MADE IN MIND #19

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Francesca Pirillo

DIRETTORE RESPONSABILE Dario Carotenuto

MANAGING EDITOR Marika Marchese

PROJECT COORDINATOR Heidi Mancino

CONTAINERS SECTION Forme Uniche

PROOFREADER Sharon McMahon

SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER Gianluca Gramolazzi

CONTRIBUTORS Lisa Andreani Francesca Biagini Guy Marshall-Brown Irene Sofia Comi Benedetta D’Ettore Gianluca Gramolazzi Ginevra Ludovici Marco Roberto Marelli Coral Nieto Garcia Dobrosława Nowak Flavia Rovetta

CONTACT info@madeinmindmagazine.com adv@madeinmindmagazine.com

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COVER #19 Mohau Modisakeng

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ISSUE #19

CONTENTS

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CONTAINERS

THE LITTLE BIG WORLD OF LUKA 5G

by Dobrosława Nowak

06

PORTRAITS

MOHAU MODISAKENG

by Marika Marchese

34 PORTRAITS

72 PORTRAITS PERFORMED VOICE |

SOUND, POETRY AND INTERMEDIALITY

Coral Nieto Garcia in conversation with Anne-James Chaton

50 STREAMS QUESTIONS FOR A SOCIETY’S REGENERATION

Michelangelo Pistoletto in conversation with Marika Marchese

SWERVING AND WANDERING WITH ALBERTO MUGNAINI

by Azalea Seratoni

56 PORTRAITS

84 PORTRAITS

SURVIVAL TACTICS IN A PRECARIOUS ECOSYSTEM Barena Bianca Artists Collective | Interview by Benedetta D’Ettore

PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE EMOTIONAL RITUALITY

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34

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Mohau Modisakeng is a contemporary artist, born in Soweto in 1986. His work engages race, the militarization of society, and the deep divides of post-apartheid South Africa and the post-colonial continent. He interrogates the collective narratives that inform our experience of the world, in particular those that evoke the black body as a site of fragmentation and distortion.

Azalea Seratoni in conversation with Alberto Mugnaini (Pisa, 1955): artist, critic and writer.

He lived in New York where he was one of the founders of the “New York Works” design laboratory. Since 2006 he has given life to the “AlbertoAperto” project, which includes projects for exhibitions and cultural interventions within his Milan studio.

Barena Bianca (Fabio Cavallari, b. 1992, and Pietro Consolandi, b. 1991) is a collective that formed in the summer of 2018 as an activist group in the Venetian Lagoon, striving to bring to light many of its ecological and sociological issues, adopting the Barena (typical Venetian salt marsh, essential to the survival of the city) as its emblem.

An interview to Matteo Vittorello

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50

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by Irene Sofia Comi

CONTAINERS is a section, curated by Forme Uniche, that deals with cultural “containers”: physical and virtual spaces, containers that welcome innovative projects, and that are told through the personalities that made them possible. For this issue Dobrosława Nowak has interviewed the Luka 5G Team, that started a curatorial activity set online in the popular game Minecraft.

STREAMS, the new Made In Mind column, comes from the desire to create a moment of reflection on social issues with established artists and professionals. We inaugurate the section with Michelangelo Pistoletto, a major artist of Arte Povera, who created a school, a city, a foundation, Cittadellarte from his art.

Anne-James Chaton, writer and multi-faceted plastic artist, started her practice at the end of the 1980s / beginning of the 1990s in the Parisian literary scene, a moment qualified as “post-poetic” and “trans-genre”. In a desire to go beyond the question of lyricism and make the object speak by itself, he will take an interest in collective, shared and banal scriptures, which he will call “poor writings”.

“Breathing is nothing more than our photosynthesis”, says the artist Matteo Vettorello (Venice, 1986). A claim that reveals a lot about the poetry of the artist, that moves through opposite issues such as science, technology, art and human sciences. Daily gestures and feelings are at the centre of Vettorello’s research, that - after a past as a painter, studying at the Academy of Fine Arts and IUAV University in Venice - consists of the creation of sculpture-devices able to measure and test our reactions and perceptions between each other, potential biometric systems attempting to measure something that cannot be measured yet.

Mohau Modisakeng, 2020

MOHAU MODISAKENG Marika Marchese

Mohau Modisakeng is a contemporary artist, born in Soweto in 1986. He lives and works between Johannesburg and Cape Town. He completed his undergraduate degree at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town in 2009 and worked towards his Master’s degree at the same institution. His work engages race, the militarization of society, and the deep divides of post-apartheid South Africa and the post-colonial continent. He interrogates the collective narratives that inform our experience of the world, in particular those that evoke the black body as a site of fragmentation and distortion. Mohau Modisakeng participated in the Venice Biennale in 2017, representing the South African pavilion, he has obtained numerous prizes and awards.

For Modisakeng, photography becomes the medium to flatten time, to connect the observer and the subject of the photo, dividing the moment and freezing it as it declared “a state of limbo situated between the horrors of our apartheid past and the ideals of the future which we have failed to obtain”, between the daily reality of the observer and that experienced by the South African people.

In his performance, the artist is in front of the camera staging the feelings he experienced, reenacted something very private and personal.

Prejudice against Apartheid and the history of colonialism exposed the collective history to a change, as if not to face reality, as if one did not want to give importance to history. So the artist tries to bring back to his works the harsh reality made of horror, destruction, violence, and pain. Very often dust resorts in the works, remembering men and children forced to work in mines.

“His images evoke the darkness and pollution of the mines that surround Johannesburg and the trauma they have wreaked on black bodies through the generations, with the striking figure of Modisakeng himself beaming brightly in the middle of it all.” Through his body the artist becomes the mediator of history, mourning’s story, expression of deep sorrow, he tells us through a thoughtful, profound gesture, a past still present, a wound not yet healed, of the differences to which we have not listened anymore.

In the works, we find symbols that have to do with the Zulu tradition (Modisakeng’s mother was Zulu), tribal customs and traditional beliefs, with the symbols of white capitalism, with the acts of violence that the population has suffered, the tiring and cruel working conditions. With his body, he described the reflection of loss, through personal experience and with the collective trauma of his people. The artist often wears black, mourning’s color, coal’s color, the color of absence par excellence, uploading the photo of expressive

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power, and emotional tension performances. In contrast, he wears white aprons, horse blinkers that allow you to look forward only, bowler hat and powder or white liquid, symbols of a not yet completely past, which has destroyed traditions, led to territorial divisions and much, much suffering.

Mohau is an incredible artist, he has a very high emotional charge.

Each project differs from the other with the same expressive power, telling how often we have repeated the drama of a violated land, the suffering that millions of people have experienced under the aegis of capitalism and oppression.

Our interview focused on the figure of the artist, from the moment of creation to the ideals he pursues. The story of Modisakeng is really wide and deep, we have not been able to grasp everything but on this occasion, we want to emphasize and give space to the Black Lives Matter movement, remembering that we will be free from hatred when we understand that we depend on others in a relationship reciprocal of giving and having, without imposing dominion, but with the awareness that to live in peace, we must give peace, that to understand who we are we must understand each other. We must take care of individual and collective memory. Loving differences are the only way to restore order.

Mohau Modisakeng Untitled (Zanj 6), 2019 Diasec pigment print on edition etching rag Courtesy WHATIFTHEWORLD Gallery and the Artist

Marika Marchese

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Mohau Modisakeng Untitled (Frame X), 2012 Inkjet Print On Epson Ultrasmooth Courtesy the Artist

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Mohau Modisakeng Untitled (Zanj 4, 5, 10, 8), 2019 Diasec pigment print on edition etching rag Courtesy WHATIFTHEWORLD Gallery and the Artist

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Mohau Modisakeng Zion, 2018 Diasec pigment print on platine fibre RAG Courtesy WHATIFTHEWORLD Gallery and the Artist

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Mohau Modisakeng Baheberu 2, 2019 Diasec pigment print on platine fibre RAG - MATT Courtesy WHATIFTHEWORLD Gallery and the Artist

Mohau Modisakeng Baheberu 1, 2019 Diasec pigment print on platine fibre RAG - MATT Courtesy WHATIFTHEWORLD Gallery and the Artist

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Mohau Modisakeng Emira 1, 6, 2019 Diasec pigment print on platine fibre RAG - MATT Courtesy WHATIFTHEWORLD Gallery and the Artist

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How does your artistic production take place?

All starts with an idea, the investigation, the trial, error, refinement, its preparation and opportunity.

How do you organize your work?

I organize it in terms of the different phrases that lead to a complete work, from conception to production and showcase.

Some of my projects take months of planning and only culminate in a series of fleeting performances for select audiences. So we document the work to be able to share with wider audiences elsewhere.

Where do you record your films?

I document a lot of my performance work, which has been showcased in different parts of the world. I often choose places that have a particular connection to the history of Africa and the black Diaspora in the19th century.

I’ve recorded in several historical landmarks in New York. I’ve also performed in Kalba, a coastal town on the coast of Oman, once a historic entry point for East African slaves. Recently I showcased a performance in an old shipyard in Helsingør Denmark.

Places are as symbolic as languages, in that

someone’s tongue can place them somewhere in the world. People are defined to a large extent by being born in a particular place in the world.

The places we live our lives in often become significant markers of our identity. People belong somewhere, someplace. So yes, places are very symbolic.

Are there any artists or directors you take inspiration from?

I admire a number of artists, each for a different reason.

I am inspired by the work of South African sculptor Jane Alexander. The photographs of Bob Gosani, Ernest Cole are a constant reference point in my research, and the photographs of South African photographer Ntate Santu Mofokeng, particularly the series shot in the caves in a place called Motouleng.

I also love the film work of Isaac Julien and Steve McQueen.

What message would you like to give to the world in 2020?

There is a beauty in stillness and silence. When the world returns to a new normal, post contagion, it might have to reimagine a new way of life, with self, and others.

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What do you wish for your land?

I wish for social justice and economic equality.

Is there a poem or a literary passage you are fond of?

A poem by this important South African poet Keorapatse Kgosietsile.

This is an extract from the poem “No serenity here”: I fear the end of peace and I wonder if that is perhaps why our memories of struggle refuse to die we are not strangers to the end of peace we have known women widowed without any corpses of husbands because the road to the mines like the road to any war is long and littered with casualties even those who still walk and talk

We would like to thank the artist, Mohau Modisakeng and his team, in particular Scott Williams, for availability during these months of collaboration, and the WHATIFTHEWORLD gallery, for the concession of the images.

Mohau Modisakeng Passage 1, 10, 2017 Ink-jet on Epson Hot Press Natural Courtesy WHATIFTHEWORLD Gallery and the Artist

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Mohau Modisakeng Passage 8, 2017 Ink-jet on Epson Hot Press Natural Courtesy WHATIFTHEWORLD Gallery and the Artist

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Mohau Modisakeng Ga bose gangwe (video still), 2013 1.36min. (loop) Single channel video Courtesy WHATIFTHEWORLD Gallery and the Artist

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Mohau Modisakeng Inzilo (video still), 2013 Courtesy WHATIFTHEWORLD Gallery and the Artist

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THE LITTLE BIG WORLD OF LUKA 5G Dobrosława Nowak

CONTAINERS / CURATED BY FORME UNICHE

Luka Gallery is an artistic and curatorial collective from Poznań (Poland) existing since 2017. On occasion, but not because of the pandemic, the group has started and is currently rapidly developing a complex curatorial activity set online in the popular game Minecraft. The new gallery branch is called Luka 5G. Its activity is planned for many months or even several years. The authors are interested in the processual nature of activities related to art and the creative reformulation of well-known exhibitive forms. This unique, unprecedented space is governed by specific, clear rules that the authors of the initiative associate with the atomistic model of the world. We talk to the content coordinators: Julianna Kulczyńska, curator, MA student in Curating and Theory of Art at the University of Arts in Poznań, and Jakub Kosecki, artist and curator, a graduate of Intermedia and MA student in Curating and Theories of Art at the University of Arts in Poznań. Other members: Alicja Mielczarek, Nikodem Biegowski, Olga Truszkowska, Wiktor Gruszka, and Mikołaj Torz.

Dobrosława: What is Luka 5G? Julianna: The easiest way is to recall how it all started. We decided to undertake a gallery project together during the pandemic, although the Luka Gallery collective was already thinking about some Minecraft-related activities before. We decided that we would launch such a place, the Luka 5G server, and we felt that it was somehow an “art instance” for us.

Jakub: Luka 5G is a platform for art, for artistic activity. I find the concept of a gallery and exhibitions problematic. I perceive it as more of a linguistic custom, a habit, and not the heart of the matter.

We meet on the Luka 5G server, we carry out an art program in the form of exhibitions and concerts, but at the same time, there are works created or activities taking place. To sum it up, a certain kind of artistic practice is conducted by various people on the server. It’s also a place that you can join and co-create with us with appropriate hardware resources. The ease of connecting with us is one of the goals we pursue.

Dobrosława: What more could you say about the Minecraft game itself?

Julianna: Luka 5G is a space for art, as part of the activity that Jakub talked about. Regarding

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the statement that we organize exhibitions and concerts on the server - we use these titles for communication purposes, but these events are actually broader and more diverse. Concerts may resemble exhibitions, and exhibitions, through their sound elements, resemble concerts. Minecraft’s capabilities are so vast that it’s fluid.

Jakub: The world of Minecraft itself doesn’t contain exceptionally complex narratives. This world isn’t defined, except that the blocks that it’s composed of are referring to reality in a sense. People rent servers where they build, wage wars, or simulate social life. Minecraft works outside of servers. You can buy or set up your server on your physical equipment. The world has been generated on our server, through the game is ours as a whole. In the case of the Luka 5G server, there is no question of buying the world, its terrains, fragments. More specifically, the server itself has an internal engine coming from the game, it’s a permutation of the Minecraft world, so every action requires the use of an interface. This world is built on very specific and consistent rules, where we can interact with its elements. Each atom of this world, each block, can be removed or moved. It’s a “sandbox game” - its content is modal for the user. We neither win nor lose, we rather test the game’s possibilities. We

CONTAINERS Luka 5G Team

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CONTAINERS / CURATED BY FORME UNICHE

use this sandbox in the context of “fun with the art world”, or you could say that we perceive the art world as such fun. This is the main point of this game. We could change its look to a more authentic one, but Minecraft is all about these bricks, so it will never be this realistic. This game isn’t about pretending to be the reality at all, but about adopting a convention that the world is homogeneous and consists of cube-shaped atoms. It can be said that Minecraft presents a specific philosophical model of the world. It’s not a direct model, it presents one concept the world consists of cubes shaped grains, which are dependent on us - the subjects. We decided that we can act artistically here. This is our interpretation.

Julianna: Making the game’s world similar to the physical reality is, however, also possible in Minecraft. Building a white cube with white walls, floor, and ceiling, and

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uploading a photo of the work (there’s an option to add external files) is possible, and the interior of the game may pretty much resemble reality. However, it’s less interesting this way. Even if Minecraft strives for reality, it’s always a bit of a mockery.

Jakub: I remember how people reacted to Minecraft when it was still a novelty. It was seen as a naive interpretation of reality, without understanding what the game was about at its core. Minecraft, if it’s a game of something, is a game with the philosophical assumption that everything is made of cubes. If we try to look at it as a one-to-one simulation of reality as if we wanted to make it a game goal, then we’d have to put it differently - what happens here is our experience, just like in the real world.

Julianna: Only that it’s realistic.

Jakub: Maybe even real.

Luka 5G Happy End exhibition view Dominika Hoyle

Dobrosława: Could you indicate the most important thing that distinguishes this space from other gallery options, both real and virtual?

Julianna: For me, it’s distinguished by the egalitarianism of use. Anyone can log in to the server, and, although we are forced to block certain key blocks and areas, everyone who logs in can build something or comment. It’s not like art galleries that most people perceive as exclusive and strange situations. It’s also not a gallery in Second Life where you first have to buy something to be able to build.

Jakub: The most important feature of LUKA 5G is its interactivity. I’m probably talking about the same thing Julianna mentioned, just looking at it from a different perspective.

In our gallery, a group of people could band together, login, run far to a place we have no idea about, and start building their own space or even define it as their own.

Second Life is the most exploited game in terms of the conventionality of online galleries that simulate social reality instead of opening up and creating new opportunities. The world of Minecraft, due to the coherence of the rules of its functioning, is an alternative, it allows doing something new, instead of posing or imitating something that already exists.

Dobrosława: Was the creation of the server a result of a pandemic?

Jakub: We thought about it before, but the pandemic simply created a situation where we had the capacity and few external factors could have distracted us from working on it.

Getting started with the project required sitting in front of the computer, and the forced stay at home was beneficial to it.

Julianna: Lockdown has allowed us to focus our efforts on a larger project. We found time to write an application and now we are financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (“Networking Culture” program - “Kultura w sieci”), so we have the funds to run the Luka 5G project.

Dobrosława: The world of Minecraft feels quite stable and predictable. In the era of continental fires, melting glaciers, pandemics, this is a world where we can finally feel safe, it gives us a sense of control. How do you relate and can we generalize your attitude for an entire generation?

Jakub: In my practice on the server, I often catch myself burning trees or blowing up holes. Recently, on the occasion of the exhibition Interface Mantra with the artist Agata Konarska, we blew a huge hole through the whole world with dynamite. The next example may be less direct, but some time ago I flooded the forest with lava to see it burn. Functioning among the internal references of this world makes you feel very safe because everything can be overwritten, you can reverse the consequences of your actions. I think a lot of people who never played Minecraft

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CONTAINERS / CURATED BY FORME UNICHE

Julianna: With more visually realistic games, you have to break the barrier of a typical perception of this object, how you usually think, and how it’s talked about. With such flexible matter, it’s simpler, more open, and brings more equality to the table.

Jakub: We are used to a given way of using things and we fit into it because it’s convenient. By creating a white cube here, we build it with the perfection that cannot be achieved in physical reality, we’re giving it perfect dimensions and location. We play with information and images. There’s a perfect cube in this Minecraft world - in ours, there isn’t. The perfect white cube that we build is an accurate visualization of what a white cube is supposed to be. We thought so and created one at the beginning. Now, if we are building a white cube or we want to use it, it’s because this world has such a strong assumption, objects interact with each other, there’s a light programmed in this world in such a way that a perfectly white environment can simply be handy for us to show something at the moment. This is not a convention that we use. I think that the idea of ​​the white cube had such a lineage - it was about abstracting objects, associating this space with a blank sheet of paper or with order - but the assumption that a white background is an actual abstraction also eats itself up from the inside.

CONTAINERS behave like they are doing just that, with a similar interface to accountability for their actions. Games today often show the naivety of both the older generations and the younger ones.

Julianna: I don’t like to generalize. It seems to me that this supposed sense of control is quite deceptive. In case there is no electricity, our work on the Luka 5G isn’t possible. In the context of our generation, I think the server is a kind of showcase. With this project, we illustrate a bit of what happens in the context of internet activities. After the project, we’ll leave our trace in the form of screenshots or server saves.

Dobrosława: I think these are also attempts to take control of your life. Whatever you do, you never die.

Julianna: For me, it’s much more attractive to test those kid’s dream possibilities of flying, jumping, teleporting, and water elevators. It’s about breaking the laws of physics. This gives you an even greater sense of agency.

Jakub: This is the question of whether death or a threat to life is meant to be a touchstone of change, or the experience itself should be. It seems to me that experience is gathered

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here on other levels than in the so-called real life.

Dobrosława: Why did you say “so-called” real life?

Jakub: Because I don’t perceive the virtual world as something separate from the real, physical world. This game is not an illustration. Perhaps in this sense, Minecraft differs most from both Second Life and many galleries or institutions that function physically that create some kind of image. I think that the Luka 5G server, potentially, like any other servers, set up for any other purpose, and the way the world works in Minecraft, how it’s randomly generated, in such a way that you can explore it and not find the end of this world, its limits, for a long, long time, still discovering new places. I think that this place is much more processual and participatory in interaction than a typical model of art reception, in which we go to a gallery to see an exhibition or take part in a performance. This, of course, is due to economic conditions, but also because of the mindset. For example, I was looking for such forms of activities outside of Minecraft. I conceptualize and test this form of spending time as a matter of art - I go with my friends to the forest and build

Luka 5G Interface Mantra Oh, Ivory Tower exhibition view Agata Konarska

Dobrosława: For me, the notion of reality is often blurry too, but I’m curious what you mean by putting these two worlds on an equal footing.

Jakub: I feel that it has its materiality. All these processes that take place inside the computer or server are visualized on the screen. It’s an arrangement of objects, and the object has never really been material. It can be defined in various ways. The object can be a block or an entire island. Not to undermine the very matter of which it’s made, or the matter of which galleries and works of art are made, I see it as an even plane. I don’t notice a hierarchy between these entities. Usage is critical.

Julianna: The object itself is just a concept.

Jakub: For me, language is virtual. What is happening, the very fact that there is a process going on, that we can interact with it, that we can look at it in an instant, walk away, then come back and see that it’s continuous, is an evidence that this world has the same properties as the laws of nature, the laws of physics.

So the process evidences life. This is how I perceive it, how it seems to me. It doesn’t matter what it looks like or how big it is. It just happens elsewhere, that’s how this place looks like. We are here, and that is there. Everything has its place and time. It’s a matter of the point of view. We have power over it, that’s how we see it, but it can also be reversed. These are just the limits of our perception. It seems to me that the question of the superiority of one type of matter or process over another, which we can abstract from the rest, is just a fetish. But also, of course, an echo of the history of civilization, humanity, for which this new world is still a new phenomenon. Games, as a commercial industry, are 40 years old. Sandbox games have been functioning more actively since 2009. Earlier games had a 2D view, the former platform games were even

more limited in terms of spatial relationships. The world of Minecraft is written on the xyz axis.

Dobrosława: What are your plans for the future?

Julianna: We’re at the beginning. Ministerial financing lasts until the end of September, but we plan to get further support. With every event we organize, there are new perspectives and ways of implementation that we cannot always delve into as much as we would like, due to deadlines. I would like to continue working on this project as long as possible. There is still a lot to be discovered.

Jakub: We, in a sense, impose on ourselves a certain implementation time with this program, and, at the same time, we test how quickly something can be done, and what we imagine is possible to implement.

Since entering this world is an entrance to some principle of functioning, it can be perceived as a philosophical basis, but also as a formal one.

Luka 5G Interface Mantra Reconstruction in a new skin exhibition view Piotr Maciejowski Luka 5G Interface Mantra There is no armchair yet, however there’s nobody sitting in it already exhibition view Aleksandra Skorupka

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CONTAINERS / CURATED BY FORME UNICHE

installations from found elements there. This is also the form of art or culture-creating practice that I am looking for. Here, this freedom is realized and requires a certain technical background, but not so large in the world scale compared to others, taking into account poverty or natural disasters.

CONTAINERS / CURATED BY FORME UNICHE

In the next stages, we would like to invite more artists to cooperate.

Julianna: Playing with the convention of transferring typical patterns, i.e. exhibitions, concerts, performances, if we were thinking about translating subsequent ones, the vision of a residence, for example, which puts even more emphasis on the process, is very attractive to me. The topic is very broad.

Dobrosława: You can practically redefine everything you knew so far.

Jakub: Yes. It happens because we throw a wellknown convention, such as an exhibition, into a

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world that is so internally coherent, where these cube-shaped blocks pass through all of this reality.

In a sense, we disenchant common forms, such as the functioning of an institution. When it comes to plans, we also thought about intergenerational cooperation, we want to invite older artists. We know that Paweł Althamer used Minecraft, he was building something with his sons. He displayed some Minecraft constructions on the screen, during the exhibition. We want these actions to happen in Minecraft, and to provide their continuity, maybe even create a local subculture. We are talking about a situation where anyone can go in and out at any time. So far, art has

Luka 5G Interface Mantra There is no armchair yet, however there’s nobody sitting in it already exhibition view Aleksandra Skorupka

CONTAINERS occasionally used Minecraft but hasn’t operated in its reality. Participation is essential for our idea. For now, we radiate our activity outside, e.g. on streamings that are watched by others. Still not so many people enter the server, but that’s ahead, we’ll make it happen. We are working on technical solutions that will make it easier for recipients to reach us.

Julianna: We are currently developing models of operation because we believe Minecraft is so easy and accessible to play that it’s possible for an artist who hasn’t had contact with it to start doing something on this platform. That’s why I think that the plans to invite older artists or curators are realizable.

Luka 5G Concert in Lemiszogròd documentation Jakub Lemiszewski

Dobrosława: You are both students of the University of Arts in Poznań. Have you consulted the idea with university professors? My question concerns both the relationship of academic structures with the latest media and the relationship vs. independence of students from the university.

Julianna: No, this activity isn’t connected to the university. At the university, new technologies are much more often talked about than used.

Jakub: We invite the community of our university to participate, and their reactions to what we are doing are rather positive. Apart from the university grounds, we consulted the curator Jagna Domżalska to a small

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extent. Minecraft is a place that has its own fairly stable rules, which is why I think it can be an interesting ground for intergenerational communication - it creates a stable context that sort of does it for us. We don’t have to open up too much or build a new context for someone to understand us. We meet on the “hard ground” where others come to the existing situation.

CONTAINERS / CURATED BY FORME UNICHE

Dobrosława: And your more personal plans for the future?

Julianna: I’m currently testing the waters. I was on internships in various institutions in Poland, I am also planning to do so abroad. I’m checking what model of work interests me. I’m curious about activities related to the market but not enough to abandon independent projects such as the Luka 5G. Jakub: Recently, I have been interested in cooperatives in the context of art and the art market, in the context of how galleries function, in what relationships they are with artists. I am looking for a grassroots platform that does not create a border between the gallery owner and the artist, between the art consumer and the artist. Besides, I continue my artistic activities, both visual and musical.

Luka 5G Three levels and a tiny one exhibition view Natalia Sucharek

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CONTAINERS Luka 5G Concert in Lemiszogròd documentation Jakub Lemiszewski

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MADE IN MIND | 33

SWERVING AND WANDERING WITH ALBERTO MUGNAINI Azalea Seratoni

Azalea Seratoni: These words by Giorgio Manganelli made me think of you: “[…] personally, however, when I consider Italian literature in its entirety, I do not see a De Sanctis-like or a consistent historiographic framework, but rather an Arabian Nights situation endlessly shifting from one author to the next, from one book to the other, through entryways, small doors, passages immediately vanishing once they are crossed, in a highly fanciful and irregular manner” (Manganelli 2020).

Alberto Mugnaini: Yes, I cannot but agree with this vision of a bustling motion through a thousand different passages and entryways. I have Manganelli’s Letteratura come menzogna here with me. A book containing single, precious, unusual words, in a display of unpredictable combinations, as well as the rhetoric and dialectics of a Baroque preacher, and pages of text analysis of a squinteyed mean structuralist highlighting all the text’s snares, its reticence, false appearances, always moving from an oppositional standpoint, never forgiving towards the authors, who are accused of lowliness, slovenliness, and superficiality. The charm of an author comes from his flaws, the very place from where originality stems. Manganelli basically believes the same thing that Lea Vergine has more recently affirmed about art, that is that literature, in short, is not something for decent people.

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AS: You might not be a decent person, but you certainly are not a simplified person. You contain multitudes. In the late 1980s you started complicating matter, folding metal sheets as if they were paper, curling iron rebars, welding pipes in all sorts of different combinations and torsions. And then, as Gadda had it, you discovered Baroque inside of things. You chose, collected, sectioned and assembled objects to give them new forms and names: Lapilla, Deliminia, Alissia, Almerilla, Valmadreno, Tulipante, Tormalizio, Idrospirio, Farfanito, Grimorello, Grinfialoro and Friggibrino.

And you are still drawing, even after having filled a thousand A4 sheets, and then a hundred; then yet another thousand, then a hundred, like the countless kisses Catullus gave Lesbia. And then there are your essay works, your studio open to other artists, your interactions with them and your interest in their practices. And then the Rosso Fiorentino book and exhibition. Is all this the expression of a single system of interests or does it appear that way only due to the fact these actions have been carried out by the same person?

AM: The answer to this question, if an answer can be given, can only be retrospective, looking back to a journey that today, after about thirty years, is about to enter its final stretch. All those working in the humanistic field experience a variety of means

Alberto Mugnaini Untitled, 2018 Ink on paper 30 x 21 cm - 11,8 x 8,2 in

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Alberto Mugnaini Untitled, 2018 Ink on paper 30 x 21 cm - 11,8 x 8,2 in

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Alberto Mugnaini Untitled, 2017 Ink on paper 30 x 21 cm - 11,8 x 8,2 in

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of expression, explore different disciplines and go through a somewhat schizophrenic state of mind, a state of things, that effectively tends to avoid all accurate and planned acts of self-analysis: certainly during the process one does not have the impression of operating within the tracks of a system, I can personally attest that one feels weltered during a journey based on improvisation, made of no beaten tracks, ups and downs, swerves, dead ends, and interrupted pathways. You think you are travelling across a familiar landscape when suddenly you find yourself in an unknown land, you think you are sailing in safe waters only to realize you are rowing beyond the Pillars of Hercules. There is no way of defining a route because the coordinates are unstable and follow diverse and non-homologous numeric codes.

And that is not all, because I am asked whether there exists a connection between the different aspects and disciplinary realms of my artistic and intellectual activity, and between the latter and my relational and emotional life, to not only find a connection between the various forms of art I explore but even between art and life. I am not sure that the consistencies, correspondences, and structural nuances I should outline would be something more than the reflection of interpretational fantasies or self-absolving shortcuts: I take this question as an invitation to somewhat clarify a process and an existential journey that for its inclination and constitution retains a chaotic and impromptu quality.

Alberto Mugnaini Untitled, 2017 Ink on paper 30 x 21 cm - 11,8 x 8,2 in

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Alberto Mugnaini From left: Astrigaldo, Rachelisio, Sivorino, Salgarolo, Omarillo, Getulonio, Valmorano, 2019 Plastic, metal, gauze, resin, cement, pigments Photo Cosimo Filippini

Alberto Mugnaini From left: Anichino, Ramitello, Clorofilio, Tracimino, Idrospirio, Farfanito, 2019 Plastic, metal, gauze, resin, cement, pigments Photo Cosimo Filippini

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AS: Perhaps it was the word “system” that triggered this “tangle, jumble, muddle”, because I was thinking “fireflies”. At the end of his book La notte buia (Muggiani, 1956), Bruno Munari used a sheet of black porous paper to illustrate the night. Pierced with small circular holes the page was backed with a yellow sheet (a foldable square sheet of yellow paper glued onto the book’s inside back cover with the author’s biography written on it) transforming the small holes into a swarm of fireflies. The fireflies don’t glow all the time. The fact that they are represented by holes pierced through the black paper, produces an unstable effect. When the black page and the yellow sheet are apart, their glow is dimmed, when the black page is nice and flat on top of the yellow their light shines through. Perhaps this is what I was trying to ask you: an endlessly changing picture, a single discourse endlessly continuing prompted by different pretexts and under intermittent lights…

AM: I believe that this constant shift from one thing to the next leads one to endlessly put oneself out there, to avoid the dangers of automatisms, of habit, what we might define one’s personal clichés, the readymade formulas, the traps of specialisation. Conflicts, imbalances, hitches, continuous changes of mental dimension force you to rethink things, to start over, in a systematically disconcerting manner. Expanding the range of our specialization, diffracting it along diverse pathways and directions means running into a permanent state of non-definition. Stable supports and

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Alberto Mugnaini Tulipante, 2007 Plastic, gauze, resin, cement 74 x 25 x 11 cm - 29 x 10 x 4 in Photo Cosimo Filippini

points of reference fail us. Every time is like starting over, you find oneself following a route only to realise that the map is a different one altogether. The sorrowful attitude of Musil’s man without qualities comes to mind, a character whose life had been a “heroic struggle of a soul resisting all compromise, never suspecting that in this way it was only creating its own dividedness”. The pretension to excel in multiple disciplines is an act of hubris, and the destiny that awaited the poor Ulrich is never completely warded off.

AS: I think we should look back. Where did it all begin?

AM: I always understood the subject of my research as something multifarious and permeable, an openwork field of diverse accesses and passages. My way of studying and working has always been marked by discontinuity, if not fickleness. My graduation thesis entitled La Tavolozza di Babele (The colour palette of Babel) was an investigation of my understanding, perception and above all interpretation of sixteenthand seventeenth-century colours. At that time colour took on a primary role, not so much in the context of history of art but rather in the practical aspects of life, becoming a necessary indicator to orient oneself and find one’s way in our maze-like world, elevated as a diagnostic and classification tool, a basic criteriom for scientific experiments, expanding to diverse sectors of everyday experience. Colour was read as a symptom.

Therefore something that should not be sought in

Alberto Mugnaini Valmadreno, 2008 Plastic, gauze, resin, cement 97 x 42 x 16 cm - 38 x 16 x 6 in Photo Cosimo Filippini

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Alberto Mugnaini From left: Basaldo, Tibertino, Compostello, Longino, Quadralbo, 2006-2007 Plastic, gauze, resin, cement, pigments Photo Leo Torri

artistic essays, where it ultimately had a limited reception, but in the descriptions of live experiments, in the technical, medical, zoological and botanic sheets, and in all those theoretical-practical manuals or almanacs significantly defined as “tesori” and “selve”, places of accumulation, tangles, reflections, analogies, echoes, correspondences, where book contents and the tangible experiential quality of the world identified and mutually exchanged to give rise to a truly babelic polyphony of voices.

My later research on the iconographic aspects of Rosso Fiorentino’s work, followed the same multidisciplinary criteria, leading me to investigate, among other things, the affinities between the hallucinated and bewitched figures of this painter and a range of psychotic disorders whose descriptions can be found in medical essays of the time: the culture of a set period cannot be studied in isolated compartments, it irradiates in multiple directions leading to diverse pathways of research.

AS: Are drawings writings or figures?

AM: In drawings, this infinity, this boundless virtual quality, is kept at bay by a mental condition of surrender, as if drawing were a form of writing that continuously rewrites itself. It is in fact a condition of writing reversibility, setting off along one direction leaving aside all distinctions between narration and figuration. If I start taking notes, for instance, invariably the pen takes over my hand, my writing loses consequentiality, familiar letters deform, their loops multiply, their ascenders stretch and bend awkwardly, and their counters become spirals in an unstoppable tangle.

It is a return, to some extent, to letters, to a hieroglyphic dimension, only that in their urge and ruffle, they are unable to anchor themselves to a defined meaning/symbol

remaining open to a babelic digression, interposing the figurative meaning with an irreverent and wild nonsense, tying together the statements and the insignificance… A mere Dionysian dance of signs which dare to climb into coils and arabesques, bending and stretching in agile poses and tapered figures, sometimes only acknowledging the fact they end up jaded and hindered in idle scrawls, in breathless and cacophonic scribbles suffering cramps and glitches leading to dead ends, with no idea of how to get out if not with leaps and run-ups, tugs and faltering steps.

These signs that on the one hand retain the rhythm, the musical legato of writing, the fluttering excitement, the complacent swerves and inertial fluidity, on the other escape its control: they swerve out of their lanes, they spread out relentlessly, incessantly murmuring the order to break ranks, pleased with their unruliness. We could describe it as a drunken and rambling writing that being unable to describe things tries to express them, experiment them even among its coils: trying, copying, disfiguring, cursing them. Alphabets of the infinite and confusing babel that exists inside us, volatile meanings, rough digits, lazarettes of calligraphy.

AS: These are Duchamp’s words to Francis Steegmuller: “[…] ten years ago I was still known as an artist that had been inactive for a long time, a has been […] Then came Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and people started taking interest in some of my old ideas. When I left my studio on the 11th Street, for example, I sold my fridge to Tinguely.

That was a good fridge. And what did Tinguely do? He mounted a sound system inside it and presented it at the Sidney Janis Nouveaux Réalistes exhibition. That is the effect of the old readymade on the new generation. They

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love me because I provide a justification to their flights of fancy” (Marcadè 2007). Do you feel you should thank Duchamp too?

AM: My sculpture work consists in an activity of continuous metamorphosis of the ready-made, in the research of a “maniera” buried in the heart of everyday objects, detecting in the inner substance of the neglected and banal the invisible connections and hidden recursive sequences. It is as if reality were seen through a mysterious and secret filigree of its own, like a deposit of unexpressed shapes, of undetected material potential, of morphologies drowned in everyday habits. It is about discovering a transfigured reality, captured in its ongoing closure and opening, sliding the sheer evidence of things within the boundaries and into a secret picture, chasing new unexpressed manifestations, searching for that solution among infinite possible metamorphosis, fractioning objects to then be able to piece them back together in unprecedented combinations.

Musil comes back to my mind. In the first pages of Man without qualities he affirms that just as there exists the sense of reality, there also exists a sense of possibility.

In the most humble and neglected objects, in every most deteriorated piece of scrap, be it a drainer, a bottle of shampoo, we can catch a glimpse of a fragment of form that must be reinvented in the game of unprecedented possibilities. As Merleau-Ponty had it: “Thus, it is essential for the thing and for the world to be presented as open, and to promise us always something more to see”.

Translation by Karen Tomatis

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Alberto Mugnaini Eldorada, 2004 Water varnish on reshaped wood 89 x 45 x 48 cm - 35 x 17 x 19 in Photo Leo Torri

Alberto Mugnaini Apostoli, 1990 Copper-plated iron, galvanized iron, silk Environmental dimensions

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Alberto Mugnaini Aquilotti, 1993 Carved plastic Environmental dimensions

Alberto Mugnaini Taking Wing n.4, 1995 Carved plastic 19 x 7 x 4 cm - 7 x 3 x 1,5 in

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STREAMS Curated by Marika Marchese

Streams, the new Made In Mind column, comes from the desire to create a moment of reflection on social issues with established artists and professionals.

STREAMS

We chose the name Streams because we would like positive ideas and actions to flow freely in a varied way of perceiving the stimuli of the outside world. A mutual exchange. Let the ideas flow without which we would not be able to move, express ourselves, in two words: to live. We have been inspired by many words, such as passage, encounters, beyond and crossing.

But Streams, like an always active volcano, wants to push, point, even discuss, with power and strength, on the ideas and gestures that artists make to subvert, sometimes the order, others in a less chaotic way, to make the world fertile, providing us with more visions and thus opening a dialogue.

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The goal, therefore, is to address current issues such as respect for and protection of the environment, the sustainability of energy resources, equality of rights, immigration, health emergency ... These are some of the social issues, in which we are enveloped, hot topics that concern us closely. How will we do it?

Through the voice of artists who have always, with their art, their social commitment, sometimes through satire, put us in front of these reflections. We will also do this with sector operators, gallery owners, critics, authors, collectors, and other personalities from the art world, figures who are careful to spread these messages.

We inaugurate Streams with Michelangelo Pistoletto, a major artist of Arte Povera, who created a school, a city, a foundation, Cittadellarte from his art. “A multifaceted organism intended to produce civilization,

activating an urgent and responsible social change at a local and gloabl level.�

Michelangelo Pistoletto, in recent years, in addition to having created City of Art, the house in which to continuously think about social dynamics and take action to bring help, has written a great deal on the search for those balances that still falter today. He did it through the Manifesto for a Regeneration of the Society, in which the Master recounts the Trinamic Formula of the Third Paradise. In this myth, he has generated a reality, putting it into practice with collective performances, congresses and events as well as with continuous dialogue with global reference figures.

We imagined an initial speech, focusing on three keywords: Memory, Active Thinking and Artist. We will gradually face other words, creating from here on out a sort of glossary.

Starting from the individual and collective memory, we have tried to understand what happens in our society.

How is it possible that in over a hundred years, in the light of the modern era, from the technological and scientific advancement, we have not been able to go beyond certain social, racial and territorial conflicts.

We have provided these same words to other artists, whom we will host in the next issues, to have a comparison, even an extended moment of debate, between everything that will come in this period of time.

Other words have followed one another, follow us in the next numbers to find out what they are.

We once again thank Maestro Michelangelo Pistoletto and the staff of Cittadellarte, in particular, Margherita Cugini who made this interview possible.

Enjoy the reading.

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Michelangelo Pistoletto La Mela Reintegrata, 2015 Piazza Duomo, Milan

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QUESTIONS FOR A SOCIETY’S REGENERATION Michelangelo Pistoletto in conversation with Marika Marchese

Marika Marchese: How can we preserve collective memory?

Michelangelo Pistoletto: “We have many ways to keep this memory, it has us, it comes from books, it comes from those stories told orally and written that have crossed the past to reach us. These are all stories we know by education. It is education or training that is acquired since childhood.

In school, memory is imparted by giving meaning to

far we have exploited nature thus pushing it towards maximum degradation. From now on our commitment will consist in using science and technology to regenerate our relationship with nature. In this perspective, training means knowing how to develop knowledge and at the same time new science.”

all that is known to you, that is, the practice of things that have gradually developed over time. But see, we should now take an exam to understand if we know the story well, and then move on to the activities of future life.

We should do an exam of history, or better yet, of our memory to overcome the epochal passage we are going through. We should introduce, after this examination, a new method which allows us to combine all the benefits and all the problems that this history of humanity has brought us and with which we have reached the present time. Benefits and problems that become matter of reflection and research for a new direction that I have called the Third Paradise, that is the third phase of humanity. The two previous phases consist of the first paradise, of when we were totally integrated into nature, and the second paradise, the artificial one, which brings us to today. So learning history, from nature to artifice is a very important knowledge that we must possess. And here we realize that these two parts of history are not only antagonistic today, but are opposed. The artifice is totally degrading nature. We have done wonderful things by applying the discoveries of science and technology, they have brought us up to current capacity and power, but so

already doing what I think should be done.” For me, art must be intellectual energy that develops practical energy.

We built modernity based on energies, I mean oil, and what we developed with chemistry, up to the fertilizers that globalized the agricultural monoculture, which led to the depopulation of rural areas. The masses have been moved towards industry, with the consequent abandonment of the countryside. So there was the revolution of modernity, which has transformed, through scientific discoveries, the entire system of production, economy and politics, subverting the traditional forms of common life. Slavery was known to exist before people were employed in industries. There was an industry that was that of power and large farms. But with the metallurgical industry, we have gone from predatory slavery to voluntary slavery, which is that of the worker. It is not the same coercive slavery practice but it is the dedication of one’s life to a system: the consumer system. And okay, the consumer system had its reasons, so I have nothing to say, until this system reaches excess, so much so that it creates planetary imbalances, originating precisely from the conflict between nature and artifice.

I proposed as a work of art the symbol of the Third

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STREAMS / MICHELANGELO PISTOLETTO

MM: What could art do at this precise moment?

MP: “I can’t say what art should do in general, I’m

STREAMS

Paradise which corresponds to the formula of Trinamics, which I identified in the early 2000s, consisting of a line that, crossing two times, forms three consecutive circles. The two opposite circles represent all the differences and contrasts that joining in the central circle create balance and harmony between the parts.

This means that we must find ways to connect all the elements that conflict in our society and develop the balance necessary for the continuation of human life on the planet. One of the first things we need to take into consideration is the production of renewable energy. If we don’t find a way to activate everything that puts activities into production through clean and sustainable energy, we will certainly not be able to change things. On the other hand, energy is created precisely, as in the trinamic symbol, connecting the positive and negative signs in the center which are separated in the two opposite circles.

MM: What message does it want to give to us and future generations in light of the reflections that we said?

MP: I use two words that come from the history of modern art, the first is “freedom”. Each one, he must know that he is free, that every person is free. Freedom means not being submissive.

Freedom is a fundamental good that modern art has brought to its maximum value. In the twentieth century, the artist achieved autonomy of individual expression that has no equal in history. He acquired absolute freedom. But what does this great freedom require as a counterweight to achieve a state of balance? It requires a great “responsibility”, here is the second word. The more you are free, the more you have to be responsible. So if we want people to take responsibility, we must make every person understand that they must first of all evaluate their freedom with the ability to interact with others and make freedom a mutual good. In this mutual good, we must insert another mutual good which is responsibility. We are commonly, interactively free as we are “interpersonally” responsible.

I would venture to say that I triggered the pandemic of responsible change a few decades ago with the foundation of Cittadellarte, which develops the interaction of art in all areas of social life. So this dynamic of freedom and responsibility is now teaching.

Now, Covid19 is confirming and recalling worldwide the need to continue the dynamic of balance between all the elements that make up society, therefore a global balance. I repeat, balance means to unite two different elements, and also opposite to each other, to create with their union a new element, which did not

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Michelangelo Pistoletto Permanent seat of the Third Paradise, 2015 Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto in collaboration with the Biellesi per il Terzo Paradiso committee

exist before. This is therefore creation and harmony.

In art, we combine aesthetics with ethics, form with content and with these unions we generate “morality”.

Balance, therefore, is morality and morality is balance.

Pandemic Covid19 must be a real turning point and this turning point is obtained with the trinamic formula that leads us to create together, not only ideally but practically. Furthermore, during the lockdown we had the opportunity to verify how important the good use of technology is, also to communicate remotely, avoiding the use of “dirty” energy, as well as realizing that many things deemed necessary are not essential.

[MEMORY]

[ACTIVE THINKING]

STREAMS / MICHELANGELO PISTOLETTO

[RESPONSABILITY]

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SURVIVAL TACTICS IN A PRECARIOUS ECOSYSTEM AN INTERVIEW WITH BARENA BIANCA ARTIST COLLECTIVE

Benedetta D’Ettore

Barena Bianca (Fabio Cavallari, b. 1992, and Pietro Consolandi, b. 1991) is a collective that formed in the summer of 2018, as an activist group in the Venetian Lagoon, striving to bring to light many of its ecological and sociological issues, adopting the Barena (typical Venetian salt marsh, essential to the survival of the city) as its emblem. The artists’ work mimics nature, it seeks to emerge in every situation and become visible. Likewise, the fragility and destruction of the natural environments are becoming more clearly visible, increasingly impossible to ignore. Barena Bianca’s work mostly happens in public spaces and formalizes in hybrid collaborative actions, installations and happenings communicated mainly through video. Their work happened and was shown in various circumstances, both informal and institutional, among which the Scottish Pavilion of the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale, V-A-C Foundation and La Serra dei Giardini in Venice, and a solo show in London, at the Imperial College’s Center for Languages, Culture and Communication.

Benedetta d’Ettorre: Barena Bianca is made of two people working together, I am interested in the collaborative aspect of your collective. Were you trained as artists? How does your training and background influence your work?

Barena Bianca: Fabio has a background in art education and graphics, Pietro in contemporary history and political theory. We found that what we studied was limiting in the sense that our disciplines did not have much agency in the world, we wanted to say something, do something. For example we wanted to change relationships between the art world and people. We also had curiosity to find means to formalise research and activities outside of disciplinary boundaries so we trained as artists, specialising in Visual Arts at IUAV in Venice. We share our political activism and we are able to marry ideas and practice in the work that we do together, combining our different ways of thinking and acting. For example the project Muevete Muevete Barena, a didactic happening with 60 kids, was thought to change the institutional relationship with kids. We did not invite them as the recipient of caring responsibilities, to keep them busy while their parents work, but rather as a force of creative production and mutual learning: we also learn a lot from kids.

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BD: Many projects and artists’ careers have started with collectives but most of them die out after a while. Collaboration under one umbrella collective presupposes trust and slower processes, including conflicts resolution and giving feedback on each other’s work. Your work has a sense of urgency and responsiveness, I would like to ask you what has brought you together? Was this mode of working brought about as a response to something?

BB: Many collectives in Italy work together because of the sectorial specificity of their skills, to share workloads and have more time to practice. Most of the time artists need to work with other people that are experts in other things, for example scientists or makers, when they approach a new medium. Working as an artist is not yet a fully legitimized profession, most of us as young artists need to have other part-time jobs to survive. In our other life, Pietro worked as a tourist guide in Venice and Fabio is a chef. Time is an important resource, you must collaborate, share skill and expertise if you want to dedicate time to your practice, otherwise you’d have to give up a lot of time to other ways of earning a living. We are very compassionate to each other’s needs and struggles and we support each others practice by working together. Our getting

Barena Bianca Atensiรณn!, 2019 Installation at V-A-C Foundation, Venice Courtesy Barena Bianca MADE IN MIND | 57

Barena Bianca Atensiรณn!, 2019 Performance, Zattere, Venice Performer: Ettore Garbellotto Courtesy Barena Bianca 58 | MADE IN MIND

together as a collective was also a response to our desire of staying in Venice after graduation. Whilst this may seem like a personal problem, we realised it’s more of an ecosystemic problem: the city has a problem with people’s retention, not just students but inhabitants as well. Local people, the residents of Venice, have struggled to stay in the city, which has changed rapidly in the last 50 years to accommodate mass tourism, that eventually turned the city into an hostile environment to resident forms of life. The residents eventually are getting pushed out. At the same time, many students come here to train at prestigious Universities which fill the city with innovative ideas and research, but after graduation we lack an infrastructural support for the settlement of young people and the growth of fresh thought. So the work of our collective is a response, on one hand, to our own struggle to remain in the city but on the other, it is a response to the struggle of many other people who love this place but live on the fine, precarious, line between benefitting from the tourist industry and the detriment that it brings to the economy, ecology and life-style of the city. Such topics are urgent and well known, yet often are not acted upon. This is why we had to develop another layer of collaboration: working closely with people who have our same goals. We were lucky to find an amazing number of determined allies, among which especially local association We Are Here Venice, with whom we kept working and exchanging ideas and knowledge throughout these last few years.

BD: What does Italy offer and what is lacking in terms of support to the activity of young artists in contemporary art?

BB: Being an artist in Italy is not a job. The commercial

private market has always been predominant here, so if you can sell your work you are a professional artist, but if you don’t manage that or if the nature of your practice is not easily sellable, you are not. The market exists only to support artists that are already established, but how do you get to be “established” without the possibility to develop an early career? That’s why people work together, they don’t have the resources to work in another way, but they can’t afford to dedicate themselves full-time to a non-remunerated practice. We lack accessible spaces for exhibitions, studio space and opportunities. All of these things eventually delegitimize your practice. This is an issue that we see everywhere in the artworld, but in particular here it took an eco-systemic form. You need nourishment to support artists, you need to facilitate life in the city, support the public’s creative interests and consumption which eventually feed each other materially and immaterially. Living often abroad, we got to know several virtuous examples of such support, where young artists have opportunities to apply for grants, residencies and to get an affordable studio and so on, this is grounded on a very simple premise: to have art, to produce culture, the artist job has to be legitimated and sustained.

Historically Venice was one of the leaders and great example of sustaining artists’ livelihoods and practices: here it was initiated one of the first modern examples of artists in residence programme thanks to the material and philosophical inheritance from Duchess Felicita Bevilacqua La Masa. She gifted the city with her residency palace, to be transformed into a place for young artists to practice freely with residencies and studios. The organisation had many challenges and its administration falls now under

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Barena Bianca Insurrezione Antimimetica Lagunare, 2018 Performance, Ponte dei Sospiri, Venice Photo Alessio Graldi Courtesy Barena Bianca 60 | MADE IN MIND

the remit of the local authority. This means that real long-term planning is a challenge, when a different mayor’s mandate can dictate a different programme and limit artistic freedom. On the other hand, Venice is famous for its Bienniale, the very first modern example of such an event. While the biennale does good by reopening abandoned spaces and refurbishing them, these spaces are opened only with the aim to be used during the biennale, there is no longer term planning and they are not really accessible to the local people.

impact a lot of people. When the workshop finishes we gift them something, hoping that the object can reactivate the memory of the experience, opening up the space for conversations and sharing. Most of the time we collaborate with lots of different people, hosting institutions, scientists and other people so that we can learn from them and respond to places and contexts from within, and not by parachuting ourselves in different situations. We like to bring forward the network ‘behind the scenes’ of our work because it makes it alive and it’s the very

Talking about Venice as a system of support to the arts and the lagoon as a system of support to sustain people’s life works very well because it can bring together the two realities. Venice does not support emerging, local artistic practices, while it tries to become a stage only for international, top-down programmes that do not engage with the life of the lagoon and at the same time.

raison d’être of what we do.

BD: The basis of your work is the collaboration between the two of you, but most of your projects widen this collaboration and include other people and organisations. How do these collaborations happen? What do they enable?

BB: We work together but we believe we are only one node of the network. We do relational work, we don’t want to insularly look at things, we produce works aiming at political agency and activation. Muevete Muevete Barena gave us the opportunity to learn with the kids and exist in their reality, as a new generation of prospective inhabitants of the city.

As a student you struggle to connect with real people here but we actually discovered that they (10 years-olds from a local elementary school) know a lot about the lagoon’s ecosystem and they have a complex ecological activist vision. When you do a workshop with 60 kids, they have families who are linked to other people and it’s easier to create a snowball effect to

BD: What was your very first project? How was it initiated?

BB: Insurrezione Antimimentica Lagunare (Lagoonar Anti-mimetic Insurrection) was our first project, a performative attempt to turn ourselves into a barena (salt marsh). It was that time when we did not know whether we could stay practicing in Venice: we wanted to do something about lives in the city and their survival.

The presence of salt marshes is key to the ecosystem as they host different flora and fauna species that are unique to that environment.

The erosion and subsequent decline of salt marshes in the lagoon mirrors the decline of people living in the city. We felt a closeness to the salt marshes as we thought that, in a way, we were not really feeling welcome anymore here. If we need to re-think ‘life’ in the lagoon we need to think of all forms of life. We needed a symbol that showed the intricate network of interdependencies of the ecosystem, and we chose the salt marshes: from aerial photos of the lagoon we extracted a pattern that we printed on shirts. In this way, we wore a sort of dysfunctional mimetic uniform in the human environment adopting an aesthetics that made us evident. In the natural environment we would blend but on the Bridge of Sighs we would stand out, showing the paradox that’s behind the history.

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Barena Bianca Insurrezione Antimimetica Lagunare, 2018 Performance, Ponte dei Sospiri, Venice Photo Alessio Graldi Courtesy Barena Bianca 62 | MADE IN MIND

Barena Bianca Insurrezione Antimimetica Lagunare, 2018 Performance, Ponte dei Sospiri, Venice Photo Alessio Graldi Courtesy Barena Bianca MADE IN MIND | 63

Barena Bianca Textile support for Muevete Muevete Barena, 2018 Printed recycled fabric

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Barena Bianca Muevete Muevete Barena, 2018 Workshop / didactic happening with Scuola Elementare Bernardo Canal, Campo Santo Stefano, Venice Photo Francesca Della Seta Courtesy Barena Bianca MADE IN MIND | 65

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Barena Bianca Muevete Muevete Barena, 2018 Workshop / didactic happening with Scuola Elementare Bernardo Canal, Campo Santo Stefano, Venice Photo Alessio Graldi Courtesy Barena Bianca

Barena Bianca Muevete Muevete Barena, 2018 Workshop / didactic happening with Scuola Elementare Bernardo Canal, Campo Santo Stefano, Venice Photo Alessio Graldi Courtesy Barena Bianca

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BD: In the last exhibition Atensión! at Imperial College London you used data to show the lagoon’s erosion. We read these works today in light of the climate change, and I understood your manifestos as a call to arms to ‘protect’ the lagoon. In relation to geologic eras, the lagoon was supposed to be a moment in time. It continues to exist only thanks to human intervention, which has already affected and deviated the course of nature. What do you think about this?

BB: Venice was born as a refuge for the populations around the coast during the barbaric invasion. Basically every other city in the world was born in hospitable places, the lagoon, which was more like a swamp at the time, attracted the first people exactly because it was not a great place to be in, with the hope that they would not be followed there. The nature of human intervention from the beginning until the Napoleonic conquest was that of trying to understand how to cohabit with the lagoon.

Keeping the lagoon healthy was the baseline for building a flourishing civilisation. Everything was thought so that it could be adapted to the lagoon from the hydrodynamics, the digging of the canals the shape of the boats, while now we do the contrary, thinking how the lagoon can be bent to the needs of the market-driven economy. This is the reason why for example the old maps of Venice highlight the islands, they were important and part of the ecosystem, while now they are almost invisible with most of the maps centred on tourists’ attractions. Yes, the lagoon formed relatively recently and if the rivers were not artificially deviated, it would have become another part of land. Similarly, if another big, ‘catastrophic’ natural event would have happened, it could have become part of the sea. The lagoon is an ever-changing ecosystem, the point is not to stop its evolution but rather, as they did in the past, adapt and evolve with it. The lockdown showed this very clearly, nature adapted very swiftly. For example, little egrets and black-winged stilts returned quickly to nest on the bricole, the mooring posts, something that they have not done for years. With the lift of lockdown, many people

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noticed it and they started to get close to take a photo for their social media, unfortunately this scared away the adults, hindering the process to continue.

All the infrastructural work that has been done to favour Venice’s adaptation to the global economy, was made without any consideration of the lagoon’s ecology and hydrodynamics. We should not only protect Venice and the lagoon from the outside but from what’s happening inside. The posters were not really a call to arms to protect the lagoon because we don’t really need to protect it… they were called atensión (attention in the Venetian dialect), something inspired by Antoni Muntadas’ “warning: perception requires involvement”. One needs to be involved with the lagoon, ‘involved’ as engaging with it and being surrounded by it. It’s a call to enhance our attention, and consider as well local dynamics of the lagoon that are a threat to its survival. With the posters we use a graphic, advertising-inspired, language to be exhibited in one of the few green spaces of Venice, they are colourful 1m x 1.5m posters with big words on it that say things like “Less 70% of the residents in the XXI century”. They were the basis of a performance, where our friend and colleague Ettore Garbellotto carried the posters around on carts shouting “Atensión!”, people would generally encourage and cheer us up. Those were exactly the days when the last art Biennale opened and local people are annoyed by the sudden surge of fancy tourists. The one about residents is a catchy poster because all people living in Venice notice that residents have left the city, as they realise that high-tides are becoming more frequent: depopulation and acqua alta are perhaps the most evident causes of the ongoing ecologic and sociologic catastrophe, they’re literally at our doorsteps.

The other two posters deal with more invisible issues, the erosion of the lagoon and the capacity of absorbing carbon, that are not on people’s doorstep. The basis for

Barena Bianca Muevete Muevete Barena, 2018 Workshop / didactic happening with Scuola Elementare Bernardo Canal, Campo Santo Stefano, Venice Photo Alessio Graldi Courtesy Barena Bianca

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Barena Bianca in collaboration with Giorgia Cereda Barena Primavera-Estate, 2019 Workshop / didactic happening with Scuola Elementare Bernardo Canal, Isola della Certosa, Venice Photo Linda Zennaro Courtesy Barena Bianca

any work that involves care and conservation is that you need to pay attention. When you are flying over Venice to see the makeup of the lagoon, or you can see certain things only from a boat, you can’t see them in Venice unless you make an effort. The political message is that if cruises and other big ships can’t go through the canal in the middle of the city, we only need to build another canal, a little bit more distant. This is not solving the problem but it’s just sweeping things under the rug, actually it’s making things worse because you are hiding it from people and causing more damage to the lagoon. The posters were lines of colours to bring attention to underly overlooked facets of the lagoon such as people, salt marshes and their fauna.

For local people, seeing something about their city different from the, often disconnected, art exhibited at the biennale,

BD: The novel coronavirus has affected the world globally in terms of being a public health crisis, it has impacted negatively on the economy and we still need to understand the social and cultural impacts. On the other hand, with the lockdowns in place and interruption of human activity, we’ve seen the natural environment flourishing everywhere. Many newspapers have titled “nature is taking back Venice”, do you think we can really learn something from this moment?

BB: The coronavirus has shown that we are exposing the most fragile parts of our system to potential shocks. Frédéric Neyrat’s “The Biopolitics of Catastrophe” and Ulrich Beck’s “Risk Society”, on which the former is based, explain how catastrophic events affect everyone, but inevitably damage those who live in most precarious conditions. With policies that detriment social welfare and safety nets, the question is

was really engaging even though we communicated with a contemporary art rather than activist language. We adopted this guerrilla strategy of using a different language from the one of the protests to address the same themes and actually widen the reach of the message.

whether to safeguard the population or maintain the GDP, which in turn is obviously not distributed equally. Similarly to the pandemic and contemporary economics, the causes and effects of the pandemic are non-local: this makes it hard to link them, and easy to bring acts of relief where effects strike while maintaining intact the causes of the problem. Resilience urges us to fix the immediate problem, without developing a critical understanding of what has produced the catastrophe. With such a high rate of backto-back catastrophes, we should be finally getting to grasp such elusive interconnections, hopefully starting to rethink our species’ way of life with a systemic perspective.

BD: What artists and practices influence your work?

BB: Contemporary artists and lecturers at IUAV such as Antoni Muntadas, Alberto Garutti, Rene Gabri, Elena Mazzi and many others have of course shaped and informed our practice, both as artists and teachers. In particular, thinking about how art can exist in the public space, the process of creation that exists between the work itself and the public.

Our vision is to create work engaging with the present public and conceive the work in such a way that it will be able to engage with the future public inhabiting the public space. A work that inspired us deeply as a metaphor is the Wrapped Reichstag by Christo and Jeanne-Claude. It took 25 years for them to realise the project, their determination in pursuing a vision is an ideal that needs to inspire us every day. We take the ephemerality that imbues the strong symbolism of the work as an invite for artists to insist and persist. There is a lot to do to create ecosystemic conscience and awareness. It’s important to insist. For this reason, we are also inspired by those informal groups, co-operatives and organisations in the lagoon that resist and protect local knowledge and ways of life, ranging from fishermen and farmers to glass blowers and boat makers, getting to local rebels and children.

BD: What are you working on now?

BB: We are working on how to use Venice as a metaphor for other places around issues like reinhabiting downtowns and climate change. Our city holds a strong symbolic power which we want to use to speak about Venice as well as the world, delocalising our work. We are producing alternative geography, civic and urban education workshops for kids. These workshops will come together after facilitating the exchange and sharing of the kids’ experience of the place where they live. Looking at the world map adopting a perspective that takes into consideration the common challenges faced by places very different, such as, for example, Venice, Jakarta and Miami, can be a powerful metaphor to show this “interconnectedness” that is at the base of our poetics.

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PERFORMED VOICE

SOUND, POETRY AND INTERMEDIALITY Coral Nieto Garcia in conversation with Anne-James Chaton

Anne-James Chaton, writer and multi-faceted plastic artist, started her practice at the end of the 1980s - beginning of the 1990s in the Parisian literary scene, a moment qualified as “post-poetic” and “trans-genre”. In a desire to go beyond the question of lyricism and make the object speak by itself, he will take an interest in collective, shared and banal scriptures, which he will call “poor writings”. Chaton began to work with the music scene of the early 21st century - from experimental rock to electronic music. In doing so, he brings the language object into its full materiality through the voice, compromising the timbre and the body, while signaling to the sound universe that accompanies him during his performances. With a writer’s canvas [as he would like to point out], Anne-James Chaton’s “raw” language and sound material reminds us of the spoken voice. He is most often labelled a “sound poet”, however, it is the context and the listener/spectator who ultimately determines the status of his practice, or even of his object. This, rendered during its staging, is seen as a living organism capable of spurring meaning. The listener, involved in the communication process, acts directly in the language game through the action of listening.

Coral Nieto Garcia: When you started writing and performing accompanied by Andy Moor, Thurston Moore, Carsten Nicolai aka Alva Noto, did you call yourself a sound poet yet?

Anne-James Chaton: This is a reflection I had with Alva Noto when he asked me to join his Raster Noto label. We decided together, when we presented the work officially, that we were not going to say that it was sound poetry so that we could open up the spectrum of possibilities and not limit listening. In this way, we realized the different regions during the reception: they quickly identified the literary provenance of the object, its connection, according to their own understanding of contemporary poetic forms.

For example, North America perceived literary provenance having to do with the Beat Generation or spoken words, while, in Germany, in Asia, in South America for them it was very experimental, so it was like electronic music today.

How should we call the “objects” that the spectator/auditor hears during your performances: “sound objects” or “language objects”?

It is about the sound turning into language. In the manufacturing process there is only text, everything is generated by writing. So it’s a writing carried out by the

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voice and then put to a machine. So the whole thing is just an amplification of the texts. It is a language object that involves the modeling of the cuisine of sound poetry. The object and the ear are potentially both acoustic objects. An illustrative example is It’s gonna rain by Steve Reich: is it a language, sound, or human beatboxing object? These are classifications by genre or style that are subsequent to the object itself. Plastically, in terms of sound, they are very close. One can become the other. It’s up to you to follow up from one to the other! For example, when I read Evénement, I try, by means of a rather cold diction, not to capture the attention of the listener’s ear by an intonation.

Otherwise, it would remind him too forcefully that there is a sense to which he should attach himself in a primary way compared to the other elements of the object. This creates a form of “fatigue” or weariness in the listening experience.

It is more than a mere sound presented to the listener, so it is a sound object which can become a literary object again thanks to the loop whose principle is to create a straight line and it is up to the listener to create a bend around it.

This way the auditor creates oscillations: he hears the text, he hears another layer since the text has become sound and then it eventually evolves into phrasing. The whole point with these objects is that eventually they will break

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Photo Andy Moor

becomes music from the moment it enters a writing canvas.

My writing canvas is always a canvas that I take or that I make, but which comes from the order of literature, poetry or not. I write music with a writer’s canvas; a musician has his own. This is what sounds so strange to the ear.

This strangeness comes from the fact that literature is set to music with the tools of the musician, and this creates a form that one can think of as musical, but when you dig deeper you realize that these are literary rhythms. It is either the reader or the listener who makes the choice to leave, to move from one domain to another.

free from their shell to become another object in relation to other things. It is a multifaceted starting material.

And what do you mean by “object”?

It is an object that is perceived through a medium, so it is physical. If it has sound diffusion, it becomes an object from which something else will be able to arrive. It will gradually be defined according to the way in which it has been reappropriated: linguistic object, poetic object ... so that the qualities which can be attached can be multiple. It is akin to a prism that can change depending on the context (from the bookstore, contemporary art center to the electro box, rock…)

The “sound object” is the most generic way of circumscribing it without overloading it. Listening will be completely different because of material issues: the same object in a bookstore remains a poetic object, while in an electronic festival it becomes an electro object. The technique is unending.

What relationship do you have with music (structural, fusional, interactional…)?

I don’t have a musical ear. My relation to music is from writing, text and voice, even if the rhythm is present. But it’s up to the musicians to bring the musical scope. From a technological standpoint, I will use the same instruments as them (techniques borrowed from electroacoustic music like sampling), but not in the same way. Next is the question of musicality which is specific to language. Poetic language has always asked the question of rhythm and musicality. It

Décade

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Événements

What do you think about the fact that poetry beckons to music?

There is a certain lyricism through the voice which reemerges. When I got to writing at the end of the 80s and beginning of the 90s there was this post-lyric desire to erase lyricism, a movement led by some writers working together for magazines like TXT. It is a corriente postmarxista that carries out both restructuring the great history of the avant-garde and the theorizing of their own practices.

They tried to do away with hierarchical structures, to think on a more horizontal plane. And one of the elements of this positioning was not to develop a meta-discourse about their own objects. It was a political choice for the poetic field of the time. A decision not to articulate a second language on an object which presented itself in its extreme materiality, at the risk of excluding possible perceptions.

I pondered what was the writing that was going to drop me outside, as far as possible from a potential reinvestment by the subject. The question suddenly was what are the most shared writings: the collective scriptures that we consume every day and that we do not read. For example, a ticket is a material object that everyone is constantly using. The experience gained is that we are used to this writing format as we assume to already know what it contains, so there is an instance of “flash reading”. It allows me to move away from the text while continuing to create literary devices.

However, I soon came to realize that the ticket was already in itself a story, not just a portrait, that is to say a very visual

Géographique 4

Photo Laurent Combe even plastic way of approaching it, but the idea of unity of action, of a tone ... In recent years, we add relevant personal details to the tickets. As a result, it is not so cold, objective writing ... over time it has become quite the opposite.

Then, there is the question of the timbre, something concrete, and therefore impossible to abstract.

How do you proceed from the collecting of sounds and verbal material during the process of creation to the actual performance? Is there a kind of “carnal relationship” when dealing with the rhythms of our daily lives as they disturb our hearing and awaken our senses which have grown numb?

As soon as you go on stage you have to reconstruct the object. There is a physical application which is constitutive of the object and which will vary

according to the contexts: the attention given to the body will not be the same depending on the location. The tension it creates is not the same, it will depend on the sound, people …

The body is there with a given state. Accidents and incidents can arise. It is important to have the text with you to signify the relation to writing, and then the possibility of rewriting the object.

The musician has a memory relationship with their texts; I have a physical relationship with the language and this leads to this possibility of making the object, because it has a direct impact on the object itself. As a result, in a given moment a listener or a spectator will say “he is in the range of performance, or poetry or music…” My state of mind at that moment leads to another relationship with the object. And that too can alter the definition of what it is.

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How do you understand this process of “voice abstraction”, from the moment the subject and with it the affections of the sender disappear, resulting nevertheless in an “object” (sound object and/or language object) due to its physicality and its specific material?

We play on the level of the dichotomy between the abstract and the concrete: first of all there is the fact of working on a textual matter, very concrete but of the collective order. Also there is a desire to distort this matter by seeking colors by way of intonation (at the level of meaning). Afterwards, it is the resistance of this textual material itself. And then there is the desire to abstract the voice by a rhythm which would be a very monotonous rhythm, knowing in advance that it does not work because the timbre (the signature of the issuer) is always there.

What are the poetic processes that define your act as a poetic one? How did the collaboration with the music scene lead you to explore the different

modalities of the voice, to new types of writing and rhythms?

Having accomplished so much in recent years is what turned this novel form into a reality, a form that is in itself a questioning of what it comprises. Once the sound catches up to the form, the rhythm of the language and sounds becomes constitutive of the overall form of the piece. So the sound reacts to the text, it modifies the form of the narrative and therefore the text turned into sound. Guillaume Apollinaire said “poetry will be sound”. In doing so, I am less in a protosyllabel or syllabic rhythm than in a form of memory of the spoken voice.

In France, we turn to the spoken word more than to the machine. We do not feel that there is a partial becoming of the text because we are quick to perceive it as a voicing of the text. We can see its density written on the page, but the text on the page has not been distorted because it will have gone through machines to return to the page. My texts that

Anne-James Chaton Evénements n°1 Performance in PROPOSTA Barcelona, Spain, 2001

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are published are originally conceived as sound. The final form, the published version, has been somewhat distorted by having gone through another medium.

It is quite different from a writing that went through a sound software or was amplified. Visual arts imply a multimedia approach and the textual forms that emerge as a result can qualify as objects of sound poetry unbeknownst to the artists themselves.

How is the communication process carried out in your practice?

The way in which I work in loop with a fragment of sentences leads to a game of compression and segmentation of the language: the sentence itself is compressed in a segment which is compressed again by the speed that impels the machine (the sample). This compression process created on a type of writings with a communicative function,

Anne-James Chaton Alphabet, 2019 Performance with Alva Noto

such as the newspaper, will trigger two things: on the one hand, “boredom”, the moment from which communication begins because the listener, starting with the aspect of sound, can return to the linguistic object, and thus create communication at the very same time when the language itself is being multiplied.

On the other hand, a second phenomenon specific to the mechanical nature of the work itself, what is called “the ghost word”: because of the weariness and the somewhat extended duration, one gets the impression that new words are appearing. In doing so, the fact of producing an open communication full of misunderstandings leads to a multiplication of meaning, and therefore the impossibility of a complete and closed understanding. However, this opens up a new possibility for the listener, that of creating another meaning for himself, and thus of creating language.

Indeed, it is from these accidents that a telescoping

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of meaning happens. The poetic function of language is there: my language can multiply into other languages each with its singular properties. Jacques Derrida, in his critical to the will of understanding, stated that when there is a problem inside the expression a collective can be born. In the writing of the word “différance” it points to where it leads. You can’t hear it but you can read it, setting off an explosion of meaning within the writing itself. Furthermore, it is the notion of the “graph” that interests me.

How would you assess the importance of listening as an action? How can the listener play an active part during the communication process and therefore in the constitution of language?

Only the listening ear has the possibility to dissociate or relate the components of the musical piece. To reach this objective, you initiate a monotonous, very dry and cold reading mode that can be seen as a soundtrack, a bass line with the possibility of becoming a total sound. Speech and language are also full frequencies.

I have a very material connection to language. In the act of repeating the same form of writing, you barely move it, it remains nailed in place, yet it moves ever so lightly. During the accident, the error, another language is possible and it gives leaning on whole. Besides, when I set up the sampling, I don’t aim to sign for anything in particular. We know that it refers to something, but I try to free language from its material attachment. Not to ignore reference, but to move beyond.

Do you consider that concepts such as “literature” and “orality”, remain intact in our modern days?

What literature? Isn’t a sales receipt literature? Why wouldn’t it be? Literature is still alive and everywhere. It’s up to listeners and researchers to say: this is literature. Everyone defines it according to how they self-appropriate a certain type of text: everyone makes their own literature according to their relationship to language, whether or not mediated by literary objects or musical objects. In the Revue de littérature générale (General Literature Review) directed by Olivier Cadiot and Pierre Alféri, these propositions were qualified as “OVNI” (Unidentified Verbal Objects). Objects are made to circulate and be reshaped and perceived differently. We must not impose speech.

Anne-James Chaton Muséographie, 2013 Exhibition view, CRIPTA Gallery Turin, Italy, 2015

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Anne-James Chaton with Andy Moor Disque, “Tout ce que je sais”, 2018 ed. Unsounds, CD + LP, 33 T

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Anne-James Chaton Les cahiers de Je, 2020 Collage, 80 gr. 21 x 29,7 cm - 8 x 12 in MADE IN MIND | 81

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Anne-James Chaton La vie de Je, 2019 92 docs. 21 x 29,7 cm - 8 x 12 in

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PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE EMOTIONAL RITUALITY AN INTERVIEW TO MATTEO VETTORELLO

by Irene Sofia Comi

“Breathing is nothing more than our photosynthesis”, says the artist Matteo Vettorello (Venice, 1986). A claim that reveals a lot about the poetry of the artist, that moves through opposite issues such as science, technology, art and human sciences.

Daily gestures and feelings are at the centre of Vettorello’s research, that - after a past as a painter, studying at the Academy of Fine Arts and IUAV University in Venice - consists of the creation of sculpture-devices able to measure and test our reactions and perceptions between each other, potential biometric systems attempting to measure something that cannot be measured yet. When they’re activated by the human interaction, become the medium through which two people interact with each other. It’s in this encounter that different factors come up: these sculpture machines are able to activate different interpretations of your capacity to leave, stay and be in the world through our senses. But the participatory installations created by the artist are devices that exist also by their own, as sculptures in the public space.

In the interview we talk about the relationship between the project, the artwork and the possibility of relations that have come out since the last two years of artistic practice, through the ideation of devices created to be activated by more than one person, going deeper in the editorial and designing items of his sketches and drawings.

Irene Sofia Comi: Hi Matteo, I’m happy to start this conversation with you, so first of all, thank you. I’ve been following your work for some time now, the things I would like to focus on are many. To focus on the direction your research is going, I would like to deepen the path you have followed in the last two years, analyzing three works in particular. Let’s start with the last one: Sintonizzatore di decongestione ambientale (Environmental decongestion tuner). What does it consist of? In what context was this project born?

Matteo Vettorello: Hi Irene, how are you? Everything’s fine here at my office. Thank you for your attention. Below I try to answer your very precise questions. Sintonizzatore di decongestione ambientale (Environmental decongestion tuner) is a process based on involvement, is an emotional ritual about awareness and is also a meeting point in the city. The idea becomes reality through the exaggerated reconstruction and the use of an instrument linked to the propitiatory rites of rain. This instrument is interactive: two users can operate the oscillating mechanism using two microphone systems. The ongoing oscillation depends

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on the constant breathing and on the same decibel of vocal emission.

ISC: With this work you focus on an urgency linked to the environment and its preservation. The meaning of the work, however, goes beyond, assuming a universal value. In fact, through your work you ask the public, that is to say passersby, to become aware of pollution and climate change. At the same time, thanks to the collaboration of two people united in an action to achieve the same goal together, the device you made takes on an almost apotropaic value: it is aimed at those and what surrounds us, invites us to take care of us and of nature. In this work, as in the others you realise, your desire in a certain sense is to transform the attitudes that make us more human into social norms - such as our sensitivity and attention to others. Where does this urgency come from?

MV: Care for the other means awareness of the world – and breathing is nothing more than our photosynthesis. This work comes from the urgent need to shout how cooperation – which is an innate ability of humans – is perhaps the

Matteo Vettorello Autoindicatore di pressione simpatica (Self-indicator of sympathetic pressure), 2019 Sculpture device Photo Maurangelo Quagliarella

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Matteo Vettorello Autoindicatore di pressione simpatica (Self-indicator of sympathetic pressure), 2019 Sculpture device Photo Maurangelo Quagliarella

only way of conservation. It is dynamic, inclusive and not exclusive. The idea comes from the desire to do things that unite, rather than separate, therefore the measurement of the present. What is the present if not a blink of an eye that needs to be perceived? If we reverse our thinking, we realize that we do not perceive the process, but it is the

indicatore di pressione simpatica provides you with a hypothetical measurement in which the two parts, i.e. the two users who operate the pneumatic system, have the possibility to examine the quality of their empathy. Despite the complexity, this exercise has very precise rules. To perform it correctly the users must pay mutual attention

process that tries to be perceived by us. And what if the process had its own breath?

and mutually regulate the heartbeat by breathing. In this systematic complexity that surrounds us, empathy between people, is linked to empathy towards the Earth and therefore the world. What makes these two works similar is that they can only be activated through close collaboration. The aim of these experiments is to try to create connections and involvement.

ISC: This project can be read through different interpretative keys. One of these is the need to tune in with the other, an aspect that is also present in one of the previous works: Auto-indicatore di pressione simpatica (Self-indicator of sympathetic pressure), an interactive sculpture created in 2019 at Edicola Radetzky, a non-profit space on the Milan Darsena, a few meters from Piazza XXV Aprile. Can you tell me what it consisted of? What do the two works have in common?

MV: Auto-indicatore di pressione simpatica (Self-indicator of sympathetic pressure) deconstructs the function of a measuring instrument. Making obsolete the numerical value given by the resultant is the critical aspect of this work that is a paradoxical synthesis of the behavioural habits of the contemporary human being. Neuroscientific aspects, such as the activation of certain neurons that regulate our emotions, can be measured with a conceptually different view by the systematic research of interrelationships as complex systems difficult to reduce to fixed parts. Auto-

ISC: This is a path that identifies its starting point in Trasformatore di rapporti utili (Transformer of useful ties), a sculpture you made in Viafarini spaces, during your art residency period. This is the first sculpture in which you reflected on a dimension that we could call a “shared ritual�. Would you like to tell me better? What has changed in your research after and with this project?

MV: Trasformatore di rapporti utili (Transformer of useful ties) is a site-specific interactive installation. It consists of a sound sensor that adjusts the brightness of the light in an adjacent environment depending on the intensity of the emitted signal. The device becomes a consideration on the need, intensity and quality of the relationship between the parts. During the open studio of VIR Viafarini-in-Residence

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Matteo Vettorello Pressione simpatica on paper (Sympathetic Pressure on Paper), 2019 Publication curated by Irene Sofia Comi, Edited by Paolo Nava Studio, 2020 Photo Marta Cavallera

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Matteo Vettorello Trasformatore di rapporti utili (Transformer of useful ties), 2018 Sculpture device Photo Valerio Torrisi

the bathroom service light was replaced by a small light bulb that could only be operated through voice, which was to be emitted in front of a microphone in the adjacent exhibition hall. The bathroom – a service environment that everyone may equally need – requires interaction

city need, in your opinion? In which way art must and can “stumble” into everyday reality? In the frenetic society of hyperconsumption, is there a “sustainable” model for humans?

MV: Society has the urgent need to become aware. Social

in order to be used. The more intense and lasting the sound is emitted in front of the microphone, the longer the light bulb stays on. This was the first project in which the instrument became the means of connection between the parts, as if it were a regulator of needs.

distancing will not last forever, so the risk is to forget what happened and why. As I previously said, the attempt is to do things that unite rather than separate. Basically, my installations are an attempt to raise awareness about openness towards the other and what surrounds us. Art cannot be just a stumbling block (“Hey, look! A sculpture!

And yet it moves…”) and can no longer be just a piece of furniture. What is certain is that we need to rethink the meaning of creating and its purpose. Only time will show us how to do it. I love Milan in the summer months. You can ride your bike without the constant risk of being run over. A sustainable model could be the removal of the horn from cars – speed does not mean quality. I dream of a world without cars!

ISC: Machines and software’s automatisms are increasingly integrated into our daily life. You use these elements to make your biometric devices. It is an art that in some ways leads to mechanics and information technology (you collaborate also with a team of engineers to create your installations). Why did you decide to combine mechanics with poetics? What do you want to communicate, using technology?

MV: Combining electromechanics and poetics – two apparently opposite fields – is a way of emphasizing complexity. The attempt is to depict the paradoxical course of a short circuit. This allows me to portray the world and the way we live. Technology is nothing more than the reflection of our contemporaneity.

ISC: Today we live in a complex time, where the social distancing seems to have become a conditio sine qua non.

Considering this, what do the urban environment and the

ISC: Your poetics are very oriented towards participation, in terms of relationship between individuals and the public space. References to public art and comparisons with relational aesthetics are inevitable. How do you relate to these major issues?

MV: Bold claim: the installation in public is the new pop.

I don’t develop my ideas trying to fit into big themes. I try to understand how the signifier becomes the signified itself. I work on my ideas trying to get them out into

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Matteo Vettorello Sintonizzatore di decongestione ambientale (Environmental decongestion tuner), 2020 Sculpture device Photo Maurangelo Quagliarella

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Matteo Vettorello Sintonizzatore di decongestione ambientale (Environmental decongestion tuner), 2020 Project for the sculpture device

the world. My instruments exist even without activation and, at the same time, they are the means through which people relate.

In order to unleash the meaning, the process needs the human being, who is the necessary link in the chain, and this allows further interpretations. The public place means passing, and, in this case, the installation and its possible fruition become an interesting social experiment. I’ve been reading up on the research about the development of devices able to process feedbacks of use. This is the case of a project I am currently working on: Rilevatore di benessere del vicinato per l’ottimizzazione della tranquillità di un condominio (Neighborhood wellness detector for the optimization of the peace in a condominium) or R.B.V.O.T.C. (02), which is a device that can record the number of uses and process qualitative viewable feedbacks.

The installation Sintonizzatore di decongestione ambientale (Environmental decongestion tuner) was created as part of the “Life Beyond Plastic” project - youth mobilization and implementation of good practices to reduce plastic pollution in the seas promoted

by Istituto Oikos, thanks to the support of the Italian Agency for Development cooperation.

ISC: Finally, I noticed how your research materializes in opposite poles: on the one hand the public and participatory dimension we have just talked about; on the other hand, attention to detail, to drawing and to the small format on paper, on which you create the sketches for each of your creations. Through these ideas transcribed on paper, it is possible to understand the evolution of your projects. Is it a research aspect you are interested in pursuing?

It seems to me that it is gaining more and more autonomy along your visual path ...

MV: First and foremost, on paper. Paper is essential, since it regulates processes, fixes concepts and allows an abstraction that otherwise would be totally impossible – I would say self-defeating if directly made of material. If the drawing works, the device works too. I began making my projects speak first. They have become the means to communicate the idea. My drawings are the trigger of intuitive processes that become possible designs – this is the creative action.

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Matteo Vettorello Sintonizzatore di decongestione ambientale (Environmental decongestion tuner), 2020 Sculpture device Photo Maurangelo Quagliarella