‘A Dirty Job’, originally published in Spooner Magazine curated by @AlexanderHidalgo.
 
As we approach the intriguing 100th anniversary of the Duchamp Monte Carlo Bond’s existence, paying homage is warranted.
 
I hope you will enjoy the reading.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Fiction of Value. 2023

Babylon, Berlin, October 28, 2023.

Fiction of Value d like to be a specif intervention in the Babylon Kino foyer as dialog between historical and architectural context and two little sculptures.

 

exchange@telegraphenwerke. Berlin.

A ritual on bartering among artists.

2022-2023.

Bartering among artists is a practice with a long tradition where mutual affirmation of artistic identity, value exchange and generosity collapse in a seemingly peer to peer agreement. If cultural and social capital are also in play, the question raises: What exactly is it that artists exchange in an artwork barter? At first glance, bartering looks like a simple pre-capitalistic practice, but behind this act one can easily discover the actualization of complex patterns of evaluations of future scenarios / power relationships / psychodynamics of ego / generosity / exchange of ideas / fostering of a form of artistic communion / mutual support / patronage (etc.). Furthermore, the exchange of artworks among artists as regularly practice might be a good precaution for their old bones. The list of artists who exchanged artworks amongst each other is really long: Bacon/ Freud, Manet/Degas, Picasso/ Matisse, Dürer/Raphael, Van Gogh/Gauguin or Sol LeWitt’s exchanges with Eva Hesse, Robert Mangold, Hanne Darboven, Robert Ryman, as random examples. “For Sol LeWitt, the act of exchange seemed to be not only a personal gesture, but also an integral part of his conceptual practice.” During the exchange@telegraphenwerke the privat ritual of bartering became semi-public. The vent is intended to give visibility to the status of a work of art before to be introduced in the market or institutional context, but also to the artist as producer in time of crisis, and to offer to a selected audience a insight of several dynamic of value activated by the exchange. The act of bartering radically simplifies the value of the two artworks in a 1=1 ratio where pricing, speculation, money transitions are suspended in their respective economic and time frame of actualization, Like any industry custom, it comes with its own rules: offer work of equivalent scale or significance. It’s OK to follow up. And be generous.”

 

Exchange II: FRICTION & FAILURE

with Laure Catugier/ Elizabeth McTernan

2022.

Friction (n.): the action of one object or surface moving against another.
Failure (n.): lack of success in doing or achieving something.
 
Ten years ago, FAILURE was the result of an error in the printing of a series of photographs entitled Almost Blind, scheduled to be shown at a Milan art fair. Mistakenly printed on the wrong medium, the entire series was finally reprinted correctly just in time for the fair. The artist didn’t want to destroy the “failed” photos, so the gallerist required her to cross out the title and signature on the back and write “FAILURE” in large letters, to ensure that it wouldn’t disrupt the “correct” artwork’s value in the art market. FAILURE somehow got caught, blocked, suspended in a peculiar status. The event of caughtness is static but not without tension, and if FAILURE failed to create value and store it, it still resists keeping all its potential.
In FRICTION the resistance between two surfaces holds them together and holds the potential energy of a future separation. The artwork A Work of Friction points to a situation of being caught on the world – of a physical recognition of roughness and resistance, and a metaphorical recognition of the political energy stored therein. On a planetary scale, researchers say about 23% of climate emissions are due in some way to friction, laying bare the myth of smooth flows of capital and resources. From the encounter between two surfaces, a third state arises – this third is most often expressed as heat, sometimes wear, sometimes a transference of energy.
The exhibition and bartering event FRICTION & FAILURE operates in a playful game of reflection and re-activation. FAILURE prompts a new line of value in the discursive space created around the work, quite literally: the work is turned around, and we are denied its front side – its “good” side – except in the conceptual reflection on the event of the gallerist’s denial of the artwork’s existence. FRICTION takes a central position between FAILURE and the bartering-exhibition format, strongly producing sensations and promises of heat and value, while the object in question is both caught on the surface of a mirror by friction and caught as an image in the mirror’s reflection. The rich narratives expressed in the relationship of its own material textures and structures converse in this double direction, reflecting the process of the bartering and the dynamic of status of FAILURE.
Under the capitalist condition, works of art are overwhelmed by the fact of being exchanged, presented, and exhibited as commodities. This challenge is indeed indicated as a major critical issue by authors like Anita Chari, Isabelle Graw, Christoph Menke, Sebastian Egenhofer, and Peter Osborne. Georg Lukács’ writing about commodities presents a very special kind of event as fundamental. During this event, “the producer” proposes her work to society. It is the moment when negotiations are done, deals are made, contracts are signed, hands are shaken – and where rejections and closed doors are experienced. Lukács called this event reification, an event where ipso facto all the social relations involved in the production of the work become a thing.
Laure Catugier
(1982, Toulouse, France) lives and works in Berlin. She graduated from the École d’Architecture de Toulouse and the École des Beaux-Arts de Toulouse. As an artist with a background in architecture, Catugier’s work conveys the geometric language of modernism. She examines the functionality of modernist architecture and urban spaces and researchs on the global standardisation of construction. She is the winner of the International Celeste Prize, as well as scholarships from the Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt Berlin, the Pilecki Institute Warsaw and the Stiftung Kunstfonds Bonn. Her work has been exhibited internationally (selection) : Liebling Haus – White City center (Tel Aviv), Total Museum (Seoul), MASQ cultural hub (Cairo), In Sonora Festival (Madrid), Artum Foundation (Warsaw), Upcoming: Public Art in a metro station in Toulouse.
Elizabeth McTernan
(1981, NY, USA) is an artist and writer based in Berlin and Iowa City with an MFA from Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Her work is a research-oriented and mixed-media exploration of measurement and media ecologies. Sometimes this involves a cartography of landscapes: mountains, deserts, the coastlines of islands or puddles. Other times it involves a cartography of objects: lab artifacts, copper, rocks. Through an interdisciplinary practice of mapping, she problematizes and plays with methods of empiricism. Most recently, her work has been exhibited at documenta fifteen, and her paper “Andscapes: As the Bug Crawls” is forthcoming from POM Berlin.
 

Exchange I.

With Lvis Mejía at  salon@telegraphenwerke #1. Berlin

2021.

 

Salon@Telegraphenwerke is a semi-public series of events hosted in the historical building of W. Gurlt Telegraphenwerke in Berlin Alt-Treptow. In the same factory where more than a hundred years ago, improved telegraphs for a simplified coding alphabet were produced, we playfully revive the Berlin tradition of the salon. By facilitating direct, informal, and pleasant encounters, we intend to connect all the people and worlds we love: art, music, literature, ideas, and yoga. It’s a contemporary decoding workshop set in a space of moving walls, open windows, and shared ideas.

Exchange@Telegraphenwerke is a ritual on bartering among artists and an art project about exchange. Bartering among artists is a practice with a long tradition where mutual affirmation of artistic identity, value exchange, and generosity collapse in a seemingly peer-to-peer agreement. During Exchange@Telegraphenwerke, the private ritual of bartering becomes semi-public. The event aims to give visibility to the artist as producer in times of crisis, to the status of an artwork before it’s introduced to the market or an institutional context, and the complex dynamics of value production.

 

artexhibition al MACC di Calasetta.

A fiction about a fiction. 

2021.

Il progetto ARTExhibition si propone di esplorare i legami fra le espressioni culturali identitarie della Sardegna, il suo patrimonio archeologico, storico, ambientale e l’arte contemporanea, con una serie web e unìapp con funzioni di realtà aumentata che avranno il compito di promuovere il progetto, attrarre, coinvolgere e informare non solo chi interessato allo specifico ambito (arte e beni culturali), ma un pubblico ampio ed eterogeneo. Si vuole tracciare una differente mappa identitaria dell’arte e della creatività contemporanea in Sardegna, un percorso che parli, non in maniera scontata e didascalica, ma andando oltre gli stereotipi, del senso di appartenenza a questa terra.

 

Questa è la tua terra.

Musei Civici. Galleria Comunale di Cagliari.

2018.

“Questa è la tua terra”,  Musei Civici a cura della rete “Nino dove sei”.

https://sistemamuseale.museicivicicagliari.it/galleria-comunale-darte-cagliari/

 

Empirical survey on a heritage.

2012-2015.

Magazine here

video performance here

The results in words, images and text are the basis of this publication which gathers the works of many collaborators, 20 artists, various associations, four art centres (the Grimmuseum, Supermarkt Berlin, the Node Center, the Lazzaretto in Cagliari ), three art galleries ( MEME in Cagliari, Joao Cocteau and the Lucas Carrieri Art Gallery in Berlin) from a span of just four years. The project generated six exhibitions, 15 exclusively conceived artworks among installations and performances, two residency programs for eight artists, two publications, and a remarkable number of websites. Our project travelled several times between Sardinia and Germany and was seen by thousands of people, from art enthusiasts to art experts. Throughout “Empirical Survey on a Heritage” we display here the different moments of our journey, and we hope that our reader will have the same critical and logical approach we had through case and accident. Finally we hope you will be captivated by the artistic discoveries made visible by this project. The three experiments connected with Empirical Survey on a Heritage are a playful way to eradicate many of the suppositions and inconsistencies related to our cultural heritage. Identity and cultural heritage are in fact hot topics in this survey, since we are a group of migrant artists and curators dealing daily with these aspects and living in a multicultural, undetermined and multiverse society. This also determinates our curatorial choices. The project has been carried out by Giusy Sanna and myself. The entire project’s structure is based on a few assumptions accompanying a certain tendency that shows the overuse of scientific criteria in the artistic and philosophical field. The project’s logic is conceived as a reaction to the fusion of artistic and scientific dialects in conceptual arts; these patterns were also recurring in the emergency of a new scheme for contemporary art. The project “Empirical Survey on a Heritage” is an investigative procedure on a grey area between several disciplines, as Deleuze would say, where artistic and scientific languages and instruments seem to mix and blend. The scientific method, based on experiments, and the creative processes, strictly connected to art, are here confused. The curator here acts like a researcher verifying, selecting, investigating and conducting an experiment. The artist becomes the acting instrument of this research. Finally artworks and exhibitions are treated like the results of an experiment, and both are able to validate and invalidate the first assumption. As we see in the subtitle, “Empirical Survey on a Heritage” could be defined as a cultural experiment focusing on Sardinian culture and identity, using contemporary art as an instrument and Sardinia and Berlin as a laboratory or play-field.

Contributors: Nuno Vicente, StellanVeloce, Marisa Benjamim, Alessandro Sau, , Ewa Surowiec, Roberto Fanari, Bryn Chainey, Irene Balia, Cristina Meloni, Ambra Pittoni, Carlo Spiga, Paul-Flavien Enriquez-Sarano, E., Rugiada Cadoni, Igor Muroni.

 Collaboration and Institution:  the Grimmuseum( GERMANY), Supermarkt Berlin ( GERMANY), the Node Center( GERMANY), the Lazzaretto in Cagliari (ITALY),  MEME in Cagliari (ITALY), Joao Cocteau Berlin ( GERMANY),  Lucas Carrieri Art Gallery  Berlin( GERMANY) , Comune di Cagliari. (ITALY), Comune di Samatzai ( ITALY), Regione autonoma della Sardegna (ITALY) , Fondazione Sciola (ITALY).

The project generated six exhibitions, 15 exclusively conceived artworks among installations and performances, two residency programs for eight artists, two publications, and a remarkable number of websites.

 

Die Ecke Project.

Art and Neuroscience.

2010-2012.

 

The project Die Ecke Project,  Art and Neuroscience. A new approach, initiated by Ecke Gallery in 2010 in Berlin, aims at promoting collaboration between artists and scholars involved in neuro scientific research,  and thus at developing innovative and multidisciplinary works of art. Ecke Gallery regularly hosts international visual artist, multimedia artists, performers, curators, neuroscientists, psychologists, psychiatrists, psycho-linguists and philosophers, who come together in smaller groups to work on a specific topic, such as: consciousness, perception, cognition, memory, and time.  Then, the results of the collaboration, works of art, has been  presented in a group exhibition 25th MAY.

Partecipants and collaboration: Jan-Niklas Antons  Psychologist / Neuroscientist, Marion Andrieu/ Artist, Levan Manjavidze/ Visual artist, Eva Teppe / artist, Mauro Murgia/psicologist, Rebecca Patrige/ Artist, Mauro Murgia/psicologist, Tomas Goucha- Neuroscientist, Paul-Flavien Enriquez-Sarano, Artist/Journalist, Katri Aksola – Artist Video/installation, Tomas Goucha, Neuroscientist, Athina Stokou – Artist/ Painter, Ambra Pittoni, Artist/ , Adeleh Hildebrand, Doctor in Psychiatry, Julie Mewes, Cultural and Medical Anthropology, Ania Pabis , Art / Photography, Nuno Vicente. Artist, Julien Avril, Musician Sound, Hannah Bohle, Psycholinguist, neuroscientist.

 

Genau! Sardinia.

Sardinian artists in Berlin
2010.

Artists: Irene Balia, paintings; ; E., video; Roberto Fanari ,sculpture; Ambra Pittoni, performance; Carlo Spiga, installation.

People have always been attracted by Sardinia because of its specific and interesting culture. In recent years this attraction has become a sort of cultural exchange because also many Sardinians in general and Sardinian artists leave and enter the island permanently; some leave for good, others stay abroad for long periods. This mobility was caused by the emergence of many talented Sardinians who live outside Sardinia, a fact which demonstrates the potential of modern Sardinia for more attention and promotion. This event aims to give visibility to contemporary art made by Sardinian artists who work in Berlin. It is a showcase in the heart of the current world capital of contemporary art and promotes the particularity of Sardinian artists in a global cultural context.Located at the crossroads of Mediterranean cultures, Sardinian culture has ancient roots but also new sprouts, opening itself towards and becoming part of Europe.The event Genau! Sardinia. Sardinian artists in Berlin wants to be an initiative promoting Sardinian identity. Of course, a difficult cultural environment forms every artist, but a culture which uses contemporary art as a way of expression shows the willingness to renew and reinvent itself.In the course of globalization every peculiarity, originality and every distinctive feature is a valuable contribution to the beauty of the world and cultural heritage. In this case, contemporary art can play an important role to demonstrate different Sardinian facets and the island’s potential.

 

TEXTS

2010-2022

The following texts  are natural development of years of studies  and artistic practices. What follow  can be just a proposition for motivated readers.I started to wrote it several years ago as a support for my private  thinking and for my personal use. Luckily I started to share some of the following considerations with some friends,  artists, neuroscientists and philosophers  during the project Ecke Project (2010-2012) and their feedback have been more than   precious. It is not  a philosophical analysis because I´m not a philosopher and neither a scientific one, because I’m not a scientist. What I can say is that I tried (and I’m still trying) to engage this research rigorously, with deep curiosity and with the most intellectual honesty I could. I included also here some of the references to facilitate verification and to permit to  re-walk easily  some of the steps I took to advance my hypothesis.

 

On definitions Wax and clay

About colors

References

Three level of meaning

John berger, how to live with stones

 

Exhibitions (selection).

2022. Telegraphenwerke art project. Exchange FRICTION & FAILURE with Laure Catugier/ Elizabeth McTernan
2022. Telegraphenwerke art project. Exchange with Lvis Mejía at  salon@telegraphenwerke #1
2018. WHEN THE RISING SUN. 2018. Galleria Comunale di Cagliari.
2017 Museum of Color. Pilot Exhibition. Berlin. (Germany).
2016 Solo Show. Pata-Archeology. For Bartoli-Felter Art Foundation. (ITALY).
2016 Artist Residency at Contemporary Art festival- DONORI (ITALY).
2015. Museum of Colours Berlin. (Germany).
2014. Atelier residence to Soma Gallery. Berlin. (Germany).
2013. Solo Show at BOX 32 ART Gallery. Berlin. (Germany).
2013. Solo Ex. Kant Reloaded- Expo Gallery. Berlin. (Germany).
2013. Berlin-Island Cagliari – Lazzaretto di Cagliari. (ITALY).
2012. 25 MAY – Art and neuroscience: a new approach .Ecke Gallery. Berlin. (Germany).
2011. Kaleidoskop Gallery “MIND the gap” (Neuköllner Kunstfestival Nacht und Nebel). (Germany).
2011. ART@HBM 2011 “Neurocartographies” – Neuroscience congress. Montreal . Quebec. (Canada).
2010. BLOOM Art fair – November – Cologne. (Germany).
2010. STROKE 03 – Urban art fair – October – Berlin . (Germany).
2010. Art Touch Gallery – 23 rue des Tournelles – 75004 Paris. (France).
2010. Forgotten Bar Project – one day exhibition . collective show- Berlin. (Germany).
2010. GENAU! Sardinia – Lucas Carrieri Gallery – Tor strasse – Berlin. (Germany).
2008. Astarte gallery, Rue de Saint-Pére ,Saint-Germain , 75007 Paris. (France).
2008. Exhibition at the gallery “ Art de rien” ,Paris 75018. (France).
2007. Nuit Blanche 2007-PARIS , MultiMedia installation « le Puits». Paris. (France).

Projects & residency (selection).

2022. Rebeccu. Musamadre 2022. (ITALY)
2021. MACC Calasetta. http://www.artexhibition.it/

2018. Residency. Musei Civici. Galleria Comunale di Cagliari. Questa è la tua terra, curator Raffaella e Bruno Venturi.
2016-2017 Empirical Survey on a Heritage Magazine –
2014. Project Manager: Ansia d´Infinito, Maria Lai a Berlino in collaborazione con Regione Autonoma della
Sardegna, Thorn and Sun Srl., Sardegna Store di Berlino, il Circolo Sardo di Berlino, Istituto Italiano di Berlino (
IIC – Italienisches Kulturinstitut Berlin). Germany.
2013. Project Manager: International exhibition: Berlin-Island Cagliari ( Lazzaretto di Cagliari March 2013);
curator Giusy Sanna. Artists: Irene Balia, Roberto Fanari, Ambra Pittoni – Paul-Flavien –Sarano Enriquez (FRA),
Carlo Spiga( ITA) ,Stella Veloce( ITA) , E., Nuno Vicente ( POR), Ewa Surowiec(POL), Bryn Chainey (ENG),
Marisa Benjamim (POR) , Alessandro Sau ( ITA), Cristina Meloni( ITA), Rugiada Cadoni from Y Liver (FRA), Igor
Muroni(ITA), Giovanni Casu. Italy
2012.Project manager BERLIN-ISLAND. ( Italy, Germany).
2012.Project manager and curator Holiday Island. SUPERMARKT. Brunnenstrasse 64- Berlin. (GERMANY)

2011.Curator for Tomasz Kobialka – Solo exhibition.Ecke Gallery. Berlin. (GERMANY)

2011. Curator for Irene de la Selva – Galaxy Project Solo exhibition Ecke Gallery. Berlin. (GERMANY)
2011. Curator and Manager Ecke Gallery- art and neuroscience . Finow Str 33 . Berlin. (GERMANY)
2010. Curator and project manager W.I.R. Gallery, Boxhagener Str. 33. Berlin. (GERMANY)
2009. Curator and project manager Work in Regress Gallery. Kreuzberg . Berlin. (GERMANY)
2009 – 2008. (6 months). Residency program at Culturia.de. Berlin. (GERMANY)

Workshop (selection).

2014 . Museum of Colors – Kremansky – About Colours (GERMANY)
2011 -Kaleidoskop -Art Gallery Berlin- “Art and neuroscience – a new approach” MIND the gap –during art
festival NACHT UND NEBEL. Berlin. GERMANY)
2011 -Stattbad Wedding FLASHLIGHTS– “Art and neuroscience – a new approach”. Berlin. GERMANY)
2011 -WerkStadt Cultural Association Berlin e.V. “ART CLINIC # . Berlin. GERMANY)