexities of translation and the entanglements of historical and contemporary epistemologies and imaginaries. While his writing deals with a range of especially philosophical and political topics, he has also repeatedly worked in collaborative art/theory projects.

Dr Stefan Nowotny teaches in the PhD programme Curatorial/ Knowledge at Goldsmiths, University of London, and supervise research projects on the curatorial, collaborative and participatory modes of art and knowledge production, institutional critique and new institutional forms, the differentiality of postcolonial conditions, and contemporary political practices.

UNIDEE Modules FALL TERM

SITE FOR UNLEARNING (ART ORGANIZATION).

HOW DO WE WANT TO WORK TOGETHER?

by Annette Krauss and Yolande Van De Heide

Participants: Agil Abdullayev Gaia Di Lorenzo Nicholas Ferrara Giulia Floris Carlotta Sofia Grassi Majd Nasrallah Yates Norton Carolina Ongaro

Photo: Courtesy of the artists.

11 / 13 November 2019

The 3-day workshop built upon the outcomes and findings of the collaborative research Site for Unlearning (Art Organization) between the team at Casco Art Institute and artist Annette Krauss, and revolved around other forms of organising institutional work.

They introduced the long-term project, revisited key features of its collaborative practice, and put these in relationship to practices of un/learning, institutional legacies in art and commoning.

In the second part of the workshop, they tested some of the practice-based approaches, explored and translated them to relate the realities and experiences present in the workshop group.

About SfU Site for Unlearning: Started in 2014, Site for Unlearning (Art Organization) is conceived as a long-term artistic-collaborative project between artist Annette Krauss and the team of Casco Art Institute to ask: “How does art institutional change relate to un-learning, commoning and the redistribution of power?�

By addressing psycho-somatic experiences of busyness as an emblem of (art) institutional habits, they have studied (amongst other things) working rhythms (individual, institutional, common), collective authorship, institutional hierarchies, respective team capacities in their entanglement with colonial, patriarchal and capitalist structures of the society we live in.

In 2018, the project culminated in a publication entitled Unlearning Exercises Art Organizations as Sites for Unlearning 1, edited

by Annette Krauss, Binna Choi, Yolande van der Heide and Liz Allan (co-published by Casco Art Institute and Valiz) and informed the inaugural assembly for commoning art institutions: Elephants in the Room 2. The project has otherwise been presented on several occasions including the group exhibitions: Shapes of Knowledge, Monash University Museum for Art, 2019; and DARK ENERGY. Feminist Organizing, Working Collectively at Xhibit, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, 2019.

1 Unlearning Exercises Art Organizations as Sites for Unlearning: https://www.valiz.nl/en/ publications/unlearning-excercises.html 2 Elephants in the Room: https://casco.art/en/ archive/elephants-in-the-room

Visit to Oropa Sanctuary (Biella).

Some references: • Grammar of the moltitude, by Paolo Virno • The institution of critique, by Hito Steyerl • A diverse economy: rethinking economy and economic representation, by J.K. GibsonGraham • The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods and Cities, by Dolores Hayden

Presentation and discussion with Annette Krauss and Yolande Van De Heide.

UNLEARNING: DISRUPTING THE HABITS IN USUAL ACTIVITIES VALORIZING REPRODUCTIVE WORK

The group of participants while practicing some Unlearning Exercises.

ANNETTE KRAUSS Annette Krauss works as an artist.

In her conceptual-based practice she addresses the intersection of art, politics and everyday life.

Her work revolves around informal knowledge and normalisation processes that shape our bodies, the way we use objects and engage in social practices, and how these influence the way we know and act in the world. Her artistic work emerges through the intersection of different media, such as performance, video, historical and everyday research, pedagogy and texts.

Krauss has co-initiated various long-term collaborative practices (Hidden Curriculum / Sites for Unlearning / Read-in / ASK! / Read the Masks. Tradition is Not Given / School of Temporalities).

These projects reflect and build upon the potential of collaborative practices while aiming at disrupting taken for granted “truths” in theory and practice. http://siteforunlearning.tumblr.com http://hiddencurriculum.info http://read-in.info Recent exhibitions include ‘Regimes of Memorizing’, Kunci, Yogyakarta, 2015; Stedelijk Bureau, Amsterdam, 2014; ‘Randzonenlesung’, Kunstverein

Wiesbaden, 2014; ‘In Search of the Missing Lessons’, Whitechapel Gallery, 2013; (In)visibilities, The Showroom, London, 2012; GDR goes on - Grand Domestic Revolution, Casco, 2012; Amateurism, Kunstverein Heidelberg, 2012; ‘For Einhoven’, Van Abbemuseum, Einhoven, NL, 2011; ‘We are Grammar’, Pratt Gallery, New York, 2011; ‘School Days’, Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork, 2011.

Since 2010 she has been a lecturer at HKU Fine Art Utrecht. Currently, she is a PhD researcher at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

YOLANDE VAN DER HEIDE Yolande van der Heide is deputy director at Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, where she began as an intern in 2008, and has worked as producer on many project exhibitions including the Grand Domestic Revolution (2009 — 2012). She is co-editor of several books published with Casco including 365 Days of Invisible Work (2017) and Unlearning Exercises: Art Organisations as Sites for Unlearning (2018). She is a faculty member at the Dutch Art Institute, Roaming Academy (see Southern Wave); and a thesis advisor in the Fine Arts department of the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam.

Currently on her nightstand: bell hooks and Stuart Hall, Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue; and Tony Morrison, The Source of Self Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Mediations.

Currently listening to: Orchestra Baobab, Bamba.

(Updated 9 September 2019)

UNIDEE Modules FALL TERM

TECHNIQUES FOR LIVING OTHERWISE: INSTITUTING WITH CARE

by Janna Graham and Valeria Graziano

Participants: Agil Abdullayev Gaia Di Lorenzo Nicholas Ferrara Giulia Floris Carlotta Sofia Grassi Majd Nasrallah Yates Norton Carolina Ongaro

Photo: Courtesy of the artists.

16 / 18 November 2019

This workshop emerged out of their work on alternatives to practices of Public Programming in contemporary cultural institutions.

Arguing that the proliferation of public platforms over the last decades and their various calls to institutional critique and ‘new institutionalism’ have done little to address the urgent social and political issues they thematise, they suggest such programmes often further detach contemporary urgencies from everyday practices of instituting.

To counter this effect, they draw from genealogies of public gathering and organise practices emerged within social movements, Institutional Analysis, and histories of partisan and anti-colonial struggles to produce modes of instituting able to make public in ways that do not exclude what is often relegated to the ‘private’: the caring, the repairing and the reproductive dimensions of life.

Taking inspiration from the École moderne movement, they drew the workshop’s title from the notion of ‘techniques for living otherwise’, which emerged as an early call to institutional analysis and change based in vital and joyful life practices.

In this workshop they looked at practices drawn from this and other political and pedagogical histories to imagine with participants how to develop institutions that begin from questions of social reproduction.

DAY 1 - What is an Institution?

A Living Dictionary Drawing from their own practices and key thinkers, they mapped and drew the various definitions of institution and instituting participants were working with.

Throughout the day, through a number of short ‘teach-ins’ they introduced a range of definitions of institutions and instituting in their own work, such as those developed by Ivan Illich, Chicana housing organisers, Felix Guattari and Gisele Pankow, Audre Lorde and others to map an emerging definition of In-stituent and Institution.

DAY 2 - Genealogies at Work On this day, they invited the participants to work on investigating a number of archives related to living and instituting otherwise. Working with this material, they developed an analysis of such genealogies, attempted to perform one of their technologies of organisation, and explored their implications for the contexts in which they were working. They brought materials, films and texts for the participants to work with.

DAY 3 - Instituting Futures One of the strongest barriers in instituting otherwise is our incapacity to imagine the world otherwise. The last session introduced speculative methodologies to invite people to imagine how to work in a chosen mode of instituting tomorrow, one year and ten years from today.

16 November, 10 am 2019 VISIBLE AWARD Official Satellite Site On Saturday 16th November at 10 am, UNIDEE, together with its participants, was one of the OFFICIAL SATELLITE SITES which, with other satellites around the world, voted for the 2019 VISIBLE AWARD. To be a satellite, you had to follow the presentations of all 10 finalists via a streaming conference, after which the UNIDEE satellite discussed who should be the winner.

How were the votes collected?

Through a whatsapp group created only for satellite sites, through which the contact person expressed and motivated the group’s vote.

• W.A.G.E. Working Artists and the Greater Economy (a New York-based activist organization founded in 2008) https://wageforwork.com/home#top

• Liberate Tate

http://liberatetate.wordpress.com/

• Edouard Glissant (Opacity / Transparency)

Some references: • Training for Exploitation?

Politicising Employability and Reclaiming Education, by The Precarious Workers Brigade

• Jean Oury, Frantz Fanon (Institutional Psychotherapy) • Felix Guattari (Institutional Analysis) • Fernand Oury (Institutional Pedagogy)

JANNA GRAHAM Dr Janna Graham is a lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London.

She has worked as an educator, organiser, researcher and curator between social movements, arts institutions and research processes for many years. She has occupied curatorial and research positions at Nottingham Contemporary, Serpentine Galleries, the Whitechapel and the Art Gallery of Ontario, among others. From 2008-2014 she worked with local people to create the Centre for Possible Studies, a para-institution linking art, popular education and radical research in London’s Edgware Road neighbourhood with publications including Edgware Road (Koenig, 2010), Studies on a Road (2013) and Art + Care: A future (2013).

Her research investigates histories of radical research and education for practices of ‘thinking with conditions’, modes of analysis and action that unravel and rework the contradictions born of contemporary capitalism, as they are experienced by cultural workers and communities.

Her current work looks at histories of anti-racism and their implications for institutional change processes in cultural institutions, counter-institutions

of care generated by refugee groups, and genealogies of Institutional Programming and Analysis for generating caring, joyful, horizontal and poly-vocal organisations.

She is a founding member of the Another Roadmap Network, involving researchers in 22 countries analysing intertwining histories of arts education, and a member of the sound art and political collective Ultra-red.

VALERIA GRAZIANO Dr Valeria Graziano is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University, UK. Her research looks at the organisation of cultural practices that foster the refusal of work and the possibility of political pleasure.

Her approach is informed by autonomist Marxism, institutional analysis, materialist transfeminism and critical organisation theory.

As a practitioner, she has developed projects for the Estonian Contemporary Art Museum, Kampnagel, Impulse Theatre Festival, Wyspa Institute, Intermediae, In-Presentable, Steirischer Herbst, Manifesta 7 and Vanabbemuseum, among others; and has given talks across a number of cultural organisations, including the Institute for Network Cultures, Moderna Museet, and documenta 14. She carried out commissioned research for Arts Collaborative Network, Serpentine Gallery and Bristol Visual Arts Consortium. Currently, Valeria is the convenor of the international project Pirate Care (pirate. care), fostering a transnational network of activists, researchers and practitioners against the criminalisation of solidarity and for a common care infrastructure, and working with WeMake (Milan)

on a research investigating the relationship between open technologies and healthcare, supported by the EU Horizon 2020 scheme DSI4EU. Together with Dr Kim Trogal (UCA), from 2017 to the present she has been working on the trope of ‘repair and maintenance‘ across different collective practices, inspired by feminist and degrowth pedagogies. She is co-editor of Repair Matters, a special issue of ephemera: theory and politics in organisation (May 2019).

Since 2013, Graham and Graziano, together with Susan Kelly, have been de-veloping the Public Programming, a research collaboration bringing together cultural workers, activists and researchers to discuss the acceleration of public pedagogical events in relation to post-democratic tendencies (publication forthcoming). They are both founding members of the Network for Institutional Analysis (UK).

UNIDEE Modules FALL TERM

WORKING TITLE: THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

by Bik Van der Pol

Participants: Agil Abdullayev Gaia Di Lorenzo Nicholas Ferrara Giulia Floris Carlotta Sofia Grassi Majd Nasrallah Yates Norton Carolina Ongaro

Photo: Courtesy of the artists.

19 / 21 November 2019

Since the early 2000s, many local wool mills in Biella have closed due to global capitalism: they could no longer compete with the prices of imported fabrics and clothing. Participants were invited to engage in a collaborative process, departing from Biella as a city in transformation.

Understanding inhabitants and their bodies as carriers of experience, and the city as an archive and a scene that could function as site for reading and listening to reflect on global processes, the purpose of the workshop was to collectively create a scenario on a speculative narrative taking place in Biella, now and in the future. Departure points for this narrative were loss, cooperation and silence as a political imperative of infrastructure, and the role that this may play both in its human and automated state. They proposed to rethink ‘loss’ as an instigator and potential for alternative learning for the future, and increase the volume of the stories that must be told now. The outcome was the performance of these learning processes.

Since 1995, Liesbeth Bik and Jos Van der Pol have worked together as Bik Van der Pol. They work and live in Rotterdam (NL).

Through their practice, they aim at articulating and understanding how art can produce a public sphere and space for speculation and imagination through which ‘publicness’ is not only defined but also created.

By setting up the conditions for encounter, they develop a process of working that allows for continuous reconfigurations of places, histories and publics.

Their practice is site-specific with dialogue as a mode of transfer; a “passing through”, understood in its etymological meaning of “a speech across or between two or more people, out of which new understandings may emerge”. In fact, they consider the element of “passing through” as vital. It is temporal, and implies action and the development of new forms of discourse. Their work is both instigator and result of this method.

Bik Van der Pol are also among the initiators of the School of Missing Studies that started in 2003 as an initiative of artists and architects who recognised “the missing” as a matter of urgency.

Investigating what culture(s) laid the foundations for the loss we are experiencing from modernisation and how this loss can talk back to us as a potential site of learning, the School of Missing Studies is calling for a space to turn existing knowledge against itself to affect our capacity to see things otherwise, to trust that seeing, and to set one’s own pedagogical terms.

BIK VAN DER POL Bik Van der Pol co-initiated the Duende artists’ initiative in Rotterdam and the Nomads & Residents collective in New York.

They have worked with others to set up the School of Missing Studies, served as advisers at the Jan van Eyck Academie, and taught at MIT. Their work has been exhibited in museums, art institutes and biennales around the world.

They have developed works for Creative Time and Frieze Projects.

In 2010 they won the prestigious Enel Contemporanea Award (Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome), and in 2014 they received the Hendrik Chabot Award. They live and work in Rotterdam.

More information: www.bikvanderpol.net

Visit to Biella The Wool Company and talk with Nigel Thompson.

Visit to Lanificio Cerruti in Biella.

Final discussion of the collective work done during the Modes of Instituting program, with Paolo Naldini (Director of Cittadellarte).

Conversation with Michelangelo Pistoletto.

STREAMING CONFERENCES During the cycle of workshops entitled Modes of Instituting, a cycle of online meetings was organized with four European Museum Directors to discuss themes such as instituent practices, decolonization of collections, open source methodologies, community engagement and climate crisis, with the aim of understanding how contemporary artistic institutions can become places for discussion on urgent current issues.

12 November, 7 pm Streaming conference

by Charles Esche (Director Van Abbemuseum) Charles Esche is the director of the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; professor of Contemporary Art and Curating at Central Saint Martins, London, and co-director of Afterall Journal and Books. He teaches on the Exhibition Studies MRes course at CSM, and at Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht.

Outside the museum, he cocurated Le Musée Égaré,

Kunsthall Oslo, 2017; Printemps de Septembre, Toulouse, 2016; Jakarta Biennale, 2015; 31st Sao Paulo Bienal, 2014; U3 Triennale, Ljubljana, 2011; RIWAQ Biennale, Palestine, 2007 and 2009; Istanbul Biennale, 2005; Gwangju Biennale, 2002; amongst other international exhibitions. He is chair of CASCO, Utrecht. He received the 2012 Princess Margriet Award and the 2014 CCS Bard College Prize for Curatorial Excellence.

Francis McKee (born 1960) is an Irish writer and curator working in Glasgow. From 2005-2008 he was the director of Glasgow International, and since 2006 he has been the director of the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow.

He is a lecturer and research fellow at Glasgow School of Art, working on the development of open source ideologies. He curated

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhvXG1wgLYY&t=646s

18 November, 7 pm Streaming conference

by Francis Mckee (Director CCA Glasgow)

the Scottish participation at the Venice Biennale with Kay Pallister in 2003. Francis McKee has written extensively on the work of artists linked to Glasgow such as Christine Borland, Ross Sinclair, Douglas Gordon, Simon Starling and other international artists including Matthew Barney, Pipilotti Rist, Willie Doherty, Joao Penalva, Abraham Cruzvillegas, and co-published books on the Icelandic Love Corporation and Salla Tykkä in collaboration with NIFCA (Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art). Francis McKee worked previously as an historian of medicine for the Wellcome Trust.

Mélanie Bouteloup is the director of Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research and Villa Vassilieff. Over the past fifteen years, Mélanie Bouteloup has directed a number of projects aimed at rooting art in society, in partnership with many local, national and international organisations. In 2012, alongside artistic director Okwui Enwezor, Mélanie Bouteloup was associate

curator of La Triennale, an event initiated by the Ministry of Culture and Communication and organised by the Centre national des arts plastiques and the Palais de Tokyo. In 2014 Mélanie Bouteloup was named Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government. In 2016, with Pernod Ricard, she inaugurated the Villa Vassilieff - Pernod Ricard Fellowship.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlMPCTjFWnk&t=1203s

20 November, 7 pm Streaming conference

by Mélanie Bouteloup (Director Betonsalon, Paris)

Cecilia Widenheim is director of Tensta Konsthall. During her time as director of Malmö Konstmuseum (2012–18), she initiated several research projects based on the collection. Previously, she was director of Iaspis, the International Artists Studio Program in Stockholm (2008–10), and prior to that, curator at Moderna Museet in Stockholm (1997–2012). She has curated a

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMX3bd50sd8

21 November, 5 pm Streaming conference

by Cecilia Widenheim (Director Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm)

great number of exhibitions with Ester Almqvist, Mary Kelly, Vera Nilsson, Yoko Ono, Martha Rosler, Cecilia Edefalk and Ann-Sofi Sidén, among other artists. She has served on advisory boards for several art institutions, among them Overgaden and Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen, and Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde in Stockholm. She has taught widely since the 1990s, and has coedited a number of books, including The Society Machine (Garrett Publications, 2018); Oomph – The Women Who Made Sweden Colourful (Art & Theory, 2015); Baltic Reflections (Arena, 2014); Work, Work, Work: A Reader on Art and Labour (Sternberg Press, 2012); Moderna Museet: The Book (Moderna Museet, 2004) and Utopia and Reality: Modernity in Sweden, 1900–1960 (Yale University Press, 2002).

WHAT WILL WE DO WITH WHAT WE HAVE DONE? Final collective thoughts about care and curating.

________________________________ NICHOLAS FERRARA PEERACY Going rogue. (peeracy*) As a remnant of a time of thinkings, talkings, charts, maps, definitions, etymologies, words, concepts.

About: what will we do with what we have done? How to navigate these times, to share a common ground. A mindful approach to the otherness. Go rogue. Remain subtle. Don’t crystallise. Keep moving. Rest. Don’t stop. Remain.

Remain conscious. Find a place.

Virtual. Physical. Hybrid. Set a

limit. Crack it open. Balance.

Abandon structure(s). Spread.

Shift between (im)materiality. Hack into everything. Infect. Affect.

Share. Draw lines. Trace links. Let constellations form. Love! I came across an old pic I took in Berlin, some time ago. Written on the ground was: “I don’t care. I do love”. *(from “peer” + “piracy”): a union of rebel peers, sharing a vision. ________________________________ GIULIA FLORIS Privilege.

To stop, to be able to get out of your own dimension in order to analyse it and to not have to do that alone.

Care.

The topic of a single workshop but the centre of all. The privilege is in this sense the chance to focus on what you consider to be fundamental in your practice and has, perhaps, never been said aloud.

The care process as circular: taking care of art to take care of culture, to take care of the community, to take care of yourself, too.

Crucial.

Crucial is using the privilege of being able to stop to analyse central issues such as care.

Crucial is eliminating all that is not needed: proceeding day by day with the study of each part

of the process to understand whether it is crucial or not. Giving a name to things, being always ready to change it depending on the process which will follow.

Accepting a fluidity which is not precariousness.

Listening.

Listening is perhaps the greatest privilege of being able to focus on issues, minimal but crucial, such as care. It allows you to do something that never happens: stop talking, knowing that when you need to speak there will be someone ready to listen carefully, putting both conscious ideas and actions into circulation.

Community.

The community is created by listening to each other talk about issues, minimal but crucial, such as care, and this is a privilege.

Carrying out a process of reflection together with people who come from either similar or completely opposite contexts, and creating together with them a valid network in that place, with those premises, in that historical moment but, intimately, adaptable to all times and everywhere.

Gift.

Having the privilege of creating a community, through a process of listening and exchanging, on minimal but crucial issues such as care is a gift. Being able to experience the object of your personal and collective reflections in real time. Achieving the affinity which is necessary to understand

that not having found answers, but only a few terms, fluid, dynamic and in total openness, is a precious goal. Having the implicit confirmation to be going to carry out, mutually, that process is a gift: it is the concretisation of a community, it is listening, it is crucial, it is an act of care, it is a privilege.

This is the abecedary of a collective reinterpretation of the existing.

The construction of a procedural map.

The search for shared points, and divergent ones, to trace cracks.

The starting point for a future construction.

The commitment to taking on a collective and scalable protocol. ________________________________ CARLOTTA SOFIA GRASSI SHARABLE OBJECTS OF ATTITUDE Contextualise, situate, be culturally specific. Listen to what culturally specific means for others.

Unpack issues, pose questions, make propositions. Then reshuffle and try again.

Find your own space/structure. Deinstitute when it’s needed, keep independence, you’ll need it.

Ideas are spaces. Spaces are ideas.

Navigate the complexity of non-

categorisation, avoid the risk of simplification.

Resist shiny development modes of production, or dusty maintenance ones.

Remember: breathe, rest, stop.

Find creative sparks when time pauses.

Embrace grey zones, welcome cracks. They may infiltrate, even invade walls. See through the renewed lightful perspectives they bring.

Ask yourself: how do we work with cracks in a way that is collectively empowering?

Consider your position as caregiver and care receiver. So be reflexive.

Don’t romanticise care: turn it into a collective militant practice, a space for sharing and empowerment.

Leave questions open. Don’t pretend you found the answers. ________________________________ YATES NORTON I remember having a discussion with Yolande van der Heide and Annette Krauss. The projector went into sleep mode and displayed the corporate logo ‘empowered by innovation’. This backdrop was antithetical to what we had

been and would be talking about.

We were searching for forms of restoration, care and renovation, not the relentless pursuit of innovation driven by competition, a notion of empowerment fuelled by individualism, the building of a future created by plundering more resources rather than working and re-working what we already have.

The workshops got me thinking about figuring things out by reconfiguring what is already there in this world, bringing into being other worlds by drawing something out. This doing and redoing is never done. A problem with the English language is that this past tense of ‘done’ suggests a discrete moment, over and done with. But what we have done still figures in what we are doing. And like the ideas behind ‘instituting’ that guided our work over those two weeks, the mode we were – we are – working in was in this present continuous.

I think this ‘-ing’ way of living can foreground commitment. If we are committed to someone (or something), we recognise that we are never done with them. We are always ‘-ing’ with them. Too often we abandon someone because they are difficult or we consider them no longer ‘interesting’. In the context of a culture of innovation that demands expendability, commitment implies endurance and dependability.

Approaching relations as ongoing and interdependent makes us

more attentive to responsibility. I like what Karen Barad says about responsibility. To be responsible is to be able to respond (to be ‘response-able’) and how we respond will configure the world in such a way that will allow others to respond or not in turn. Unlike the individualistic notion that we are our own masters [sic], we are caught up in other people, other beings. We are all gathered together, gathering others around us. So, we must tread carefully and attentively. I think it is inevitable, given how close we were – are – to each other in this group, that this question we formulated was in the plural: ‘what do we do with what we have done?’

Asking a question can be a precious thing. Questions require listening, often they are motivated by curiosity, wonder and commitment. The very act of asking a question invokes an other and the possibility of what Elizabeth Povinelli has called an ‘otherwise’, a recognition that there is still so much to find out, listen to, be part of. Questions can encapsulate hope and they can socialise rather than individualise concerns and curiosity.

Of course, not all questions are in this key. Some are brutal interrogations where there is no listening. But throughout those two weeks we learnt together what kinds of questions to ask, how to ask them, who to offer them to and how to listen to their answers. These answers may

not be solutions to problems, especially since solutions are often provisional. The answers may involve silence or a gesture; perhaps there are times when there can be no answer. But still, the question can draw attention to something overlooked and even if we do not know how to answer, the very terms of the enquiry are a good starting point. Thinking about what we have done, specifically there all together, gathered up if you like, I turn to how much was being done together which has given us many more things to keep on doing.

This, to me, is empowering. ________________________________ CAROLINA ONGARO NOTES ON MODES OF INSTITUTING Practices of listening and speculating are key ingredients in the project of conceiving alternatives. They activate – and cultivate – an aptitude to generate understanding, and to ground knowledge-making on empathy, relation and care. As such, they need temporal space to unravel in strong ramifications: within an economy that purposefully dominates time by systemically making it shrink, the most radical gesture is to create spaces where listening and speculating become essential tools for thinking. It is necessary that we pay attention to one another to learn from each other’s conditions and

situations, and slowly build paths of resilience. Over the years, I’ve developed a commitment to imagining and locating these spaces of possibility within the realm of art, conceiving their forms and formats through my curatorial work.

‘Modes of Instituting’ generated for me one of these spaces, where this type of learning through listening could be activated. Our group formed as we observed the differences and the similarities that constituted us, triggering the need to talk about our individual movements – cogitating on where we were all travelling to.

Being given time, we used this privilege to grow personally while developing in a collective sense; an opportunity to situate our actions and experiences, to reflect on our ways of moving through the possibilities we are building for ourselves and others, and to speculate on the future of organising in the arts, in relation to past and present trajectories.

Acknowledging that caring for each other is the basic condition of existence grounded our conversations over the two weeks, generating spiralling questions that could find no specific solution: understanding care in the context of instituting as a pivotal and very intricate matrix, impossible to formulate as a concept. It pushed us to circumvent universal statements or thematic conclusive sentences, to instead keep questioning what the notion of

interdependence meant for us, in our life, work and relations.

Spaces were generated out of common goals. A space for practising listening, to listen and feel listened to; a space for mistakes, to open propositions for reparation; a space for negotiating each other’s ideas: meeting in their fragility and incompleteness they acquired strength, becoming matter for use, tools for building new knowledge. The question of care that occupied our thinking together manifested in the group, allowing for acts of understanding to gently delineate paths for our practices. We dismantled any itch to compete, to instead celebrate new bonds and guide one another through each of our insecurities, and our capacity to overcome them.

‘What to do with what was done?’ was formulated as the underlying question, unable to produce immediate, fixed answers: suggesting instead the need for ongoing interrogation, able to generate infinite possibilities of reconfiguration. It proposed a model to be implemented by the institutions of the future: a transformative process they will have to integrate in their working, to insert listening and speculating as foundational practices, to let common desires shape better modes of coming together, of creating and of organising resources.

UNIDEE Modules FALL TERM

CLIMAVORE

by Cooking Sections in partnership with illycaffè S.p.A.

Participants: Asli Uludag Federica Peyrolo Caterina Tioli Tina Zlatina Alejandro Medina Annie Larkins Julie Comfort Orestis Athanasopoulos

Photo: Climavore. On Tidal Zones, by Cooking Sections.

Courtesy of the artists.

19 / 21 November 2019

To celebrate twenty years of collaboration between illycaffè S.p.A. and UNIDEE - University of Ideas, Cittadellarte presented CLIMAVORE, a workshop dedicated to artists, architects and designers to investigate new forms of production and consumption in times of climate crisis.

The workshop, led by the duo Cooking Sections, took its cue from the Biellese farming area, to understand what measures local producers are taking in view of strong and sudden climate changes. For years, the artistic duo has been carrying out a research on how climate change is redrawing the boundaries of territories linked to specific agricultural productions throughout Europe.

Besides discussing contemporary practices linked to these themes, the participants in the workshop were also invited to present a design project for a illycaffé coffee can. The winner received a production bonus of 3.000 euros.

The winner of the production prize for 2019 was Caterina Tioli.

MODULE DESCRIPTION What do you eat in a period of drought? How do you water without water? How did fish turn from a valuable food source into a source of pollution?

These and other questions were addressed in the Cooking Sections workshop, structured around the cross-disciplinary framework of CLIMAVORE. Different from omnivore, carnivore, vegetarian

or vegan, CLIMAVORE uses diets as forms of infrastructure to explore how to eat as humans change climate. This implies finding new ways to adapt our food production and consumption patterns, as well as our cultural imaginaries, to increasingly evident man-induced environmental transformations. Using the case of the Piedmont region, the workshop revolved around how climatic changes are challenging the correlation between “origin” and “quality” across Europe.

The complex system of PDO (protected designation of origin) labels and certifications that regulates it dates back to the beginning of the 20th century, when a series of ecological crises in French vineyards accelerated the colonial project in Algeria.

These entanglements around eco-territorial control and political power struggles are once again at the forefront today, as changing temperatures are eroding and reshaping borders anew, modifying ecological associations, flavours, seasons and vocabulary used to describe products coming from those shifting landscapes.

Local grape variety Nebbiolo to make “the wine of the fog” in Piedmont, for instance, refers to a harvest that used to take place in foggy November, but the harvest is now sometimes taking place weeks before the fog arrives.

Throughout different discussions on socially-engaged practices, short exercises, site visits, and a series of outdoor walks,

participants advanced other ways of mapping, sensing and supporting human and more-thanhuman interactions.

Visit to the rice company “Azienda Agricola Tenuta Margherita� which uses machinery from the 1940s to process rice in a sustainable way.

Visit to the company Agricola Garella and meeting with the owner Daniele Garella, talking about the history of wine with a focus on Piedmontese wine in Biella area and on its production and how climate change is affecting it.

COOKING SECTIONS Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual & Alon Schwabe) is a duo of spatial practitioners based out of London. It was born to explore the systems that organise the world through food. Using installation, performance, mapping and video, their research-based practice explores the overlapping boundaries between visual arts, architecture and geopolitics. Since 2015, they have been working on multiple iterations of the long-term site-specific CLIMAVORE project exploring how to eat as humans change climates. In 2016 they opened The Empire Remains Shop, a platform to critically speculate on implications of selling the remains of the empire today. Their first book about the project was published by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City. Cooking Sections was part of the exhibition at the U.S. Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Their work has also been exhibited at the 13th Sharjah Biennial; Manifesta12, Palermo; Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; Serpentine Galleries, London; Atlas Arts, Skye; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Storefront for Art & Architecture, New York; Peggy Guggenheim Collection; HKW Berlin; Akademie

der Künste, Berlin; 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale; Brussels ParckDesign; and they have been residents in The Politics of Food at Delfina Foundation, London.

Their work has been featured in a number of international publications (Lars Müller, Sternberg Press, Volume, Frieze Magazine amongst others). They currently lead a studio unit at the Royal College of Art, London. They were awarded the Special Prize at the 2019 Future Generation Art Prize and are nominated for the Visible Award. www.cooking-sections.com

UNIDEE Residencies FALL TERM

MAJD NASRALLAH

joint grant by A.M. Qattan Foundation (Palestine) residency at Cittadellarte Fondazione Pistoletto, Biella October - November 2019

Majd Nasrallah is a social, political and human rights activist based in Palestine. In his former capacity as General Director of the Tishreen Association — a grassroots social empowerment and civic activism organisation in the Triangle area — Majd initiated popular and informal educational programmes that focused on identity building, critical thinking, knowledge acquisition and the creation of a sense of social responsibility.

His work included the formation, training and capacity-building of several groups of artists, youth, young adults and women.

He established the Forum for Cultural Expression as a collective of artists and producers, and founded the “Alternative Space” as a hub to advance the creation of autonomous, critical and independent cultural content.

Majd is also a coordinator at the One Democratic State Campaign, which advocates restorative justice, social equality and the dismantlement of oppressive structures of domination.

Artist’s statement

I firmly believe that the capacity to produce knowledge in autonomous spaces within oppressive environments is a fundamental necessity in the process of emancipation. For colonized communities like mine (e.g. Palestine), free cultural expression is critical not only for the preservation of a shared narrative, but for the mobilization of the masses towards a liberating destiny. In this sense, I consider cultural creation to be a revolutionary domain, a primary vehicle for political and social change.

As a cultural activist, my main role has been to organize local artistic talents, stakeholders and community activists, with the goal of catalyzing cultural activity in communities on the margins of a dominant, hostile, “mainstream� society. I find limiting critical cultural activity and production solely to urban spaces to be counterproductive to that work, since it transforms entire communities on the periphery into mere recipients of culture and arts, if that. With this realization, my work has explored pragmatic ways to stimulate authentic, critical and politically-

aware production of local cultural content and knowledge. To do so, I work closely with artists, students and workers through informal educational settings, identify successful strategies and develop long-term action plans for cultural community interventions.

I consider the exchange of ideas and dialogue between artists and activists with the local community to be an invaluable knowledge resource capable of producing cultural content that is crucial for shaping social and political discourse. I attempt to facilitate the cross pollination of ideas from across the ideological and geographical spectrum. My ambition is to engender consistent, coordinated and systematic cultural intervention that in turn will generate an inclusive and critical cultural vanguard, capable of mobilizing the masses in the struggle for collective human emancipation, in Palestine and globally.

UNIDEE Residencies FALL TERM

AGIL ABDULLAYEV

joint grant by YARAT Contemporary Art Space, Baku (Azerbaijan) residency at Cittadellarte Fondazione Pistoletto, Biella October - November 2019

Agil Abdullayev (b. 1992, Baku, Azerbaijan) is a multidisciplinary artist and social art practitioner, based in Baku. Primarily working in the fields of moving image, performance and photography, his practice examines the Caucasian queer identity that has been shaped by the historical, cultural and social background.

Abdullayev’s works aim at facilitating a dialogue of identity and society with a contrast of the subjects such as femininity and masculinity, public life and private life, politics and society, western and eastern cultural standards, bridging the spaces between these subjects. Agil graduated with a BA Fine Arts with First Class Honour at Nottingham Trent University in 2018, and has been selected for several awards and grants, such as Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2018 “Attic Residency” by One Throsby Street in Nottingham, UK; and the “Arts and Culture” grant by the Swiss Corporation Office. Abdullayev’s works have been shown in group and solo exhibitions such as Tbilisi Photo Festival, 2019; Photographers’ Gallery London, 2019; Liverpool Biennial, 2018; The Wrong - New Digital Art Biennale, 2017; Tate Modern, 2016; 4th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, 2012.

Currently, Agil Abdullayev lives and works in Baku.

History of the contemporary art scene in the modern society of Baku

“History of the contemporary art scene in the modern society of Baku� combines a narrative documentary and personal essays of the last twelve months of the artist, since he has been back in his hometown after studying abroad.

The film re-imagines racialized, gendered representations beyond the visible frame to encompass the multiple and shifting perspectives through which we experience the social realm. The essays bring together stories from the current contemporary art scene and its organizations, artists, curators, and dealers, with links to the recent history of how these institutions have been formed.

The documentary uses narrative techniques with detours into the imaginary, and explores hidden histories, marginalized narratives, and the act of performing itself.

The artist/narrator emerges from the collaboration, particularly as a co-director of a queer space in the capital of Azerbaijan, which was a flashpoint for underground art and community activism in Baku.

The film creates a narrative where long-time patrons of community organizations, queer people, together with curators, artists, and performers document the contemporary young scene and the perpetual negotiation of race, gender, and socioeconomic class among the patrons, who wrestle with questions of gentrification, authenticity, and ownership as they encounter each other’s realities.

During a year-long performance reviewing the art scene, the artist becomes a narrator and a performer himself, and plays a leading role in the film, serving as an omniscient narrator and embodying the imaginative and performative acts through which the contemporary art crowd is formed and expressed.

UNIDEE Residencies FALL TERM

RYTS MONET

residency at YARAT Contemporary Art Space, Baku (Azerbaijan) promoted by Cittadellarte Fondazione Pistoletto, Biella October - December 2019

Ryts Monet (b. 1982, Bari) lives and works between Venice and Vienna.

He studied at the University IUAV of Venice, where he graduated in the BA Visual Arts in 2007 with Nicolas Bourriaud as thesis’ supervisor. In 2011 he specialized in Visual Communication (MA Program) in the same university.

His work has been exhibited in institutions such: ARTIM, YARAT Contemporary Art Space, Baku, Azerbaijan (2020), Q21, Museums Quartier, Vienna, Austria (2019), Kunsthaus Dresden, Germany (2019), Nakanojo Biennale, Japan (2019), Budapest Galeria, Budapest, Hungary (2019), 6 Moscow International Biennale For Young Art, Moscow, Russia (2018), Off Biennale Cairo, Egypt (2018), Mediterranea 18, Young Artist Biennale, Tirana, Albania (2017); Jan Van Eyck, Maastricht, Netherlands (2017); Kunsthaus Graz, Austria (2016); Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Como (2016); Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, Netherlands (2015); PAN, Palazzo delle Arti di Napoli (2013); Tokyo Art and Space, Tokyo, Japan (2012); 15th Tallinn Print Triennial at KUMU Art Museum, Tallinn, Estonia (2011); Fondazione Claudio Buziol, Venezia (2010).

Der Euro des Kaukasus (The Euro of the Caucasus) Two-channel video installation, Video, colour, sound,12’ 20’’.

2019

Der Euro des Kaukasus (The Euro of the Caucasus) is a two-channel video installation created in 2019 and presented at the end of a residency in Baku, in Azerbaijan, at the YARAT Contemporary Art Space, promoted by Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella.

The work mainly focuses on three elements used by political and economic power: architecture, monuments and money, and how these constitute national and transnational identitarian elements.

The first video is shot between Vienna and Baku, and consists in an interview with Robert Kalina, the Austrian designer of the Euro and the Manat (Azerbaijan’s currency).

In the first part of the video Robert Kalina illustrates the visual and symbolic characteristics of the Euro, stressing the intentions of the ECB to generate, through the currency, a collective imaginary that could unify all the nations of the Eurozone.

The second part of the video is dedicated to the Azeri Manat.

In the early 2000s, the Austrian National Bank was entrusted by the Azeri National Bank with designing and minting the new Manat.

The Azeri National Bank hired Robert Kalina in order to obtain a formal and symbolic similarity with the Euro.

The second video shows footage of abandoned Soviet monuments and buildings shot in various areas of the former Soviet bloc (Hungary, Bulgaria, Georgia and Azerbaijan), with a brief final sequence shot in Vienna.

The buildings and the monuments presented in the video were created with the purpose of glorifying the socialist values, unifying all the nations that used to be part of it.

These objects today in ruins, abandoned or hidden away in storage, have become a refuge for stray dogs and cats.

UNIDEE 2019 CALL FOR PAPER

•

• CA ◆LL✳

FOR • • PA PER

UNIDEE residency programs welcomed proposals for paper presentations from artists, academics and cultural workers.

Celebrating its 20th anniversary and reinforcing its publishing activity, UNIDEE asked experts to respond to the 2019 programme’s key-concepts that embraced the following principles: • Collective Agency: the agency of participation, alternative ways of living, forms of co-operation, peerto-peer, solidarity, among others.

• Climate Actions: postpetrol, antropocene, agroecology; deindustrialization of the self, climate breakdown.

• Modes of Instituting: instituent practices, artist led-culture, forms of institutional parasitism, self-organisation, institutional performativity, fictional institutions, among others.

The winning texts are also published in the Cittadellarte Journal.

UNIDEE 2019 CALL FOR PAPER

IT’S 2068. WE NEED A NEW SWARMING REVOLUTION. Why becoming secondary players on Earth’s field will help feed all of us

by Anna Moreno

Ms. Moreno is the former Global Urbanism Director of the CHPP, Spain 7th May 2068

On the 10th anniversary of the official cancellation of the China Hand Pollination Project (CHPP), The Herald published an extensive article speculating on the longterm effects of its demise, focusing primarily on the social and political factors which threw us into a new world order with no damage control. Said article reflected what increasingly occurs in mainstream media outlets, which points at economic instability and increasing social unrest in vertical pollinating colonies as the main reasons for the CHPP’s decline. As former urban planner for the CHPP, I am hoping this op-ed will help bring a broader scientific perspective on the events that led us to what we now call the Two Oceans Theory.

The main motivation for me to write these words is actually to redeem myself of my past naivety.

My own scientific megalomania led me to believe the beehive could be replicated on a planetary scale.

Back then, it seemed everything could be engineered. If there is one thing I have learned by living and working in insular exile for a decade, is that we need to forgo our anthropocentric view on urban (and planetary) planning, and it is imperative that we do so side by side with our most significant collaborator: the honeybee, starting by recalling a phenomenon well known to all of us: the suicide of the bees.

China had already been implementing hand pollination in the orchards of Hanyuan since

the 80s of the past century, long before the very first articles on the Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) surfaced in scientific journals around the world. Human labour was cheaper than eco-forestry and mono-cropping seemed too extended, too overly present, to care about the well-being of beehives. First, the CCD spread in the valley and throughout the province of Sichuan, where the disappearance rate of bees became catastrophic during the First Collapse Phase. Still, due to the excessive mono-cropping and the success of the CHPP, those were not alarming signs, at least from an economic perspective.

Naturally, nobody else looked for solutions other than the usual environmental activists and those states victim of the exploitation of their natural lands, like in Brazil, where they had seen their Amazon rainforest decimated to a hundredth of its size by the end of 2019. Ignored by the big shots, the damage was done.

Ironically, it was precisely the bees who made climate change undeniable, even to the most renegade conservatives, while simultaneously bringing it to a dramatic halt by sacrificing themselves en masse and enabling a domino effect: first in China, then in California and Canada, and later on entire bee populations disappeared more or less everywhere. Some of you might remember the constant dread and the almost comical fluctuation of the economy when solar panel

technology and turbine prices skyrocketed to heights only gold or petrol had once reached.

The biggest emergency, though, was food, and subsequently, agriculture. Between 2029 and 2048, during the Gold Pollen Rush, the China Hand Pollination Project tapped in with stunning opportunism, presenting itself as the only efficient and feasible short-term solution to most of the states worldwide. It was an emergency response and a highly profitable one. Soon enough, a corporate conglomerate put together a huge team of scientists, economists, lawmakers and engineers that people nicknamed The Chap. And then I became director of their Urbanism Division.

During my formative years I was part of a specialised think-tank at the University of Barcelona which, given the urgency of addressing the expanding draught, the exponential growth of the population and the scarcity of space for mono-cropping — the devastating measure adopted by the states back then to end famine caused by failing pollination technologies —, came up with a redefined idea of the brutalist high-rise. Vertical city planning proved to be an effective tool to concentrate large groups of population in a few blocks, while freeing most of the land for agriculture. Those were exciting times for me, as after writing an award-winning PhD on the reactualisation of 1970s modular dwellings in times of extreme

environmental conditions, I was appointed director of the Urbanism Division of The Chap, where I was to lead a team to design the redistribution of urban spaces into “vertical colonies”.

that is still standing today among the ruins of Barcelona’s industrial belt, as a derelict witness of a time when architectural utopias were linked to progress and not to emergency measures.

The rationalist housing blocks that proliferated in European and American cities in the decades after the Second World War had been broadly criticised as failed — often naively Marxist — sociological experiments. Conversely, our redefinition of the high-rise introduced massive conglomerates that would concentrate living cubicles, leisure, commerce, healthcare and education into one single colony, thus liberating millions of hectares for crop cultivation. Our headquarters being located in Barcelona, we adapted the utopian architectural experiments that Ricardo Bofill’s Taller de Arquitectura undertook some 100 years ago, such as Walden7, the 1975 “vertical city”

Our departure point was the repetition of identical cells (or modules) positioned according to mathematical formulas, a technique developed in the 1970s

by El Taller de Arquitectura. We adopted the cube as the main modular unit to be repeated through a pattern of growth. This repetition provokes a certain automated urbanism, for when grouped, the cubes define the city and its functions, similarly to the rows of hexagons inside beehives.

Essentially, the way to do it is to fix an axis around the isometric movement of a parallelepiped in space along a three-dimensional orthogonal grid. As it were, a cube can be shifted along this axis, but also rotated, reflected, or

moved in various combinations of those processes. In the Great Urban Renewal during The Chap’s takeover of the early years, we extensively used this formula to erect mega-structural urban tissues that could stand alone or fit in with the extant urban environment, allowing these structures to be repeated ad infinitum. The advantages were significant: it made construction easier and cheaper through the use of standardised prefabricated materials while large-scale urban design became more adaptable by repeating component parts. In terms of social design, similarly to the workers’ housing developments built during the Industrial Revolution, the vertical colonies provided a highly effective access for the millions of new Pollination Agents to the neighbouring fields.

That became a key factor, for it soon brought to light that it was simply unattainable for farmers to implement hand pollination on any large scale basis. It had been feasible for those few crops that commanded high prices, and — even then — only when labour costs were cheap (which they were not).

The technique required someone to take hold of every single flower.

Using homemade pollination sticks made from chicken feathers and cigarette filters dipped into plastic bottles filled with pollen, a single agent could pollinate only 5 to 10 trees in a day. And to make things worse, children were often illegally employed, as they were the only

ones capable of climbing the trees to reach the highest and most fragile branches.

Within a decade, the rapid decay of working conditions and the subsequent multitudinous protests left a struggling elite who tried to salvage everything from spiralling into chaos. And chaos ensued. The Chap’s Resources Division then steered its efforts towards robotics.

In hindsight, that move was uttermost naive, some would even say agonistic. Almost immediately, the corporation entrusted all investments to a company named RoboBee and other materially engineered artificial pollinators, leaving hundreds of thousands of Pollination Agents unemployed (only some were repositioned into training programmes for RoboBee’s human remote control).

That gambit turned out technically and economically unviable, as it posed even more substantial ecological and moral risks than hand pollination. In some areas, deserting the high-rise quarters and settling in autonomous municipalities became a common practice. Media reported images of what seemed like swarms of humans settling in seemingly anarchic communities while proposals to pave the way for the comeback of bees started to resonate soundly.

Purposeless and attacked from all fronts, The Chap dissolved into different phantom societies and some of its political leaders faced imprisonment. I was lucky enough to be considered alienated from

the hierarchical power structure that commanded the corporation and declared a mere designer (cit.) by the criminal investigation. I then chose to exile myself in a new development in the Canary Islands (Spain), where a native type of palm tree, the Phoenix Canariensis, was giving exceptional results as a host for swarming bees. My island retreat in La Gomera, my home for the past 10 years, has given me enough perspective to summon in this letter the facts I believe have forged us into the fragile society we have become today.

It is imperative that we use the knowledge gathered during The Chap’s era not only as a reminder but as a revulsive. With this chronology I might hopefully

draft a blueprint to understand what is becoming the most abrupt ideological rupture since the Cold War of the 20th century. Experts have dubbed it the Two Oceans Theory, a name that is gaining traction in social media and spreading in the academic world, similarly to what happened with the term Anthropocene. North, Central and South America are veering towards what is widely known as Queen B, an economy led by Bitcoin blockchain technology and the sequestration of the remaining satellites; meanwhile, Europe and Asia have turned to a system reliant on the perishability of honey to promote commerce and trade culture within and among colonies, enhanced

by AI and automation, called The

Hexagon Honey Trading System.

During The Chap’s terminal years, the United States pumped resources into their satellite network. With stunning opportunism and using all their diplomatic force, they sequestered the remaining satellites in orbit.

The economic uncertainty that followed the collapse had some of the wealthiest US citizens investing their traditional fiat money in the Bitcoin blockchain system via the network, and gradually the rest of America wound up doing the same thing. With a US-backed control of the network, a new hierarchy of access is being established. Bitcoin lenders perform like banks used to and re-write the law, taking centralised control over entire cities. Some activists have accused beekeepers of enforcing a monopoly over certain urban colonies. Beekeepers have become some of the most powerful citizens, getting extremely rich by having different colonies competing over their services and being able to mine more coin than anybody else. As a consequence, illegal Queen Bee hunting is an increasing practice and some beehives have turned into surveillance fortresses, as absurd as the idea of controlling swarming bees might sound. Yet, there is a great divide between colonies in the countryside (closer to the big agricultural exploitations) and the city-colonies (those that concentrate a higher number of interconnected highrise developments). The rural

colonies often issue their own currency derived from Bitcoin under their control and the amount of thriving bee colonies that they possess. Those local currencies are stable and not susceptible to speculation. On the contrary, city-colonies have adopted a form of fractional-reserve banking by issuing new money in relation to their assets, which results in aggressive fluctuation.

On the other side of the ocean, ecologic cycles determine economy and its flows, which are affected by the exchange systems found in nature. Europe, Asia and Africa have now a tradebased economy with honey as the leading currency, which comes encapsulated in wax containers with hexagonal shapes, hence the nickname. Honey is a perishable good, a characteristic that defines the economy under which it serves, and so it promotes constant exchange while disavowing hoarding or speculation. Societies under that economic system have reorganised themselves into a noncentralised government scheme where citizens value the wellbeing of a hive over increasing the production of honey and thus unnecessarily stressing the bees.

Citizens dedicate the biggest chunk of their youth to profusely study anything related to bees and beekeeping, and the laws of the beehive have now been adapted to be the laws of the economy.

As symbiotic as it may sound, this system is doomed to instability.

Still struggling to balance

production with maintenance, the fragile ecology of this economy can only thrive without external threats, and the ever-increasing population on the Queen B sector is making their city-model the predominant one, which puts this municipalist-driven system at risk.

What not everybody knows is that it was traditional beekeeping and slight differences in bee species that provoked the subsequent division of the world in the aforementioned systems. Only the Apis mellifera, the western honey bee, is thought to have originated in Europe, Asia and Africa. These bees were one of the first domesticated insects, and are still the primary species kept by beekeepers. The honey bee is a non-native import in North America and most other countries, all honey bees in America are feral European bees brought over by colonists. My thesis now is that this factor has had a determining

influence in our more or less symbiotic relationship with this species.

I will soon be moving to eastern Australia, where the Phoenixis Canariensis can also thrive, to advise on the new experimental vertical farms that are reconverting some of the abandoned high-rise dwellings into part hydroponic facilities, part beekeeping mega-structures. I am designing a pipeline system similar to a gigantic hamster maze that will allow bumblebees to travel from the mega-hives to the farms and help us pollinate. Australia and some parts of Antarctica are considered neutral territories. Their isolation from the continent makes them ideal test grounds.

Allowing bees to recover to healthy hive numbers while still being able to feed the increasing population asks for dramatic measures. Moving the weight of

http://journal.cittadellarte. it/en/cultural-supplement/ its-2068-we-need-newswarming-revolution

agriculture somewhere else and transforming our derelict vertical cities into vertical farms is our only hope. I see it clearly now. We should have looked, listened, and learned how to swarm like a single organism. Looking back, I see my life experience as a metaphor of the recent history of humankind.

I find myself now inhabiting a decaying body, and at the last quarter of my existence I am back to studying again. I am humbled by my past failures as a urban planner, for bees are the ultimate urbanists. It is fundamental that we learn how to bow our heads as a species, because right now we might just need to act as a secondary one. We must allow bees to thrive and meander, we must quietly observe and follow their paths as they write plausible new narratives for the future.

ANNA MORENO Anna Moreno (Barcelona, 1984) lives and works in Barcelona and The Hague. She has been teaching Artistic Research at the Royal Academy of Art (The Hague) and other institutions and is a co-founder of the artists’ initiative Helicopter (The Hague).

Her art practice develops through expanded events and solo exhibitions such as Billennium, Catalonia’s Architectures Association (COAC), Barcelona, 2018; D’ahir d’abans d’ahir de l’altre abans d’ahir i més d’abans encara, Fundació Blueproject, Barcelona, 2016; The Whole World Was Singing, HIAP Project Space, Helsinki, 2016; and An Awkward Game, 1646, The Hague, 2015.

She has shown her work in the group shows We Are As Gods and Might as Well Get Good at It, Nieuwe Vide, Haarlem, 2018; Beehave, Joan Miró Foundation, Barcelona, 2018; En los cantos nos diluímos, Sala de Arte Joven, Madrid, 2017; Distopía General, Reales Atarazanas, Valencia, 2017; CAPITALOCEAN, W139, Amsterdam, 2016; Lo que ha de venir ya ha llegado, CAAC in Sevilla, MUSAC in León and Koldo Mitxelena in Donostia, 2015, and Generaciones, La Casa Encendida, Madrid, 2014, among others. Anna Moreno’s work has been featured at symposia such as Visual Activism, SFMOMA, San Francisco, 2014; and United We Organize, Stroom Den Haag, The Hague, 2013. The artist has participated in residencies at Artistas en residencia, CA2M and La Casa Encendida, Móstoles and Madrid, 2017; Seoul Art Space Geumcheon, Seoul, 2012; and Atelierhaus Salzamt, Linz, 2011; and has recently been the recipient of the Botín Visual Arts Grant, Santander, 2018; and of a fellowship at the Van Eyck Institute, Maastricht, 2019.

UNIDEE 2019 CALL FOR PAPER

HOW NOT TO FALL APART

by Julian Day

1 Half a day slips past and with it the sun and the heat. The shadows from midday bend as dusk approaches, washing our faces with gold then dull overhead light. A chorus of birds departs the nearby trees. The cooling air reveals the sound of traffic across the harbour.

I stand in a wooden rotunda on a hill overlooking Sydney Harbour.

My mouth is wide open.

Around me people flock and disperse like apparitions. I think I recognize one or two from the workshops but I’m not sure. We have sung together for six unbroken hours and I’m impressed. Singing for ten minutes left my diaphragm sore but pushing beyond made me feel increasingly high. Indestructible, even.

2 The provocation was simple and literal: to extend the human breath across an entire day.

24 Hour Choir was enacted by a shifting cohort of strangers across the first day of spring, from noon til noon, without pause.

All up over a hundred and fifty people clustered within the small bandshell to sustain the human voice collectively. I offered basic guidelines but these, for one reason or another, were mostly

As in any task, the duty cycle is crucial. You must rest in order to exert. You must also disperse the load. While one person rests the other picks up. Simultaneity is counterproductive — it’s more effective to overlap, to relay your energy. Doing this requires patience and negotiation, in our case unspoken. In other words, listening.

3 The composer Philip Glass led his own ensemble for several decades. He once said to me that the hardest thing about running a group is keeping it together.

Or, rather, stopping it from falling apart. I recount this to Peter Hook, bassist for Joy Division and New Order, in light of his bands’ very public breakups. He immediately blames “the emotions and the

What does it take to start a relationship, a group, a community, and keep it going? To resist the pressure to disband, to defeat entropy? Beginning a union seems such a mystery, ending it less so.

I recall too many times when a lover has called, texted, or emailed and in a flash we are done. Now when I see a couple walking down the street I am spellbound. They have found each other and have developed a vocabulary that they are willing to maintain. What are the odds?

4 “The power of singing, and its relation to place or territory, carries within it a deep political implication. As the example of the Australian aborigines attest, singing is a sacred rite by which entire communities are sustained.”1

5 Observatory Hill is the highest natural point immediately south west of Sydney Harbour. It attracts endless selfies, picnics, marriage proposals and, at night, teenage drinking parties.

Initially, I chose this location because it was practical. The work’s commissioner, the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, administers the historic Sydney Observatory

Branden LaBelle, Lexicon, p.53

Proposing the task was the easy part. Figuring out how to do it took time, a whole day to be precise. For one thing, it couldn’t be managed alone. Expelled from a single pair of lungs a breath is short, small, fragile. It quickly reveals corporeal limits. Supported by others, however, it can extend, move, create room. It extends the body outside itself and defines the common space between itself and others.

power.”

1

ignored. Thus each person bore the responsibility to solve the task, on their own and with others, wordlessly and in real time.

The original owners of the land, the Cadigal, called their natural port Tallawoladah. After the British invaded in 1788, its constituency swelled, first with aristocracy, then convicts, then visiting sailors, then a mix of immigrants, leading to Sydney’s first Chinatown. Before long, The Rocks was known as

This most recent diaspora was captured in Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s The City Of Forking Paths (2014). To partake, you swap your passport or license at nearby Customs House for an iPod and headphones. You hold the screen in front of you as Cardiff’s spoken contralto guides you on an hour-long route. The experience is dissociating.

Ghostly characters appear and disappear, rain snaps into sunlight snaps into night-time, houses blur with their hyper realistic simulacra. Cardiff’s narrative is part historic, part fiction. At one point you look

Grace Karskens Grace Karskens

When looking to film Playing Beatie Bow, Ruth Park’s magic realist novel about traveling back to convict-era Sydney, the producers decided on The Rocks. The area, named after the distinctive sandstone of its buildings, is tiny, just two dozen streets clustered in a narrow peninsula. It contains the oldest European buildings in the country — thick stone pubs, spidery Victorian row houses — dwarfed by a casino to the south and the grandest of Art Deco superstructures to the north, the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

For the next century, the remaining buildings were repurposed as public housing. This meant that until recently The Rocks was Australia’s only neighbourhood in which the most disenfranchised enjoyed multimillion dollar views.

This was further helped by the so-called ‘Battle of The Rocks’ of the early 1970s, in which building unions defied government’s orders to tear the buildings down. Forty years later, however, market forces won the fight: all houses were sold to private owners and the last tenants dismissed, this time with little protest.

3

The rotunda sits in the heart of The Rocks, a district famous for its intersecting symbolisms.

Historian Grace Karskens locates its significance in “very particular, distinctive and complex histories of cultural interaction, of the making of urban culture, of the creation, dissemination and power of images, and of the interface between land and sea.”2

a miasma of working class vice, harbouring “every species of debauchery and villainy”3, and when the plague swept through Sydney in the late 19th century, the area was blamed then largely cleared.

2

next door. This gave us somewhere warm to make tea and coffee and to store bags and iPhones. Quickly, however, I realized the site’s broader resonances.

6 “[Time] is the inexplicable raw material of everything ... No one can take it away from you.

It is unstealable. And no one receives either more or less than you receive. Talk about an ideal democracy!”4

7 There must have been a reason I set this all up. My year had become a blur of airports, broken wi-fi, flopping on friends’ couches or in lovers’ beds. Twenty four hours was about the longest I’d spent with anyone else in months. Even flying to and from Australia from New York, as I’d done several times that year, took less time than this.

Several months earlier, I’d undertaken another twenty-four hour piece but on my own. In The Weight of Air I set out to play a large pipe organ in a town hall continuously from midnight to midnight. I armed myself with a bag of heavy bolts that I used as weights. I placed one on a different key every minute; clocking time, like Tehching Hsieh. Like 24 Hour

Despite starting at the opposite time of the day, the effort followed an identical shape. The first twelve hours were easy. I can do this! I’m a winner! The next six, however, felt increasingly impossible. The death zone. Around hour sixteen, on both occasions, I momentarily lost my mind or momentarily fell asleep. From here on the end was easy.

In both pieces the transience of the crowd — we are together but never still — felt comforting. I didn’t want to be alone but I didn’t want a tribe. Not a lasting one anyway.

8 In her essay When The Hero Is The Problem, Rebecca Solnit calls for “coordinated rather than solo action”.

We are not very good at telling stories about a hundred people doing things or considering that the qualities that matter in saving a valley or changing the world are mostly not physical courage and violent clashes but the ability to coordinate and inspire and connect with lots of other people and create stories about what could be and how we get there.

Arnold Bennett, How To Live On 24 Hours A Day, pp. 8-9

The work was recorded at the apex of social transition and quickly became obsolete. A planned document of loss.

Choir, a crowd ebbed and flowed but were there not to sing but to listen.

4

through a window at what may or may not be a live person and for a moment you’re not sure which century you’re in.

Solnit suggests that to effect social change we should reject the concept of the leader and instead look collectively. She continues with a shortlist of concrete virtues: “listening, respect, patience, negotiation, strategic planning, storytelling.”

This list could function as a credo for 24 Hour Choir and by extension its parent project Super Critical Mass. For over a decade, I have facilitated sitespecific performance works in which groups of people, mostly strangers, commune in common spaces, like parks, town halls, streets, and learn to relate through interdependent sonic tasks. We develop these collaboratively through workshops in each space.

I never plan more than an exercise or two — the journey is always spontaneous, emerging from the skills each person brings and what we devise together. Whilst we have often worked with voice, we also work with other sound sources such as flutes, brass instruments, ceramic plates, sticks and metal cups. Always hunting for objects that anyone could handle.

Over several years, I and two colleagues, Luke Jaaniste and Janet McKay, met with a morphing crew of over fifty people in and around the downtown area of Brisbane. Our meetups culminated in performances on a forlorn waterfront car park, within the hectic main town square, and through the grandiose Gallery of Modern Art.

In these sessions we used the Federation Handbells, a set of crisp handbells commissioned in 2001 to celebrate the centenary of the federation of Australia’s disparate modern states. These instruments are sturdy and mobile. The simplicity of their design rewards invention, allowing performers to develop and discover the inherent virtuosity of a basic object.

Being bells, they are designed to co-opt space and to draw out connections. Their portability allowed the players to easily move around and focus on their shifting relationships to each other.

The final work featured a mass of performers swarming through a museum. They tried to chime in unison but the building’s complexity thwarted their efforts; no one could ever see enough of everyone else to know when to play. Individual attempts to form consensus generated a communal momentum and the piece refused to end.

9 The air is refreshingly warm for late winter. I stand near the rotunda with thirty or so people. An older man in a suit jacket, a couple of students, several women wearing cotton scarves. Our eyes are closed and we quietly hum, a buzzing indistinct harmony against the ambient weight of the evening: the birds, the traffic, the boats.

I have invited to this workshop all

Writing about this now, I think about Chiron, a video work by Adelita Husny-Bey, in which the Italian-born artist facilitates a workshop with a group of lawyers working with undocumented migrants to the USA. Husny-Bey gives the group exercises drawing on techniques of the Theater of the Oppressed from Brazil. They close their eyes, hum, sing, shout. Their accumulated trauma, and that of their clients, is channelled into a song devoid of syntax.

Andrew Ford observes, in his book Earth Dances, that “in Super Critical Mass the non-professionals are likely to be blanker, better able to blend, and — because their performance depends on it — possibly better at listening.”5 Sometimes I feel that listening is a rare skill. I’m not sure who does it better — beginners or experts.

Recently, I attended a performance in New York of sound artists improvising with laptops. As they play, their faces are stony, lit by their glowing Apple screens.

Later they debrief and proffer that “listening is more important than sounding.” The aural result was fragmented, dispersed, resembling random bleeps and blorts. I can only presume they meant what they said.

11 For 24 Hour Choir I could have written a protest song, with lyrics and a melody.

But I choose to work more abstractly. In this sense it’s a ‘song without words’. I figure this strategy will create a more elemental common ground between people and widen the aperture of participation.

Anyone can turn up and contribute a note. A wordless requiem, perhaps, for those departing against their will, the lack of text paralleling their lack of voice.

Andrew Ford, Earth Dances, pp. 190-191

This workshop serves multiple functions. We hear what our untrained voices sound like, the basic grammar of the task. We sense what we want and do not want to do. We build initial trust and points of connection. We begin to gauge how much focus and commitment we need to input.

We hear what it’s like to hear other people against an ever changing immersive soundscape. We sense what it’s like to work with a score that is held in the body.

10

5

the local social housing tenants but only one appears. He was once a dancer and retains libellous stories of famous choreographers past. For two decades he had lived in a modest convict-era cottage nearby. From his small bedroom window he could just about see the water. In the final performance he will be one of our mainstays, returning at various times across the hours, catching the train from his new flat forty-five minutes away.

12

struggle, encountering all the problems I foresaw and tried to arrest in my score. They run out of breath, they clash with each other, they fall into drone patterns that they can’t escape.

“Being good at getting a group to sing in harmony has more to do with how most environmental battles are actually won.”6 When it comes time to perform the full action I come prepared.

I bring a full-page text score. I have consulted Pauline Oliveros’ pioneering Sonic Meditations and have reflected on what we learnt in the workshops. I devise ways for participants to sing at full voice and rest as often as they like; I give them something to occupy their minds; something to generate a complex harmony for listeners.

I arm them with several tiers of information: the basic plot, some general suggestions, then more detailed instructions if they care to take them in.

6

There is one 30-minute window around 2am when it’s just me and two professional vocalists and my score works like a treat. But for the rest of the work people make it up as they go along. I see them

Rebecca Solnit

Despite my efforts, however, the piece quickly becomes a game of telephone: transmission corrupts the message. My invigilators get the instructions wrong, eager singers leap in with too much confidence, someone turns up when the invigilator is on a break. It’s a mess. For most of the experience I feel annoyed that everyone’s getting it wrong.

But the piece pushes on. I start to relax. I feel comfortable with relinquishing control, becoming less a composer and more a peer.

Many singers stay for hours and some return multiple times: at dusk, at midnight, at dawn. In receiving freedom they return with a sense of investment. In giving up control I have invited a community to invent its own teleology. I wasn’t needed after all.

JULIAN DAY Julian Day uses sound to reveal and transform power dynamics within social and civic situations.

He does this within individual artworks (sculpture, installation, video, performance, text) and ongoing projects including Super Critical Mass, in which temporary communities articulate public spaces with identical sounds, and An Infinity Room, which charges negative space with invisible turbulence. Day’s work has featured at Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery, Prague

Quadrennial, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, MATA, Bang On A Can Marathon, MASS MoCA, California-Pacific Triennial, Asia Pacific Triennial, Liquid Architecture, Artspace and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. He lives and works in New York and Sydney. www.julianday.com

UNIDEE Organisations SPRING TERM

DESIGN + CHANGE MA PROGRAMME RETREAT 2019 in collaboration with Design + Change MFA Department of Design Linnaeus University Växjö (Sweden) 4 - 11 April 2019 Students: Norman Lammers Lacey Dams Hubert Gaca Nada Okruhlicova Stephanie Föhr Clara Veneziano-Coen Tutors: Paolo Naldini (Director of Cittadellarte) Adrian Paci (Artist) Federico Campagna (Philosopher) Jenny Lee (Researcher and materiologist ) Ola Ståhl (Deputy Head of the Design Department at Linnaeus University) Zeenath Hasan (Senior Lecturer & Programme Coordinator, Design + Change BFA & MFA)

UNIDEE: art, creativity, magic and pretence in the latest module with the Linnaeus University From 5th to 7th April, the spaces of Fondazione Pistoletto hosted the UNIDEE module.

The artistic-educational initiative involved six students from the “Design + Change” master’s course, and was structured around a series of multi-thematic talks.

Let’s find out all the details.

Art, demopraxy, design, magic and pretence: these are some of the themes dealt with in the course of the latest UNIDEE module, developed through the contributions of different speakers and lecturers. The initiative was held in the spaces of Fondazione Pistoletto, and organized by Cittadellarte in collaboration and in co-planning with the Linnaeus University. The programme, characterised by an exchange of tutors between the two institutions, officially started on the evening of 4th April, with the actual activities beginning the following morning.

The module was conceived as a retreat dedicated to the world of art: the students temporarily left their classrooms to move to a different context. In the dimension of Cittadellarte, they had the opportunity to concentrate on their individual researches, also operating as study groups.

In an environment governed by new dynamics, the youths could interact with tutors and guests, there to enhance their

educational experience. “Retreats with universities — explains Valerio Del Baglivo, UNIDEE’s visiting curator — allow us to provide an immersive experience away from the classroom. The participating designers, for example, moved out of a scholastic institution to enter an art organisation like ours, which gave them the opportunity to concentrate on themselves and shift their perspectives on many aspects, like times, context and rules”.

On Friday, after a guided tour to explore the spaces of the Biellese foundation and discover the peculiarities of Michelangelo Pistoletto’s works, was the opening talk by Paolo Naldini, director of Cittadellarte, called Cittadellarte’s

experiments and practices in Social Design. The Demo-praxis prototypes. The activities of the six students participating in the master’s course Design + Change — coordinated by Valerio Del Baglivo — continued in the afternoon with a Skype lecture

by Federico Campagna, who presented and discussed the

contents of his book Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality (a philosophical work in which the author has highlighted the process of construction and pretence of reality). Campagna is an Italian philosopher living and working in London (he is a lecturer and tutor at the Royal College of Art), and his main research field is the connection between metaphysics, cultural production and politics.

After the Skype lecture, the students attended a conference curated by Adrian Paci (the mentor of two past UNIDEE modules, in 2016 and 2017), who presented his artistic practice. Paci talked about how his work addresses one of the paradoxes of human

intelligence, i.e. becoming aware of reality through the unreal.

“In 1997 — we read in UNIDEE’s notes about the life of the artist — Adrian Paci escaped from violent riots in Albania to find refuge, with his family, in Italy. On arriving in the country, he temporarily abandoned painting and sculpture in favour of video making, thus exploring new cinematographic languages and expressive means. The experience of being in exile, the shock of the separation and his having to adapt to a new place defined the context of his first films, through which he tried to discover the roots of his past. Gradually, Adrian Paci took distance from his personal experience to deal with collective history through projects stressing

the consequences of conflicts and social revolutions, revealing how one’s identity is affected by the socio-economical context. Working with non-professional actors, men and women in difficulty, he investigates many of the existential and social problems of our time: migration, loss, uprooting, globalisation, cultural identity, nostalgia and memory.”

The next phase of the module took place on Saturday morning, with two workshops curated by Zeenath Hasan and Ola Ståhl, called Fictioning and Towards a Post-Anthropocentric Speculative Archaeology through Design.

In the afternoon, the programme again involved Adrian Paci, who engaged in a dialogue with

the young designers about the meaning of being creatives and artists: “Paci talked in particular about the possibility of producing intensities (as a poetic concept) and the personal reasons leading people to be artists, — Valerio Del Baglivo said to us — he explained how a work not only needs to be well made, it’s also essential that it communicates a strong message, shining with its own light. Adrian’s work is not only about his daily life and professional story, but also about his past as a migrant.

He has in fact transformed these events into his artist’s films”.

The last gathering the students participated in was on Sunday, and it was a lesson curated by Jenny Lee, lecturer in the Speculative Design course at the Linnaeus

Article by Luca Deias

Luca Deias, “UNIDEE: art, creativity, magic and pretence in the latest module with the Linnaeus University”, Cittadellarte’s Journal, 19th April 2019 http://journal.cittadellarte.it/formazione/unideearte-creativita-magia-finzione-nellultimo-modulola-linnaeus-university

University. “This module — Del Baglivo concludes — was important for us because it re-tested the model of the institutional retreat.

I am extremely satisfied, because the students took part in an educational experience right before getting involved in Milan’s Design Week. The balance was definitely positive: the multithematic discussions with the lecturers were animated and the students very much involved in them”.

UNIDEE Organisations FALL TERM

LEARNING FOR THE FUTURE in collaboration with Italia che Cambia and Inwole association 29 Sept - 1 October 2019 Tutors: Daniela Bartolini (Vice-President of Italia che Cambia, Community Manager and Editor of Italia che Cambia) Andrea Degl’Innocenti (Journalist and Founding Partner of Italia che Cambia) Luca Asperius (Web Project Manager of Italia che Cambia)

“Learning for the future” in Piemonte che Cambia For five days Piemonte che Cambia was fertile ground on which to grow the dream of sustainable future for fifteen actors of change from Germany. Here is the story of the experience orchestrated by Italia che Cambia with the German association Inwole, organised as an occasion for encounter and characterised by dialogue.

We have now reached the end of this experience foretold.

The five days in Piemonte che Cambia, second and last stop in the European project Erasmus Plus for mobile activities for adult education, which brought together Italian and German educators and actors of change, concluded last night with a final hug on a warm autumn’s evening in Milan. Trains are now taking us to different places, but the roads are more and more conjoint, the feeling is of travelling along rail tracks crossing different territories but heading in the same direction.

“Learning for the future” was the title of this experience of exchange and contamination which involved 15 participants, coming mainly from Berlin and Potsdam, united by their engagement in organisations and associations dealing with the wide theme of sustainability.

“Because what we want to learn (together) for the future is what is usually called sustainable development, as mentioned in the European project itself. An

expression that doesn’t actually wholly convince us. We like the idea of sustainability, we like less the concept of development as it is generally intended. We prefer a qualitative to a quantitative growth”.

A journey full of encounters and, for some of us from Italia che Cambia, re-encounters. The stops were the ones marked on our map of Piedmontese change. Opportunities not only to present actions in progress, but also to meet the people, the true protagonists of these realities. A proposal coherent with our way of telling about change, which keeps being a “This is the way I do it”, which implies a speaker, somebody narrating their experience in first person.

The people we met inspired us by sharing their way of operating, and provided us with ideas that enriched our moments of group sharing, our analyses, our workshops.

And allowed us to overcome the somehow frustrating sensation of not being able to fully convey an experience to those reading about it. We sometimes feel that our words and videos can’t really communicate what we have the privilege to see, to appreciate firsthand, like the expression in the eyes of the people we interview when they are talking about their projects. These journeys seem to be a good way to let others enjoy this experience.

On those days we were based in Cittadellarte, which – as we were expecting when we organised the residency – revealed itself to be an equal source of inspiration. The concept of art at the service of a responsible change at the basis of the organisation and the beauty of that welcoming place were great

elements of support, reminding us how much we need beauty, to be surrounded by it, in order to find the necessary strength and energy to feed the process of change and renew our commitment in this direction.

A territory is also made of its history so we couldn’t not touch on some of its founding elements like wool working in the Biellese area and Olivetti in Ivrea. Stories we approached with a view of “learning for the future”, to understand how features from the past can be emphasised to define trajectories towards a sustainable future.

More out of mere chance than of careful planning, the day in Ivrea enclosed the three “states” of

time. Like in a bizarre remake of “A Chritsmas Carol�, we first stepped into the past, visiting the Ivrea of Camillo and Adriano Olivetti, the most advanced entrepreneurial venture our country has ever had, from both a social and a cultural point of view. To accompany us was our guide Marco Peroni, the son of a worker who has been employed with Olivetti since he was 14.

Then a step into the future with Nicola Savio and his strange and futuristic tools, and his systemic approach to agriculture, and life.

A desirable future made of big visions and small realities. To then step back into the present, with a visit to Lanificio Subalpino, where Nicolò Zumaglini showed us how tradition and sustainability can be

combined in a more old-fashioned market-oriented company.

The present is where the most important match is played, among foreign competitors, market changes and new sensibilities more and more strongly emerging in people.

The day in Turin was the most intense. We got carried away and dragged the group of bewildered Germans in a whirlwind of meetings, stories and adventures.

“It would probably have been better if we had been given the time to digest the information, to talk about it among ourselves, to share our impressions”, someone good-naturedly commented in the final round of feedbacks. But a sense of being overwhelmed by the inputs you receive every day is also part of experiencing Italia che Cambia.

After a stroll around the historic city centre, we met Hakima and Malik at the Public Lavatories in via Agliè, a “Neighbourhood’s Home” created to provide a

warm shower to those who can’t afford it, and soon become reference point for all the local associations, meeting place and blend of different cultures and traditions. Hakima then took us to Piazza Foroni, which on that day was occupied by BarrieraFiera, a neighbourhood market gathering some of the most interesting realities from the area. There, after a hearty lunch of pasta with beans and potatoes washed down with Menabrea beer, we had a chat with Daniela Re from Rete Solare per l’Autocostruzione, who showed us their natural products for bioarchitecture, and with the youths of Fa Bene, who told us - who were in the meantime having the fruit salad they had kindly offered

us - about their idea of collecting unsold / excess food from the city’s markets and redistribute it to families in financial difficulties.

Ten minutes later we were at the entrance of MAcA, Museo A come Ambiente, the first museum in Europe dedicated to the environment, itself an architectural reuse project that has recycled an abandoned factory. Paolo Legato, its dynamic director, explained to us the educational value of this initiative designed for the younger generations – but able to engage adults too – which every year welcomes hundreds of children and teenagers from the age of 4 to 18. We then actually visited the museum, rediscovering ourselves as curious adolescents mesmerised by a microscope or by

the thousand creatures populating a drop of water.

Lastly, we popped to Turin’s most bizarre and eclectic balcony, to meet Maksim and Daria, known for their project “Concertino dal Balconcino” (Little concert from the little balcony). In front of a glass of wine from Apulia – which for some turned from one to two or three – the couple of artists and performers told us how the initiative started as a little game of organising live concerts and exhibitions on their own balcony to eventually become a cult event on Turin’s musical scene, able to draw thousands of people, and for which even The Guardian showed support. Some recent legal issues have in fact slowed down – but not stopped! – the “artistic revolution”

Before leaving each for our own destination (Berlin, Potsdam, Rome, Turin), we treated ourselves to a last visit: Miagliano.

As our guide Maria Laura Delpiano explained to us, Miagliano is the site of one of the local historic wool mills, built in the 19th century by the Poma family, who up to fifty years ago employed 1200 workers. Today it is a charming and fascinating town, blending industrial archaeology with luxuriant nature and new cultural impulses.

Since the closure of the factories, some of the old abandoned buildings have been completely covered in brilliant vegetation, with tree trunks breaking and growing through windows, overpowering lime and bricks. One of the more recent constructions houses the association Amici della Lana (Friends of wool), whose aim – Emanuela Tamietti told us – is to keep alive the tradition of this ancient manufacturing process through exhibitions, theatre productions and cultural initiatives.

A bit further on we met Nigel Thompson, who has dedicated his life to wool since he moved to the Biellese area as a young boy, establishing Biella The Wool

Company. Nigel meticulously selects the wool delivered in big lorries, dividing it according to its length and characteristics.

Our objective was to combine first-hand experience with development, resuming the format already tested on our first journey.

In the educational moments we declined the word “sustainability” applying it to the actual practices gathered during the encounters.

The “prepared” workshops therefore acquired unexpected forms, with extemporaneous transformations feeding on the enthusiasm of the participants. This led to discussions about circular economy, radio rehearsals to produce an engaged and effective story-telling of change, reflections on creative ways of communicating the emerging paradigm, moments of serious collective fun trying out games on sustainability to use to lightheartedly convey the concept to a younger audience… and much more.

Article by Daniela Bartolini and Andrea Degl’Innocenti.

Daniela Bartolini and Andrea Degl’Innocenti, “Learning for the future”, Italia che Cambia’s website, 2nd October 2019. https://www.italiachecambia. org/2019/10/imparare-per-futuronel-piemonte-che-cambia/

led by the couple, because the music exceeded the permitted level of decibels. “But we’ll be back better than before, the revolution doesn’t stop here!” Maksim said to us, before Daria said goodbye making the whole courtyard resound with her crystalline high pitch.

About Cittadellarte Fondazione Pistoletto Cittadellarte’s aim is to inspire and produce a responsible change in society through ideas and creative projects. Cittadellarte - Fondazione Pistoletto was instituted in 1998 as a concrete action of the Progetto Arte Manifesto, where Michelangelo Pistoletto proposed a new role for the artist: that of placing art in direct interaction with all the areas of human activity which form society.

Cittadellarte is dedicated to the study, experimentation and development of practices translating the symbol of the Third Paradise* into realty, implying it into every sector of society. It is a great laboratory, hosting many young artists, which generates unedited processes of development in diverse fields of culture, production, economics and politics.

Cittadellarte is a vibrant international network of cultural and social innovators, individuals actively interlaced with their social contexts where they often act as catalyst of change. The interrelationship between people and projects is based on a common vision whose roots lie in an accumulative thought&practice process, developed by a wide range of thinkers, managers, innovators of all field. Pistoletto’s work, from the 60s to today, acts as a pumping brain for Cittadellarte’s communities.

Cittadellarte has developed an extensive networks of collaborations with Institutions (various United Nations Agencies, Ministries, Universities and Educational Organizations) global enterprises and local businesses, civil society collectives, organizations and individuals from all fields.

* “The symbol of the Third Paradise, a reconfiguration of the mathematical infinity sign, is made of three consecutive circles. The two external circles represent all the diversities and antinomies, among which nature and artifice. The central one is given by the compenetration of the opposite circles and represents the generative womb of a new humanity”.

Michelangelo Pistoletto www.cittadellarte.it www.terzoparadiso.org

About UNIDEE residency programs UNIDEE residency programs is a higher educational programme based on a weekly modular format investigating the relationship among visual arts, public sphere and activism by combining critical theory with practice.

Through residential dynamics, UNIDEE is designed to form artivators, people who intend to use art as a methodology, practice and language, in order to become agents for the activation of responsible actions and processes in the territories in which they live and carry out their professional activities.

During 2019, UNIDEE has developed three formats: UNIDEE Modules, UNIDEE Residencies and UNIDEE Organisations.

UNIDEE residency programs 2019 Director Juan Sandoval Visiting Curator Valerio Del Baglivo Under the supervision of Paolo Naldini Programme Coordinator Clara Tosetti

www.cittadellarte.it/unidee/

VALERIO DEL BAGLIVO Valerio Del Baglivo is a freelance curator, educator and perennial collaborator based in Italy.

Collaborative research, alternative education, fiction and storytelling play a continuing and vital role within the methodology and interests of Valerio Del Baglivo.

He attended Curatorlab, an independent curatorial course, at Konstfack University (2011), and is now completing a PhD Programme at Middlesex University with a research focused on public engagement and experimental pedagogy in self-initiated art institutions. He has integrated his academic training by participating in international residency programs at The Banff Centre in Banff, ICC at Gwangju Biennale in South Korea, Wysing Art Centre in Cambridge, Futura in Prague, The Luminary in Missouri and BAR Projects in Barcelona.

In the last years he has curated exhibitions and projects for organizations such as, Apexart - NY, Kunstverein – Milan,Konsthall C Stockholm, Kunsthalle WUK- Vienna, Azkuna Zentroa - Bilbao – and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo - Turin.

In 2017 he initiated with artist Ludovica Carbotta The Institute of Things to Come, an itinerant institute that embrace irrational, mimetic and fictional knowledge with the aim of destabilizing models of objective scientific research.

He was 2017 Curator in Residency and Shadow Curator at Grand Union, Birmingham. Since 2013 is a member of IKT – International Association of Curators of Contemporary Arts. He is currently Associate External Curator at MAXXI (Rome) and 2018-19 Visiting Curator of UNIDEE at Fondazione Pistoletto (Biella).

JUAN ESTEBAN SANDOVAL

PAOLO NALDINI

Juan Esteban Sandoval (1972), Head of projects and Director of Cittadellarte’s Art Office.

Paolo Naldini is the Director of Cittadellarte since 2000.

In 1996 he gained a degree in Economics from Turin University with a dissertation on urban derelict buildings and lands, in connection with the Faculty of Architecture.

From ’94 to ’97, he worked as an account manager at F.&T. Srl Consulting in Turin, then moved to England’s West Country; from ’97 to 2000, he worked for Westland Helicopters Ltd, Yeovil, in the finance department, as Accounts Officer and Trend Analysis Researcher.

As artist, he has exhibited internationally since 1994. He is the co-founder of “el puente_lab” art collective in Medellín, a platform for artistic and cultural production which uses contemporary art as a tool for the social trasformation.

Since 2002 he has been the director of the Art Office of Cittadellarte, coordinating the realization of 13 editions of “Arte al Centro” exhibitions within the Foundation’s premises and a number of exhibitions in other locations, among others, the MuKHA in Antwerp, the Island of San Servolo for the 50th Venice Biennial, Modena’s Galleria Civica and the MAXXI Museum in Rome.

He co-curated the exhibition “Cittadellarte. Sharing transformation” at Kunsthaus in Graz, the first two editions of the seminar “Methods.

Research project on art-society relation” and two workshops of shared interdisciplinary planning in Venice and in Gorizia, Italy.

Juan is a former UNIDEE resident (2000).

Paolo writes texts and often talks at conferences on Art and Society.

His aptitude for words has recently brought him to create the word demopraxy, “a tension toward a new and pulsating declination of the concept of democracy along the lines of concrete experimentation, of direct and working commitment, open and ongoing involvement” or, to say it more plainly, democracy in first person, which refers to all those practices and methods that focus primarily not on the power of the people, but rather on what people do in and of the public space, the things they create in practice as urgent and de-ideologised responses to expropriation in all fields of life. He founded a web project dedicated to exploring creative collaboration by meeting and writing in different places in the city of Turin.

CLARA TOSETTI Clara Tosetti (1989), Programme Coordinator, UNIDEE - University of Ideas.

A graduate in Architecture (Polytechnic of Milan, 2014), in 2016 she obtained a Master in Economics and Management of Art and Cultural Heritage at the Business School of the Sole 24 Ore, specializing in the areas of communication, organization of exhibitions and cultural events and educational programmes.

During the master’s degree studies, she co-curated the exhibition “Legàmi” at the Carcano Theatre in Milan, which explored the different types of bonds between women.

She then worked for the Studio Art&Co. in Turin, collaborating in organizing the exhibition “Sigmar Polke” at Palazzo Grassi in Venice and assisting prestigious private collections of contemporary art with the advisoring and cataloguing.

Clara has always been interested in the connection between art and public space, and how this might relate to the individual and collective growth to create the identity of a community that is both local and global.

UNIDEE residency programs 2019 is made possible thanks to the collaboration and support of: Patrons

Piedmont Region; Compagnia di San Paolo; CRT Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Torino; Fondazione Zegna; illycaffè S.p.A.

Production Residency Collaborations & Scholarships A.M. Qattan Foundation (PS); Yarat Contemporary Art Space (AZ).

Institutional Collaborations & Scholarships

Accademia di Belle arti di Bologna (IT); Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, Milano (IT); Accademia di Belle Arti di Napoli (IT); Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma (IT); CAMPO - Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (IT); École supérieure d’art et design – ESAD, Grenoble (FR); Fine Art (BEAR) – ArtEZ University of the Arts (NL); Fondazione Modena Arti Visive (IT); HYDRO, Biella (IT); IULM-Istituto Universitario di Lingue Moderne, Milano (IT); Italia che Cambia (IT) and Inwole (DE); Linnaeus University (SE); Università IUAV, Venezia (IT).