Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage

Ferite e lacerazioni del corpo, ma anche fenditure e crepe nell’architettura: l’artista contemporaneo traumatizza a volte la carne, alle altre la pietra come atto di resistenza esistenziale, artistica e socio-politica. Dalla Body Art alle esperienze Post Human, infliggersi o provocare lesioni corporee è una dichiarazione di forza e di vita, ancor più che un’ammissione di vulnerabilità e una pulsione di morte. Nei morsi (Trademarks, 1970) che Vito Acconci si timbra sul corpo c’è narcisismo e istinto vitalistico; il colpo di fucile (Shoot, 1971) che ferisce Chris Burden sul braccio sinistro durante una performance è un mettere alla prova i propri limiti psico-fisici, una sorta di resilienza biologica; le incisioni che Gina Pane si provoca sulle braccia con una lametta (Azione sentimentale, 1973), tingendosi di rosso la pelle e l’abito immacolato che indossa, sono un gesto di affermazione identitaria come donna, dove il sangue è simbolo del mestruo e del parto, quindi di vita più che di morte; il sangue che Regina José Galindo si fa prelevare copiosamente rischiando il collasso e poi vende al pubblico a un prezzo simile a quello a cui si vende sul mercato nero (Crisis/Blood, 2009) è un atto di denuncia verso la violenza subita dalle donne, e non solo, nel suo paese d’origine, il Guatemala. Quando invece del corpo l’artista aggredisce l’architettura, simbolo del corpo istituzionale e sociale, creando veri e propri vulnera, l’azione si carica di una valenza critica e sovvertitrice nei confronti del sistema artistico, in particolare, e politico, più in generale. L’artista mina le basi (reali e metaforiche) e crea una fragilità che è promessa di rinnovamento. Si pensi alla tipica casa unifamiliare del New Jersey tagliata a metà da Gordon Matta Clark (Splitting, 1974); al pavimento del Padiglione tedesco demolito da Hans Haacke durante la 46a Biennale di Venezia (Germania, 1993); all’abisso che Gregor Schneider ha scavato nei sotterranei di Napoli (400 Meter Black Dead End, 2006); alla spaccatura che Doris Salcedo ha creato nel cemento della Turbine Hall della Tate Modern di Londra (Shibboleth, 2007).

(ENGLISH)
Memory is an operating process that requires perpetual revising to stay up-to-date. For contemporary artists to choose the archive as a medium, reactivating and reenacting both its mnestic and socio-political function, means not only to collect, store and classify, but above all to reconsider trough the act of showing and telling. In her book Cristina Baldacci retraces the long and complex history of the obsessive interest in archival practice by outlining the rich mosaic of different roles and meanings that the archive has taken over time and its relevance as a work of art, namely an atypical and in some ways “impossible” classification system. 
(ITALIAN)
La memoria e il ricordo sono sistemi operativi che necessitano di continui aggiornamenti e rielaborazioni per rimanere attuali. Scegliere l’archivio come medium, riattivandone il ruolo mnestico e insieme quello sociopolitico, per gli artisti significa non solo raccogliere, classificare e conservare, ma soprattutto ripensare, mostrare e raccontare. Cristina Baldacci ripercorre in questo volume la lunga e articolata storia dell’interesse per la pratica archivistica ricomponendo il ricco mosaico dei ruoli e dei significati che l’archivio ha assunto nel corso del tempo e la sua rilevanza come opera d’arte, quindi come sistema classificatorio atipico e, per certi versi, impossibile.
http://www.johanandlevi.com/scheda.php?libro=134

Both the exhibition Aby Warburg: "Mnemosyne Atlas. Rekonstruktion – Kommentar – Aktualisierung", curated by Roberto Ohrt and Axel Heil at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, and the two-day colloquium organised in conjunction to the show have been an opportunity to read the “reconstruction, commentary and revision” of the Bilderatlas as a reenactment, and to reconsider the polarities original/copy, past/future, visual montage/epistemic meanings in Warburg’s method, at the crossroad between artistic practice and scientific research. In this respect, the article focuses on the role of Mnemosyne as a medium that stands in an open, generative dialogue with the contemporary obsession for revisiting the past, not in a nostalgic way, but by exploring its potentiality in the present and future.
http://www.engramma.it/eOS2/index.php?id_articolo=3086

"Repetition as Claiming Space"
6 February 2019, 14:00 - 17:00
Seminar Room SG2, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road NB longer session
 
Description

Professor Richard Coyne (Architecture, Edinburgh)
"Mindless Repetition: Re-running the Territorial Imperative"
3.30pm -5.00pm Respondents:

Dr Cristina Baldacci (Università Ca' Foscari, Venice/ICI Berlin)
"The Re-turn in contemporary art"

Dr Francesco Giusti (ICI Berlin)
"Lyric Time and the Trans-historical"

Richard Coyne researches and teaches in digital technologies and design. His most recent books are Mood and Mobility, Navigating the Emotional Spaces of Digital Social Networks with MIT Press, and Network Nature: The Place of Nature in the Digital Age with Bloomsbury Academic. He is interested in sound and space, the persistence of romanticism in digital cultures, and philosophical pragmatism, and will soon release a book on C.S. Peirce. His blog 'Reflections on Technology, Media and Culture' is at https://richardcoyne.com/. The title of his lecture refers to Ardrey, R. (1967) The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations, London, Collins) and its applicability to video gaming and other more recent pursuits.

Cristina Baldacci is Senior Researcher at the Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice, and still affiliated to the ICI Berlin, where she was a 2016-18 fellow. Her research interests focus on the archive and atlas as artistic gestures and visual forms of knowledge; appropriation and montage as artistic strategies; “re”-practices in contemporary art; image theory and visual culture; contemporary sculpture and installation art; new media art. She has written for various magazines and essay collections, and co-edited, among others, the volumes: Quando è scultura (2010), Montages: Assembling as a Form and Symptom in Contemporary Arts (2018), Abstraction Matters: Contemporary Sculptors in Their Own Words (forthcoming), and Over and Over and Over Again: Re-Enactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory (forthcoming). She is the author of Archivi impossibili. Un’ossessione dell’arte contemporanea (2016), a monograph on archiving as artistic practice.

Francesco Giusti is currently affiliated to the ICI Berlin, where he was a 2016-2018 fellow. After his PhD in Comparative literature at the Italian Institute of Human Sciences and Sapienza University of Rome, he pursued his research on the history and theory of the lyric at the University of York and the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt. He is a member of the Centre for Research in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis Après-coup (University of L’Aquila) and the author of two books devoted respectively to the ethics of mourning and to creative desire in lyric poetry: Canzonieri in morte. Per un’etica poetica del lutto (2015) and Il desiderio della lirica. Poesia, creazione, conoscenza (2016). With Christine Ott and Damiano Frasca, he co-edited the volume Poesia e nuovi media (2018).


Cristina and Francesco were both Fellows of the ICI Berlin 2016-18 research project ERRANS, in time and will also share insights from this recent project in discussion e.g. https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/re-workshop/

The text considers recirculation as a process through which both visual and cultural imagery are put in motion over and over again in the current information age, especially in the context of post-Internet art. Hito Steyerl’s writings and thoughts on the ‘poor image’, namely the low-resolution digital image bound to a perpetual wandering or ‘circulationism’, here serve as major reference points for the development of the argument.

By distancing it from historical revival (i.e., ‘Living History’), reenactment is here understood as artistic strategy as well as curatorial practice, and therefore as critical method. As artistic strategy it implies the reactivation (over time) and remediation (on different supports) of images stemming from a vast visual repertoire that artists — especially those working with time-based media (film, video, performance) — appropriate in order to give them new meanings. As curatorial practice and critical method, reenactment regards the remaking of impermanent artworks and the restaging of temporary exhibitions to possibly offer an understanding of (art) history that gives preference to a visual and performative, sometimes immersive, approach.