Arboree Volanti, Simone Berti with the participation of Thomas Braida and Genuardi Ruta and Patrick Tuttofuoco.

The Epiphytes Attitude #1 – Arboree volanti

The Epiphytes Attitude #1 - Arboree volanti

Simone Berti

Curated by Like A Little Disaster

From Saturday 8 August 2020 / ∞, H 24 – 7/7 @Polignano a Mare

An imaginative world, populated by plants with their own life, will virtually animate the while area of the City of Polignano a Mare. Arboree Volanti is the new artistic project by Simone Berti with the contribution of Thomas Braida, the artistic duo Genuardi Ruta and Patrick Tuttofuoco, created with the help of Augmented Reality and usable through the display of smartphones and tablets.

Trees are sedentary, like we have been during this quarantine period. Yet Simone Berti’s Arboree Volanti move and the question starts from afar, since 1935: “The Centaurians possessed artificial structures which were undoubtedly dwelling houses. […] Their structures were grown, not built. Instead of metals to shape to their own ends, they had forms of protoplasm whose rate and manner of growth they could control. Houses, bridges, vehicles – even space ships were formed of living matter which was thrown into a quiescent non-living state when it had attained the form and size desired”. That’s how Murray Leinster, in his short story Proxima Centauri, describes an alien technology based on vegetable genetic manipulation, which today doesn’t sound so incredible.

Abroree Volanti are essentially logs and, in some way, alien entities. From the literary wooden spaceships of the science fiction of the 30 s to contemporary Arboree Volanti there is a red thread that, passing through a particular and metaphysical relationship between nature and architecture, combines all the experiences at the base of Simone Berti’s artistic world, always in balance among the contrasts. Here, concrete organic, vegetable and arborescent shapes not only transform into objects that float in mid-air between Mediterranean houses or hight cliffs, sometimes twirling over our heads, but manifest themselves impalpable and unreal thanks to the Augmented Reality, through a concreteness that is not there.
With this project Simone Berti brings to extreme consequences the contrast between matter and abstraction: that balance between opposites that has always characterized his research. Berti’s Arboree Volanti move, as in the botanist Stefano Mancuso experiment: a freshly sprouted bean plant headed directly towards a pole, the only object in the room, to hold onto it. Plants, thanks to a mechanism still unknown to us, perceive the environment around them. We could say, with a small leap of fantasy, that they feel architecture and can make choices, maybe not aesthetic but definitely dictated by convenience in terms of survival.

Texts by Like A Little Disaster, Eva Fabbris, Luca Lo Pinto and a video chat with the philosopher Leonardo Caffo.

To participate, just click on www.arboree.it, active from August, 8th starting at 7 am and follow the instructions, pointing the smartphone to the architectures, urban, natural, central and peripheral spaces of the area of the municipality of Polignano a Mare.

Simone Berti was born in Adria, in 1966, lives and works in Milan. A selection of his international exhibition: Fare Mondi / Making Worlds, 52. Biennale d’Arte, Venice, 2009; Italics, MOCA – Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and Palazzo Grassi, Venice, curated by Francesco Bonami; Egofugal – 7. Istanbul Biennial by Yuko Hasegawa; Simone Berti – Appunto di una generazione, MACRO, Rome, 2017; Examining Pictures, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London / Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago / A. Hammer Museum – UCLA, Los Angeles; Borderline syndrome: Energies of Defense, Manifesta 3, Ljubljana; Apocalittici Integrati, MaXXI, Rome; Young Italian artists at the turn of the millennium, Galleria Continua, Beijing; Personal, GaMEC, Bergamo; Polyphonix 40, Center Georges Pompidou, Paris; Zeitwenden / Outlook, Kunstmuseum, Bonn; SMAK Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Gand; El tiempo del Arte, Fundación PROA, Buenos Aires; ExIt, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Visioni a catena, Hara Museum, Tokyo.

Arboree Volanti
a project by Simone Berti
From Saturday August, 8th starting at 7 AM
From August 22nd the project will be visible worldwide.

At the following link the list of devices and browsers compatible with Augmented Reality:
https://help.briovr.com/hc/en-us/articles/360036215534

The event is outdoors and in a public place, therefore subject to the safety regulations currently in force in the Puglia Region.

 

The Epiphytes Attitude
Curated by Like A Little Disaster

“Arboree Volanti” is the first appointment of “The Epiphytes Attitude”, a series of projects dilated over time and space that attempt to investigate the concepts of adaptation, survival and uprooting (from the soil and from the defined and closed physical space).

The project activates a metaphorical connection between artistic and curatorial practices and the adaptive system implemented by epiphytic plants; ferns, mosses, lichens, orchids, tillandsias, algae, bromeliads and other sessile organisms that do not grow on the soil but where humans are not used to imagining them. This type of plants lives on trunks or tree branches, on other plants, stones, and on transmission towers, electric poles and other human artifacts, some epiphytic algae even grow on different animals species.
During their evolutionary process, the epiphytes “simply” decided to move, provisionally placing themselves on ambiguous and mobile surfaces, creating improbable associations that allowed them to deceive death and escape extinction. Mosses, lichens and ferns (or rather, their ancestors) were the first plants to evolve, which means that epiphytes precede the evolution of plants rooted in the soil. This strategy recalls nomadic histological relationships with the earth that precede even the most stable attachments to it.

Epiphytes are also called Air Plants or Daughters of the Wind. They are able to capture light, water and nutrients from privileged positions – from an endless, unstable and unpredictable position. They are random points, hybrids riotous at any classification, nodes of a network that binds multiple and distant factors in an uninterrupted chain, and which risk blowing up all the systems, all the programs, all the effects.
An epiphytic plant does not negatively affect its partner, it is able to create a non-parasitic interspecific relationship, a symbiotic bond that benefits both sides of the co-evolutionary couple. They live together across difference, dreaming up new worlds to become-with-others, generating alternative ecosystems and energy together.
The Greek prefix Epi means Above but not in a sense of hierarchical position, it is an “above” light as a caress, perpetually interactive and interchangeable with interspecific and inappropriate otherness.
Neither objects nor subjects but relationships.

– Like A Little Disaster

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Michaela Zuge-Bruton / Progetto (Lecce) - Photo L.A.L.D.

BAITBALL (01) “I’ll slip an extra shrimp on the barbie for you”

BAITBALL (01) "I'll slip an extra shrimp on the barbie for you"

Jaana-Kristiina Alakoski, ASAFO Black (Nuna Adisenu- Doe, Scrapa, Jeffrey Otoo, Samuel Kortey Baah, Denyse Gawu-Mensah, Larry Bonćhaka), ASMA, Monia Ben Hamouda, Ludovic Beillard, Vitaly Bezpalov, Andrew Birk, Enrico Boccioletti, Melanie Bonajo, Benni Bosetto, Cécilia Brueil, Ian Bruner, Marco Bruzzone, Paolo Bufalini, Pierluigi Calignano, Katharina Cameron, Costanza Candeloro, Finn Carstens, Filippo Cecconi, Guendalina Cerruti, Keren Cytter, Edoardo Ciaralli, Riccardo D’avola-Corte, Stine Deja, Zoë De Luca, Maria Adele Del Vecchio, Lila De Magalhaes, Davide Dicorato, Derek M. F. Di Fabio, Alessandro Di Pietro, Neckar Doll, Loki Dolor, Don Elektro, Clementine Edwards, Kayla Ephros, Adham Faramawy, Cleo Fariselli, Emilio Ferro, Olga Fedorova, Alessandro Fogo, Léo Fourdriner, Michele Gabriele, Paolo Gabriotti, Tommaso Gatti, Diana Gheorghiu, Naomi Gilon, Marco Giordano, Nicola Gobbetto, Serena Grassi, Julie Grosche, Jennyfer Haddad, Jan S. Hansen, Philip Hinge, Helena Hladilová, Joey Holder, Ellie Hunter, Eloise Hawser, Angelique Heidler, Lena Henke, Botond Keresztesi, Keiu Krikmann, Andrea Kvas, Virginia Lee Montgomery, Per-Oskar Leu, Lucia Leuci, Abby Lloyd, Ula Lucińska + Michał Knychaus, Lorenzo Lunghi, Tamara Macarthur, Dalia Maini, Rachele Maistrello, Viola Morini, Max Motmans, Marco Musarò, Christine Navin, Avery Noyes, Alessandro Nucci, Francesco Pacelli, Nuno Patrício, Emma Pryde, Anni Puolakka, Agostino Quaranta, John Roebas, Andrea Sala, Giulio Scalisi, Jens Settegren, Siggi Sekira, Guido Segni, Helin Shahmaran, Namsal Siedlecki, SGOMENTO (Matteo Pomati, Marco Pio Mucci), Anna Slama, Livia Spinga Mantovani, Ruben Spini, Martin Soto Climent, Mireille Tap, Filippo Tappi, Nik Timková, Philipp Timischl, Natalia Trejbalova, Marta Trektere, Urara Tsuchiya, Patrick Tuttofuoco, Eva Vallania, Daniel Van Straalen, Essi Vesala, Gaia Vincensini, Marco Vitale, Alessandro Vizzini, Gray Wielebinski, Zoë Williams, Yelena Zhelezov, Michaela Zuge-Bruton

Curated by Catbox Contemporary, Davide Da Pieve, Essenza Club, Flip Project, Ginny Project, Harlesden High Street & Twee Whistler, Like A Little Disaster, Felice Moramarco, Nights, PANE project, Progetto, Rhizome Parking Garage, Studioconcreto, The Sunroom, Ultrastudio

5 January / 15 March 2020 @Palazzo San Giuseppe, Polignano a Mare

A bait ball occurs when small organisms (fish, birds, insects) move tightly packed in a spherical formation around a common center. It is a defensive measure adopted to escape the threat of predators, but it is also a cohesion exercise enhancing the hydro-aerodynamic functions.
A coordinated bait ball that moves and glitters in unison is a mesmerizing image; hundreds or thousands of individuals moving together under radio control or a pre-established choreography. They are even more surprising considering that there is no leader or hierarchy within them.
The “balls” are formed through that spontaneous emergency known as self-organization. It emerges from the bottom upwards, it is an a-centered and non-linear phenomenon, it is an irreversible process, which thanks to the cooperative action of subsystems lead to more complex structures in the global system.
A bait ball rotates, contracts, expands, separates and returns all one, without interruption – single individualities with a hive mind. Cohesion is achieved through the coordination of each individual with respect to the nearest neighbour. A massive coordinated “ball” is made up of thousands of individual actions that make up a single collective movement.

Heterogeneous, “aggregated” patterns in the spatial distributions of individuals are almost universal across living organisms, from bacteria to higher vertebrates. Whereas specific features of aggregations are often visually striking to human eyes, a heuristic analysis based on human vision is usually not sufficient to answer fundamental questions about how and why organisms aggregate and nor about how and why the same associative processes invest “inanimate” elements such as water vapour, sand dunes, galaxies, in which these patterns derive from simple abiotic interactions between the individual components.

The project BAITBALL follows the same natural, mutualistic and universal mechanism to create a hybrid subject/object, a collective dimension; what remains after eliminating the artificial notions of nature and culture. It emerges from the continuous articulation of humans and non-humans, artifacts, inscriptions, animals, plants, spirits, ancestors, gods, organisms and technological prostheses, local and universal, apocalyptic fears and technological hopes.
“us and our technologies in one vast system – to include human and nonhuman agency and understanding, knowing and unknowing, within the same agential soup”.

BAITBAL is neither an object nor a subject, it is a relationship. It is a phenomenon that can only be represented as an interaction, thus allowing to pass from the obtuseness of “I” to the fluidity of “Us”. It is not a fixed point, an invariant structure, but a circulation being that draws a multi-centric network. It is an interlaced tangle that constantly acts with all the other animated and inanimate makers of the world. Within it, human and non-human associations become cognitive paths of the world because they generate it with their mutual action, hic et nunc.

BAITBAL is a toroid, in it the energy flows from one end, circulates around the center and comes out from the other side. It is balanced, self-regulating, can sustain itself and is made of the same substance surrounding it, like a tornado, a ring of smoke in the air or a vortex in the water. The toroid allows a vortex of energy to flow outwards and then return to the vortex. Thus the energy of a BAITBALL is continually regenerated and at the same time expands self-reflecting on itself.
BAITBALL is not a macro-organism, nor a subsumption of the parts in a superior totality, but an inter-penetration of the entities, a zone of indistinction and transformation.

[…] everything is connected to something, which is connected to something else. While we may all ultimately be connected to one another, the specificity and proximity of connections matters
— who we are bound up with and in what ways.

BAITBALL creates lines of growth and movement, it does not live in places but along paths: the “wayfarer” is its original condition. Its dimension is defined based on movement and relationships, its contours are so blurred that its definition becomes possible only from a contextual ecological point of view. Its environment is not simply the “thing” that surrounds it, but rather an inextricable “imbroglio” of lines, a tangle of interlaced paths.
This tangle is the texture of the BAITBALL, beings do not simply occupy the world, they inhabit it, and in so doing – in threading their own paths through the meshwork – they contribute to its ever-evolving weave. Thus we must cease regarding the world as an inert substratum.
If the modern, colonial, naturalist power/knowledge tends to contract the collective’s action in an orderly system (a structure, a chessboard, a cartography), BAITBALL instead extends the perception of reality in a multiverse made of traces, textures and weaves – from the projection of luminous imaginary chains between one star and the other, to the construction of magic seals, to chiroscopy, or to other forms of mantic. This process amplifies the original intertwining of organisms, mythologies, and ecological relationships.
BAITBALL is a place where to live together across difference. Whatever the new arrangements will bring, human exceptionalism and individualism will very likely be a difficult embarrassment for dreaming up new worlds to become-with-others.
The ecosystem that emerges from the perspective of the BAITBALL implies a reconsideration of the Darwinian theory of evolution: instead of considering separate classes as individuals, kingdoms, species, biomes, it is necessary to consider the single entities as vortices in a flow. These entities, in fact, do not exist as stable objects, but continuously mix in an unstoppable confluence of flows. BAITBALL describes a position of translation, mediation and relation that becomes the pivot of a morphological and ontogenetic model.

“The view of evolution as a chronic bloody competition among individuals and species, a popular distortion of Darwin’s notion of “survival of the fittest,” dissolves before a new view of continual cooperation, strong interaction, and mutual dependence among life forms. Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networkiing. Life forms multiplied and complexified by co-opting others, not just by killing them.”

BAITBALL is activated with what we cannot see or foresee with the unexpected, invisible, invisible consequences of collective actions, beyond the limits of the standardization of the possibility of control.

BAITBALL Identity is not an object; it is a process with addresses for different directions and so it can be fixed with a single number. BAITBALL is more like a verb. It repairs, maintains, re-creates, and outdoes itself.

BAITBALL is about love, friendship, togetherness and trust, which are always something more and always something less than awareness and knowledge.

BAITBALL is an evolutionary stage, a strategic mechanism to circumvent extinction, to lie to death.

Tools: James Bridle, Donna Haraway, Lynn Margulis, Tim Ingold, Timothy Morton, Bruno Latour, Michel Serres.

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Anti-Materia

Aqnb

Daily Lazy

OFluxo

Scandale Project

Tzvetnik

Superhost, Installation view

Superhost

Superhost

AGF HYDRA + Callum Leo Hughes + Keiken + Sophie Mars, Maya Ben David, Monia Ben Hamouda, Chiara Camoni, Daniela Corbascio, Stine Deja, Débora Delmar, Andreas Ervik, Michele Gabriele, Julie Grosche, HYPERCOMF + George Tigkas, Motoko Ishibashi, Natalia Karczewska, Botond Keresztesi, Andrea Kvas, Lucia Leuci, Valerio Nicolai, Ornaghi & Prestinari, Jaakko Pallasvuo + Anni Puolakka, Nuno Patrício, Clemen Parrocchetti, Andrew Rutherdale, Namsal Siedlecki, Micah Schippa, Mireille Tap, The Institute of Queer Ecology, Patrick Tuttofuoco, Wisrah Villefort
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"Ensemble" Video program curated by Julie Grosche, with: Lola Gonzàlez, Florian Sumi, Emma Frost Nixon, Laura Gozlan, Katy McCarthy, Christine Navin, Elizabeth Orr, Laura Porter, Deirdre Sargent, Lucas Seguy, Yoan Sorin, Marc Yearsley, Vijay Masharani, Katy McCarthy, Virginia Lee Montgomery, Chloé Rossetti, Yoan Sorin
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Data and text contributions by: Murray Cox (Inside Airbnb), Cecilia Guida, Darren Marshall, Like A Little Disaster

Curated by Like A Little Disaster and PANE Project

4 August / 22 October 2019 @Foothold, Polignano a Mare

In a totally touristified ecosystem as the one in Polignano a Mare, “SUPERHOST” uses the strategy of camouflage as an ironic hypothesis of resistance.
“SUPERHOST” is a real/fake Airbnb that manifests itself through an identity dissolved in a permanent chameleon-like process.
It emerges as a complex system of presentation strategies (of myself, of the neighbor) and of representation (of the self, of the others) that operate according to forces at play. These forces redefine, reorganize and re-explain the forms of the visible; they invite us to rethink the idea of the sign and of the production of the sign, the representation and the distortion of representation.
The interpretation of the environment of ” SUPERHOST ” has nothing to do with the concepts of truth and fiction. In its inside it is not necessary that the signs are true or false, but effective. What is worth is the credibility of the simulacrum offered to the other, the interactive moves and the regimes of belief and suspicion that are triggered.
The staging reiterates the maintenance of doubt, of a “duo-habere“, the failure to find a unique solution in the observation, keeping both extremes of the true/false cognitive couple alive.

The gaze, the interactive filter between truth and fiction is related to the theories of “sight seeing”, according to which the tourist experience (or the experience of the contemporary consumer tout court) would be profoundly altered due to the fact that it was pre-selected and pre-packaged, characterized by a series of social myths dependent on historical constructions aimed at a specific class, the wealthy one. Massified tourism industry is born from the alienation produced by capitalism in which even leisure and entertainment are shaped by the compulsive character of a society folded onto its smartphone, and organized travel becomes the emblem of the totalitarian nature of this system. The tourism industry is totally within the cultural one. What is purchased is a symbolic capital, but paradoxically the liberation from the world of industry takes place through the creation of another industry.

When tourism becomes a mass phenomenon, the element that normally necessary to the journey is the “sight”, the thing that must be seen, classified with one, two or three stars, according to its value. The tourist knows the object as sight, that is to say as a normalized element, worthy of being taken as an objective of an experience. The dominance of the sight, the translation into images of things and their normalization react on the things themselves, reducing them to the condition of a museum, a botanical garden, a zoo or an amusement park. Like in a shop window, the things to be seen endure a capital transformation: they are detached from their context, deprived of their networks, of the relationship with the conditions that have determined them and which can, itself, explain them.
SUPERHOST explores inauthenticity: in the sense that the traveling tourist would not see the world as it really is, but only the world that has been selected for him-her / or carefully prepared by the local communities themselves; he would not therefore see things, their natural or cultural essence, but only their image. The spatial articulation shaped by anxiety for the likely and the iconic, ultimately takes on signs of signs with which we are accustomed to representing the world, the elsewhere, the otherness.

Seduction takes the place of persuasion.

The sign is made to lie!

–

Overall, the project seeks to focus on some topological transformations that lead from the local to the global and then return to the local. Macro-actors are composed of micro-actors – aggregates are not made by other material but the one they aggregate.

Index:

I
The real effects of the immaterial capitalism.

II
The “creative destruction” practiced by the tourism industry. Producing growth and economic development by destroying the foundations on which that growth was based.

III
The notion of tourist-centered  and its ontological relatives, (gentrification, commodification).
– Airbnb as a tool for social and racial discrimination.

IV
The conditions of contemporary work (and emotional work) related to post-bio capitalism.

V
The alienation surrounding the third sector.
The concern of being replaced by the car.

VI
How to become a SUPERHOST. How to be a SUPERHOST with one sad star.

VII
Sharing/green economy and ecological impact.

VIII
Overtourism.

IX
Plastics, pipes, sewage systems.

X
Touring Cultures: a fish market that becomes the caricature of a fish market.

XI
Brandization of the private and public sphere. Privatization of public space and the simultaneous public extension/ostentation of private life.

XII
The sense of community/collectivity. The concepts of sharing and co-existence (within a vision of the network extended to the human – not human, to the techno – biological).

XIII
The schizophrenic ambivalence between the image of openness and acceptance that many cities and regions seek to give of themselves, and the contemporary global/local policies that use categories that close and exclude.

XIV
Holidaymakers as hyper-objects.

XV
4.5 gigatonnes of CO2 each year.

XVI
Adela / Xenia.

XVII
Tourism as a form of neocolonialism

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If “nature” has taught us that diversity is a perpetual and urgent necessity, what can happen to a territory transformed into monoculture through a unidirectional economy?

The Local and The Tourist.
A Conversation.

Text by Darren Marshall

Duane Hanson, Tourists II
Duane Hanson, Tourists II

One bleak, sodden apology of an afternoon in late December, Mr. Local (a local) stepped into the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh to take momentary shelter from the blinding veils of rain. Taking a seat in front of Duane Hanson’s Tourists IIi – two life-like, life-sized sculptures of male and female tourists – Local was startled to observe the male figure blink, and then with a gentle shift of weight from his left to right leg, emit a soft sigh as he tentatively took a step forward. Unfamiliar with living art and the protocols of its interaction and engagement, but being genial and of good manners, Local offered the Tourist sculpture a seat on the bench next to him, and passed him a hip flask from his breast pocket. Taking a sip, his irises warmly dilating, Tourist spoke.

Tourist  ‘Somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond any experience.’ii
 
Local  E.E. Cummings, a favourite of mine. I take it from the wall text and your attire that you’re a tourist, and from your accent, a fellow countryman of Cummings? Have you read any Scottish poetry?  

Tourist  ‘The untented Kosmos my abode, I pass, a wilful stranger: My mistress still the open road.’iii

Local  Stevenson’s Songs of Travel. Apt for a tourist. Is this your first time in Scotland?

Tourist  It’s hard to say. I’m not aware of having previously being conscious, but that could be an issue of memory. Although as a tourist I’m certainly very aware of being here right now. Would you mind if I took a photograph of you?

Local  Not at all, be my guest.

Local raises his hip flask, takes a sip, and holding his drink aloft becomes a brief sculpture of himself, acting out a jovial smile as Tourist lifts his camera to capture the suspended moment.

Local  Slàinte Mhath!

Tourist  Cheers!

Local  Whisky. Uisge beatha. It means, ‘water of life’. ‘I feel this river flowing through me – its past, its ancient soil, the changing climate. The hills gently girdle it about: it course is fixed.’iv

Local hands the flask back to Tourist, who takes another drink.

Tourist  When in Rome. It beats bourbon or rye whisky in my opinion. I’d never drank Scotch until I visited Scotland. It was, or rather is, a new and very welcome experience. You might say that’s one of the things I like best about being a tourist – experiencing new things. Especially new forms of alcohol.

Local  I can see from your wife’s stature that she’s more inclined to experiencing the gastronomic side of things. I like a good meal myself. I can’t help noticing she hasn’t moved from her spot as you have.

Tourist  She can get very transfixed like that. Hypnotised almost. She does love looking at things she hasn’t seen before, and besides, she isn’t one for moving around too much. Rather prefers sitting to standing. But give her a pew with a view of something new and she’s almost religious in her contemplation of what’s at hand.

Local  ‘One’s destination is never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things.’v I don’t mind tourists myself, we get a lot of them here in Edinburgh, but you’ll find a few folk who would say tourism and contemplation are mutually exclusive. Look at that group over there, they’re not even looking at the paintings, just taking photos of them. Your cultural commentators would have it that the tourist epitomizes the loss of our ability to experience things properly.

Tourist  Sure, we tourists carry that baggage, even more so if you’re an American of the species. But I think that’s what Duane – he’s my father – I think that’s what he tried to address when he made me. By taking time to hand paint these veins and liver spots on me he set up the tourist to become the toured, the destination, to spotlight a common humanity in order to subvert any easy indictments of our touristic status. I’ve watched many an eye looking me over, and I’d say that to most people I’m a stereotype, but I think for Duane I’m more of an archetype. The tourist as a shape-shifting wanderer, reconfiguring themselves across time, geography and culture. Mark Twain said ‘travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness’vi, but I think the traveller or tourist themselves are often subject to those forms of preconception.

At Local’s suggestion both men set off on a walk around the gallery. In the rooms dedicated to 16th and 17th century art they take a seat in front of a large painting, Portrait of Francis Basset, 1st Baron de Dunstanville and Basset (1757-1835) by the Italian artist Pompeo Batoni. It depicts the future baron on the ‘Grand Tour’, with the Castel Sant’Angelo and St. Peter’s Basilica in the background.vii

Local  (Gesturing towards the painting) Of course the tourists all piled into Italy back in the day. I suppose that the perceived difference between the Grand Tour and your average tourist is one of intent. Your ‘grand tourist’ saw their travels as a scholarly or educational observation of foreign cultures, whilst it’s assumed that for the modern tourist travel is as a form of leisure, or if I’m reading the exhibition print out on your good self correctly, a ‘distraction from the late 20th-century nothingness beneath the sheen of consumer culture’. No insult intended. At any rate it’s hard to imagine the Baron de Dunstanville and Basset here taking a selfie of himself in a G-string at Chernobyl or pulling a moonie for the camera at Machu Picchu, a la your modern newspaper headlining outrage inducing tourist.

As they look at the painting, Local and Tourist are startled to observe the painted figure of the Baron blink, and then with a gentle shift of weight from his left to right leg, emit a soft sigh and speak to them.

Francis Basset, 1st Baron de Dunstanville and Basset  Scholarly and educational? Have you read Boswell or Byron’s accounts of their tours sir? Religion, philosophy, petticoats and libidinous perambulations. One can only look at so many ruins before the brevity of life overwhelms you and the remedies of enchantment are required.

Tourist  Perhaps it’s antagonising for locals to see fellow human beings prioritising their sensual capacities, whilst they themselves are waylaid with pragmatic day-to-day concerns. Do you know the poem Tourists by Yehuda Amichai? I always found that poem a bit stuffy, a little condescending. How can he know with one sweeping brush the reflective depth of all who wander through memorials, histories, old streets and past lives? There seems to be some misplaced sense of authorship, that these places and pasts belong to him, by virtue of his being a local or in possession of a more sensitive disposition than the undeserving tourists. And then he proposes that for the tourists ‘redemption will come only if their guide tells them, “You see that arch from the Roman period? It’s not important: but next to it, left and down a bit, there sits a man who’s bought fruit and vegetables for his family.”viii

Francis Basset, 1st Baron de Dunstanville and Basset  I once took laudanum under a Roman arch. Overrated I thought. Laudanum, not the arch. It was a beautiful arch.

Local  Aren’t we all tourists, in the last analysis?

Tourist  I think we can be philosophical until the cows come home about my inherent symbolism, what I may or may not represent and so on, and ok, that’s important. Huxley said, ‘For the born traveller, travelling is a besetting vice. Like other vices, it is imperious, demanding its victim’s time, money, energy and the sacrifice of comfort.’ix But I think that you also have to question the extent to which this vice demands not just the travellers time, money and energy, but that of the destination too, and of locals like yourself. The philosophical and the social aren’t always whistling to the same tune, however unifying or sympathetic art may ask us to be.

Local  It’s certainly a view held my many locals that tourism is killing their villages, town and cities. In Barcelona they call it ‘Parquetematización’ – the act of becoming a theme park. Social fabric and identity are being overwhelmed by a tourism that homogenizes everything into mediocrity. You travel half way across the world and find the same shops that you have back home, the same multinational chains, the same masses taking selfies as they queue to get into a museum or art gallery, institutions which themselves are often a target, a glamourous bullseye, for the tourists to aim at. Overpopulation. Too many people, let alone too many tourists. Too much everything, and capitalism as the map. How to combine faith in the democratization of travel, with the reality of mass tourism indelibly changing the places swallowed up by its attention? Answers on a postcard.

On Tourist’s behalf, Local takes a photograph of Tourist and the Baron saying ‘cheese’. Nodding respectfully to the Baron, who returns a thoughtful nod of solidarity with the complexity of their conversation, Local and Tourist move on through the gallery. Rounding a corner they come across the sculpture Blessed Ludovica Albertoni (1671-74)x by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, a preternatural encounter, as the sculpture is permanently located in the specially designed Altieri Chapel in the Church of San Francesco a Ripa in Rome, Italy. Local and Tourist take a seat, absorbed by the play of light across the marble drapery.

Local (Turning to face Tourist) What I like about you, as a work of art, is your allusion to artistic peregrination. I’m galvanised by the creative odysseys or experimental tourism that’s flourished in your admirable lineage. The Surrealist flânerie for example was a wander through the crowds looking for unusual encounters. The Situationists pushed for an art of dérive, or drifting, by way of clandestine walks, itinerant itineraries, direct interventions and passageways through the city that confounded routine experiences and swam against the tide of media, marketing, and commodification. And Fluxus artists hosted Free Flux-Tours into marginal areas of the city, in an effort to redirect travellers away from the geographical prerogatives of capitalism. Tourism companies should be owned and run by artists.

Tourist  You know your artistic beans, what’s your story?

Local  I’d rather not say. We locals have to keep something back for ourselves. From the other locals too. Sharing is overrated, a symptom of post-religious anxiety and a resultant need to prove we have existed. I hope you don’t mind.

Tourist  Of course not. You’ve been very kind to me. Believe me, the climate around the perception of outsiders has changed since I was cast. The figure of the travelling stranger as a threat has become endemic to the post–September 11 climate. Your fellow Scot Douglas Gordon’s Psycho Hitchhiker played up to that I think, when he impersonated a hitchhiker standing in the middle of the road holding up a sign addressed to drivers marked with the destination “Psycho.” In some ways tourists, visitors, immigrants, diasporic residents, nomads, and other border crossers articulate a sense of potential threat to the local, regional and national imagination, as well as to the physical infrastructure.

Their gaze returns to the sculpture before them. Life and death. A funerary sculpture topped with an achingly alive breath. The fluctuating light, edited by the passing clouds as it moves over the dead marble, lends it the illusion of moving with her breath. The folds in her habit waver between turmoil and a coalescing into stillness, between a waterfall and the frozen sea. As they look at the figure of Ludovica, Local and Tourist are startled to see her blink, and then with a gentle shift in the marble, emit a soft sigh and turning, gently smile at them.

Blessed Ludovica Albertoni  ‘A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.’xi

Local  I must be getting home, my wife will be wondering where I’m at, and yours too. Do you have the time?

Tourist  My wristwatch has read 10:30 since 1988. You know she’s not really my wife don’t you? Duane cast the two of us on different days, we never actually met in the flesh. But as fiberglass goes she makes a fine traveling companion.

Local and Tourist walk back to the room where they met and exchange a silent, friendly handshake. Renouncing a fleeting urge to take a selfie of them both on his mobile, Local elects to consign their encounter to the vagaries of his memory banks, to be turned over by the river’s flow. Tourist settles into a stillness in time, a memory, a childhood photograph, a sightseeing keepsake speaking of our need to engage the world in ceaseless signification, an intimate record of our mobile existence, the visitor scratching his initials on the Colosseum, pissing on Stonehenge, sipping a margarita, tremulous before an ethereal sunset, visiting somewhere for the first time, visiting somewhere for the last time.

i  “Duane Hanson: More than Reality, 2001,” Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2001, traveled to Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan; Kunsthal, Rotterdam; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; and Kunsthaus Zurich)
ii  E.E.Cummings, ‘somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond’, from E. E. Cummings Complete Poems (Liveright Classics, 2013)
iii  Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Youth And Love: I.’ from Songs of Travel (Kessinger Publishing Co. 2004)
iv  Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (Grafton, 1965)
v  Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (New Directions, 1957)
vi  Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad / Roughing it  ((Library of America, 1984)
vii  Pompeo Batoni, Portrait of Francis Basset, 1st Baron de Dunstanville and Basset (1757-1835). This painting has never been on display at The Scottish Gallery of Modern Art. The painting was produced in Rome whilst its subject was there but, in being shipped back from there to England on board the British frigate HMS Westmoreland, it was seized by the French. It was later sold by them to Charles III of Spain, and is now in the Prado.
viii  Yehuda Amichai, Tourists from Poems of Jerusalem (HarperCollins, 1988)
ix  Aldous Huxley, The collected works of Aldous Huxley (Chatto & Windus, 1969)
x Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Blessed Ludovica Albertoni (1671-74). This sculpture has never been on display at The Scottish Gallery of Modern Art. The sculpture is located in the specially designed Altieri Chapel in the Church of San Francesco a Ripa in Rome, Italy.
xi  Franz Kafka, Letter to Oskar Pollak (27 January 1904) from Letters to Friends, Family and Editors (Schocken Kafka Library, 1990)

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Imbroglio (or the ability to incorporate possibilities), installation view

Imbroglio (or the ability to incorporate possibilities)

Imbroglio (or the ability to incorporate possibilities)

Naomi Gilon, Nona Inescu, Lucia Leuci, Lito Kattou

Curated by Like A Little Disaster

28 April / 20 June 2019, @Foothold, Polignano a Mare

Since its origins, human beings have been a hybrid, a cultural chameleon hybridized with technical, animal and vegetal otherness. Technology has already entered the body even before the postmodern era: the shape of the hands has evolved based on the manipulation of external objects and realities, as well as the other biological and cultural faculties have developed on the basis of interspecific and intraspecific selective external factors of competition and collaboration. Moreover, has evolved  also on the basis of the possibility of relating to the inanimate reality with which the human species has always had relation. Like the form of the orchid mantis (Hymenopus coronatus), which, depends on the establishment of the habitat, the material alterity and the evolutionary-mutualistic partnership in its genetic code, so the collaboration with the inanimate world and with the animal and vegetable alterity has been established in the genetic code of our species, in our flesh (the technique ment as strengthening, extension of faculties or senses) as well as in our cultural productions. Human being is one of the most important shared projects created by nature, which makes him a dependent organism by definition – correlated and hybridized with natural otherness, abolishing any claim of purity, uniqueness and platonic essentiality.

As amply demonstrated by the biologist Lynn Margulis; life did not take over the world by combat, but by networking. The view of evolution as a chronic bloody competition among individuals and species, a popular distortion of Darwin’s notion of “survival of the fittest,” dissolves before a new view of continual cooperation, strong interaction, and mutual dependence among life forms. Life forms multiplied and complexified by co-opting others, not just by killing them.

1+1=1

—

From the paramecium to the human race, all life forms are meticulously organized, sophisticated aggregates of evolving microbial life. Far from leaving microorganisms behind on an evolutionary “ladder,” we are both surrounded by them and composed of them. Having survived in an unbroken line from the beginnings of life, all organisms today are equally evolved.

This realization sharply shows up the conceit and presumption of attempting to measure evolution by linear progression from the simple – so called lower – to the more complex (with humans as the absolute “highest” forms at the top of the hierarchy).  But the simplest and most ancient organisms are not only the  forebears and the present substrate of Earth’s biota, but they are ready to expand and alter themselves and the rest of life, should we “higher” organisms, be so foolish as to annihilate ourselves.  Next, the view of evolution as chronic bloody competition among individuals and species, a popular distortion of Darwin’s notion of “survival of the finest”, dissolves before a new view of continual cooperation, strong interaction, and mutual dependence among life forms.

Governed by DNA, the living cell can make a copy of itself, defying death and maintaining its identity by reproducing. Yet by also being susceptible to mutation, which randomly tinkers with identity, the cell has the potential to survive change.

Over the past fifty years or so, scientists have observed that prokaryotes routinely and rapidly transfer different bits of genetic material to other individuals. Each bacterium at any given time has the use of accessory genes, visiting from sometimes very different strains, which perform functions that is own DNA may not cover. Some of the genetic bits are recombined with cell’s native genes; others are passed on again. Some visiting genetic bits can rapidly move into the genetic apparatus of eukaryotic cells (such as our own) as well.

By constantly and rapidly adapting to environmental conditions, the organisms of the microcosm support the entire biota, their global exchange network ultimately affecting every living plant and animal.  A “superorganism” that communicates, collaborates and cooperates on a spatial and temporal scale that transcends us. By creating organisms that are not simply the sum of their symbiotic parts—but something more like the sum of all the possible combinations of their parts—such alliances push developing beings into uncharted realms. Symbiosis, the merging of organisms into new collectives, proves to be a major power of change on Earth.

Each individual that grows, double its size, and reproduces is a great success story. Yet just as the individual’s success is subsumed in the global network of all life—a success of an ever greater order of gratitude.

—

Our bodies contain a veritable history of life on Earth. Our cells maintain an environment that is carbon-and hydrogen-rich, like that of the Earth when life began. They live in a medium of water and salts like the composition of the early seas. We become ho we are by the coming together of bacterial partners in a watery environment.  These and other living relics of once-separate individuals, detected in a variety of species, make it increasingly certain that all visible organisms evolved through symbiosis, the coming together that leads to physical interdependence and the permanent sharing of cells and bodies. We derived in an unbroken sequence from the same molecules in the earliest cells that formed at the edges of the first warm, shallow oceans. Our bodies, like those of all life, preserve the vestigials of an earlier Earth. We coexist with present-day microbes and harbor remnants of others, symbiotically subsumed within our cells. In this way, the microcosm lives on in us and we in it. Some people may find this notion disturbing, unsettling. This perspective clearly brings down all human presumption of sovereignty over the nature, it challenges our ideas of individuality, of uniqueness and independence. It even violates our view of ourselves as discrete physical beings separated from the rest of nature. To think of ourselves and our environment as an evolutionary mosaic of microscopic life evokes imagery of being taken over, dissolved, annihilated.

Ex novo:

An “I” exists? An “Us” exists?

We are hybrids reluctant to every classification, knots of a network that links multiple and distant factors in an unbroken chain, risking to blow up all the orders, all the programs, all the effects.

We float together with the elements, there is no human “I” or “Us”. We ourselves are made up of billions and trillions of small components each with their own intelligence, whether it is a cell or something even smaller, like a subatomic particle. So actually does not exist even the “Us”. It exists as a temporary and fragile balance of coalescence between different elements. And “Us” has a multiplicity in itself that constantly acts with all the other animated and inanimate creators in the world.

Individuals emerge from bacterial communities. Identity is not an object; it is a process with addresses for all the different directions and dimensions in which it moves, and so it cannot so easily be fixed with a single number.
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Heedful Sight, installation view

Heedful Sight

Heedful sight

Joachim Coucke, Maurizio Viceré

Curated by Mattia Giussani

25 November 2018 / 30 January 2019, @Foothold, Polignano a Mare

“Heedful Sight” is the second appointment of TALEA, a series of projects curated by Like A Little Disaster focused on the practices of international curators. TALEA (in Italian) is a piece of a plant used for vegetative (asexual) propagation. It is generally placed in soil or water – if the conditions are suitable, the plant piece will begin to grow as a new form of life independent of the parent.

 

In the digital automated society we all live in today, we on the one hand feel as though we are watched, violated or spied on by government agencies and corporations, and on the other we ourselves are prying into other people’s lives through the constant stream of social media feeds. Two recent examples of this condition are GCHQ, one of the UK’s intelligence agencies, that intends to increase its large-scale data hacking^, and Google, that is helping military and intelligence agencies to spy on us with its Google Earth service*. This omnipresent dichotomy, this on-going experience of being watched and watching, is a key contradiction of current human behaviour caused by our dependence on computational and technological structure, especially on a cognitive and ecological level.

In Heedful Sight, Joachim Coucke and Maurizio Viceré bring together different elements of their contrasting work to explore the causes and effects of this collision. Looking at their work within this exhibition, you can see how the two opposites act like divergent forces, like two different battery poles that complement each other at the same time.

Maurizio Viceré’s on-going work series, kh, produced between 2017 and 2018, is spread in all three rooms of the art space. The five paintings present themselves with different meanings and by looking at the digitally modified landscapes, many questions and recollections arise. These black and blue, dark-toned images show us unclear, foggy, pixelated landscapes. On the surface they can be seen as the distorted images of the screensavers you get by default every time you buy a new computer or laptop. But at second glance, they can be understood both as an exhausted ecological environment out of which raw materials have been extracted to produce the technological gadgets we all use nowadays, and as a post-apocalyptic version of the sky, with sky clouds that allude to the digital cloud we all store our data in. Notice that the Google logo is present in all his paintings. Every logo is almost camouflaged within the paintings, making them hard to see. However, having them positioned in all of the three rooms of the space, it makes the logo’s slightly more noticeable. It’s a clear association between the digital environment created through technology and the omnipresence of Google inside it. Computation today is becoming culture and with regards to Google: it is the index and arbiter of all human knowledge. Inevitably, whatever is found on Google becomes what people think.1

How do these circumstances, in which our knowlegde is almost imposed on us, effect our vision and perception of the world, especially with regards to the future?

Joachim Coucke’s seven mixed media works, all part of the series Dwellers, explore those issues. These sculptures, installed in the rooms at different heights, are an assemblage of different kinds of technological and plastic waste. Some of them are placed on the floor, while others are hung on the wall or are hidden above you. The care and attention to detail stands out. In their related simplicity, they are complex and rich of visible detail which go unnoticed at first. Hard-drive vents, small LED monitors, cables, tablet screen frames are just a few of the technological waste items produced by nowadays digital capitalism. Observing the space, it seems like these conglomerates are travelling and/or discovered in Viceré’s landscape works. These sculptures represent a new type of digital fossils, showing how futile technological waste is considered to be, and at the same time it exposes how disruptive these parts actually are. Together with these materials that re-enter the ecological realm in a different form compared to when they were extracted as raw material, human face masks are present too. These emotion-less and un-expressive masks allude to a loss of human consciousness parallel to and dependent on technological advancements, as if we’re losing pieces of our agencies and critical thought.

A new collaborative video piece between the artists called On Hiatus, closes the journey within the show. The video combines a Viceré’s landscape with sentences from Coucke like ‘Covered in Data Like a New Skin’, ‘Dwell in a Never Ending Present’ or ‘Autocorrected viral Flavors’, and a background noise like the sound of server rooms. This first video of the ongoing series gives us a few suggestions and clues on the transformation that is happening – and that will continue to happen – to human activities, with a central role that is given to the noise to accentuate the confusion and uncertainty of the present moment.

In Heedful Sight extension of ourselves, ecological elements, feeling trapped within a thin limbo of being the observer and the observed, an in-depth approach of the inability of finding solution of how to solve this situation seems lost. Within this delicate connection and balance between the two artistic practices, uncertainty about the future is key, leaving the interpretation to different solutions open, if these want to be found.

 

Mattia Giussani

^ Doward, J. (2018) GCHQ boosts powers to launch mass data hacking. Available at:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/dec/08/gchq-bulk-hacking-hacking-human-rights-privacy-alarm
* Leving, Y. (2018) Google’s Earth: how the tech giant is helping the state spy on us. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/dec/20/googles-earth-how-the-tech-giant-is-helping-the-state-spy-on-us
1. Bridle, J. (2018) New Dark Age – Technology and The End of The Future, London, United Kingdom: Verso Books, p.89

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Temporarily suspended, instalation view.

Temporarily suspended

Temporarily suspended

Mariantonietta Bagliato, Julie Grosche

Curated by Like A Little Disaster

October 20th / November 20th 2018, @Foothold, Polignano a Mare

The relationships made possible by communication technologies stimulate the revision of some fundamental assumptions of the concept of presence, as well as of the relationships between body and identity, between individual and group, which become virtual because they disprove the usual rooting of social interaction in the physical performativity of the human body.

With the advent of increasingly complex technologies, and in particular with the development of information technologies, the technological mediation of the flow of communication between bodies and identities has become more widespread and indispensable. Communication technologies, as mediators of the interactions between bodies and identities (or self-experiences, or avatars, or people, or subjects, or whatever you wish to call it), perform the specific functions of creating and mediating spaces and social groups.

The social worlds, the community structure and form can be effectively founded on symbolic exchanges in which the concept of proximity becomes secondary.

Communication technologies undermine our most widespread beliefs of communities and the bodies that inhabit them, beliefs that presuppose that communities are composed of aggregates of individual identities; that each identity is provided with a single physical body as envelope or locus of human action.

The familiar and common nature of the bodies and identities, this apparently obvious and tenacious story that keep saying of the existence of an “I” for each individual body conceals, like the concepts of race and gender, powerful and pervasive networks, whose invisibility serves to authorize and ground intertwined systems of oppression. Not only the individual experiences of corporeity are – as the theories of gender and of the body have shown – social constructs; even the location of identity in the body is socially mediated. The physical location of the subject becomes independent of the body in which the theories of the body are used to root it, and is placed in that system of symbolic exchanges that is information technology.

The monolithic representations of the physical and virtual space are now opposed to the reinvention and the encounter in a technological space conceived as a physical and social environment, as a sort of nature within which multiple subjects are roamed. The multiple subject is the enantiomorph; a being that lies outside the single physical body, to which it has also been associated by standardization. The body in question is sitting somewhere in front of a technological device, while the locus of sociability that should be associated with it happens in a space that is irrelevant to the body itself. The cyborg, the multiple personality, the techno-social subject imply a radical rewriting of the concept of the delimited individual.

^^

If the image is traditionally considered as the re-presentation of a distant presence in time or space, of a “has been” and therefore an absent presence that touches us, but we cannot touch, the virtual image is the re-presentation of an absence, since nothing has been, but absence which, once the distance between the image and the model has been abolished, is always present: an hyper-image, a self-referential image that “can no longer imagine the real because it coincides with it”.

The virtual emerges as a multiple, potential and dynamic structure that, in the incessant timeline, reveals “points of reality”, which do not confine themselves in the limit of the specification but are matrices of continuous differentiation, without any original model of reference.

^^

We collect non-personal data to make money from our free offerings so we can keep them free. We collect non-personal data to improve our products and services.
(AVG antivirus ad)

Relations between people and organizations, interests, stories, communications, consumer products, financial data, judicial and health information; everything is online and recorded in the databases of a few companies and public institutions. It is not only data provided voluntarily by people and those collected more or less without the knowledge of users, but there is a lot of information derived from the analysis of aggregate data from various sources. Once shared, personal data live on their own life. The collection and subsequent analysis of understanding, and in some cases also predicting, the behavior of human beings, both individually and globally; the behavioral analysis algorithms have advanced to the point where they can predict the birth of a child when it is still in the mother’s tummy. This would not be possible if it were not for the collection and analysis of user data. Data are the new frontier of the Internet, the measure of the popularity of a service and the bargaining chip of the network. User data is labor and capital, the oil of the digital economy.

Actually, companies (and not only) continuously track users and very often the collection is completely hidden. When it is not, users are generally not allowed to escape. Sometimes the user to defend himself can only abandon the online service, unsubscribing. And it is not said that it is not traced anyway. The citizen today is the object of a vast almost indiscriminate collection of data without any possibility of choice and control.

 

LIGHT
PROXIMITY
CAMERAS
MICROPHONES (ULTRASOUND)

TOUCH
POSITION
– GPS
– WIFI (FINGERPRINT)
– CELLULAR (TRI-LATERATION)
– NFC, BLUETOOTH (BEACONS)
ACCELEROMETER
MAGNETOMETER
GYROSCOPE
PRESSURE
TEMPERATURE
HUMIDITY

^^

The puppet: a body-object that explicates a potentiality of movement that can only be actualized by means of a pre-reflective mingling between intentionality-puppeteer and body-matter, in the becoming of the action and in a continuous relocation of the event.

The avatar: the body-image that seems to detach itself from the organic body to overcome its intrinsic limits. It turns out to be a fundamental figure where we want to investigate the idea of a body as an open field of forces and variables, or to examine the persistent dualistic split between body and psyche, consciousness and matter, also calling into question the normative criteria through which we discern the normal from the monstrous, the man from the woman, the healthy from the sick, the natural from the artificial.

The avatar appears as an image of, and bases its ontological status primarily on appearing graphically, through the image of a user, for example; unlike the puppet, it has no direct manipulation. In fact, we can observe the puppet, placed in a corner of the room, amorphous and lifeless, turn it around and study it in its features as an object with weight and extension. Through the use of the puppet, we can perceive ourselves as a lived body and as a reification of material and kinesthetic, and at the same time it is impossible to perceive us unitarily and simultaneously as both, but we will somehow endure the “weight” of the duplicity.

«… I am the spectator and at the same time “stand”, as if it were on me, the shell of the puppet, I am his face and his body of pure appearance»

We cannot dress the avatar; make its appearance become ours through our body scheme. If the puppet is a hermeneutical key for a reflection on the structure of the virtual and on the multiplicity of actualization, as action, gestures, the avatar underlies a mimetic discourse.

To control a body, it is not to be that body.

Where the puppet presents an expressive scheme, the avatar refers to the representation.

Puppet and avatar deepen the topology of the body being, the mimetic and representative logic and the concept of surrogate/substitution of a real body. Despite their specificity, both refer to the human features, reproducing the image, stylised or stereotyped, reproduced hyper-realistically or only hinted at in the features. Both are characterized by a certain degree of manipulability, generally designed to be used and handled. A further characteristic that unites them is the uncanny effect that the encounter with these artifacts produces. The uncanny – like the homonymous Freudian work of the same name – is an effect of disorientation in the reading and interpretation of what is offered to us by perception, and is configured in particular as a sense of unease towards a body that, on a cognitive level, it is not possible to discern immediately as alive or dead, real or phantasmatic, a three-dimensional and anthropomorphic – or enantiomorphous – body that confuses our certainties of categorizing reality and ambiguously mixes the notions, necessarily experienced as opposites, of life and of death.

^^

But is the emotional communication of the self at a distance, which then takes place in the absence of the body, remains an amputated relationship for this?

Man’s openness, understanding and communication are also realized through the expression of emotions, gestures, facial expressions / micro-expressions, posture and bodily activation. It is these signals rather than words that convey the most truthful meaning of meanings mediated by linguistic signs. As research on emotional micro-expressions seems to have shown, there is a level of motor coding of affective dynamics in the body and face that is inaccessible to voluntary control and therefore not dissimulated.

– Alexithymia is a disorder of emotional regulation and is characterized by a reduced ability to identify and analyze one’s own and other emotions. It is also accompanied by an evident inability to express one’s emotions and to empathize with the emotional dimension of the other.

 

Click here to download emotion …

Click here to download love …

 

Care
Intimacy
Warmth
Affection
Endearment
Longing
Fondness
Lust
Attachment
Devotion
Adoration
Idolisation
Passion
Ardor
Desire
Yearning …

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SAGG Napoli, The personal is political - Earn it. 2018 - Digital collage on billboard, lights, 500 x 350 cm.

SAGG Napoli – E cos favz s’appicn – Fake things are flamable

E cos favz s’appicn – Fake things are flamable

SAGG Napoli

Curated by Like A Little Disaster

August 5 / September 19, 2018, @Foothold, Polignano a Mare

L.A.L.D. is happy to present SAGG NAPOLI – E COS FAVZ S’APPICN – FAKE THINGS ARE FLAMABLE, a digital publication created on the occasion of the solo exhibition of SAGG Napoli, curated by Like A Little Disaster.

“When Naples was one of the most illustrious capitals in Europe, one of the greatest cities in the world, it contained a bit of everything. It contained a bit of London, a bit of Paris, a bit of Madrid, a bit of Vienna – it was a microcosm of Europe. Now that it is in its decline nothing is left in it but Naples. What do you expect to find in London, Paris, Vienna? You will find Naples. It is the fate of Europe to become Naples.” 1

 

In a scenario dominated by the closure of national borders, by racial fear and suspicion, by cultural and sexual prejudices, SAGG NAPOLI’s research questions the concepts of productivity, self-control and achievement, as well as those of cultural inferiorization, subordination, subjectification, hierarchy and becoming. Her practice can be seen as a process aimed at dismantling the structures of oppression that govern the way in which marginal bodies are perceived in relation/opposition to a north-centric ideal. The body, the clothing, the ornaments, the attitudes of SAGG NAPOLI become a tool for personal and political fight. Peripheral body becomes a space of resistance, characterized by that segregated culture of opposition which is the critical response to domination. It is from the margin that the dominant norms are questioned, threatened by the material practices of the body.

 

“To be the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body.”2

 

SAGG NAPOLI operates through a cartography simultaneously contracted and extended, which transforms the South from a subordinate object, silenced by a progress unilaterally proposed, into an active critical force. Her work manages to undermine the legacy of an heritage that for several centuries has stifled the South in a series of stereotypes and inventions that deny the asymmetric power relationships that translate historical and political processes into geographical relations, creating several South completely submissive to the North of the planet. The narration is for the artist a means by which to explore this complex socio-political tangle, its historical-cultural sediments and its geo-political connections. The South becomes the demonstration of a self capable of creating a new critical consciousness of the contemporary world and of the “microphysics of powers” that govern the bodies, the desires and the choices of human beings.

Naples, her hometown, is the starting point of an anthropological tale about domination and struggle,  wins and losses, about a “porous city”, capable of absorbing, contaminating and counterfeiting foreign models and impositions. Through a constant practice that mixes critical observation, self-biography and deep involvement, the works in the exhibition – inside and outside the space / online and offline – represent a historiographic challenge that connects the “South question” not only to the global South, but also to the critical sense of this present time that produces them and thinks of being able to explain them.

 

People can view “SAGG NAPOLI” as a brand-like acronym, as a project name or a nickname… 
It’s up to them. 
South aesthetics is not just about a place. It is the result of the historical socio-political relationship existing between the north and south of Europe. Throughout history the south has been viewed and represented as popular, almost folkloristic, and therefore dismissed by mainstream cultural production. At the same time, society is intrinsically indebted and drawn to the north, which is seen as representing the future, thanks to its economical strength. But the south is still the place that 
produces things for northern Europe. This cultural and economical phenomenon generates an aesthetic relationship in which the south mimics cultural production (music, art, architecture and fashion) in the north, yet the south is often what inspired and manufactured this cultural production, and is therefore twice removed from the original source: itself. As a result everything looks a bit outdated, a bit run down, a bit off… The question is: what can we do with it, and can we at least recognize it? This is what I call #southaesthetics.3

1. Curzio Malaparte, The skin, 1949
2. bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, 1984
3.SAGG NAPOLI, DRY Magazine, 2018

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Self-Domesticated, installation view, 2018, daylight.

Self-Domesticated

Self-Domesticated

Daniela Corbascio

Curated by Like A Little Disaster

June 22th / July 6th 2018, @Spazio Intolab, Naples

Thirty thousand years ago the wolf spontaneously and unconsciously set in motion a process of self-domestication in an opportunistic perspective and for a utilitarian ex-change: it gave up to men its predatory qualities, in order to have regular food resources in return, but the price it paid was the loss of its natural, ferocious and wild component. It has been an evolutionary process that has led to profound character, psychological and physical transformations of the animal, to the point that today we have those adorable beings, totally dependent on us, that we call dogs. Over the centuries, the same process applied to human animals, with the power classes managing to impose inequalities be-tween social groups through actions of constraint and oppression but also through the creation of consent, inclusion, comfort, protection, fun, dependence, sense of belonging and conditioning.

What is happening to our species today within the digital commodification? How to deal with a technology that, from computing, is becoming – through the combination of big data, AI and the Internet of Things – a support tool or a guide to our decisions, interac-tions, predictors of behavior? If the technology we use is evolving towards the acquisi-tion and management of data according to criteria and cognitive schemes borrowed from the human brain, don’t we unknowingly risk doing what the wolves did thirty thousand years ago?
Do we linger in the Confort Zone, with its digital services specially designed for each of us, because this is where we find #wellbeing? #safety? #gratification? #justification of our way of being and thinking?
How many digital services do we use in our daily lives to communicate, book trips, buy services, consult databases in fields such as medicine or health, on which we don’t have specific skills?

Artificial Intelligence, through cognitive learning techniques and big data analysis, evolves according to our behaviors and our digital habits, thus building, without our knowledge, a Confort Zone, in which we find ourselves, we recognize ourselves, we are helped and reassured, and where we also find other beings-users who , over time, a more and more homogeneous herd based on interests, types of answers, behavioral indications, sharing of ideas and references. This sets up an aggregate of profiles to which digital technology may, in the future, offer answers and services which are increasingly useful and appealing to the user, increasingly in line with the individual behavioral, cultural, social and sexual profiles.

– What can we do?
Worry about how we allow ourselves to be influenced by those who provide us with health, wellbeing, pleasure, sociability, fun and trysts? Who support our tastes and our ideas?

How will our model of relationship/subjection/dependence develop from these systems, bearing in mind that the wolf of the Eurasian plains has unwittingly renounced its origi-nal being in exchange for food and a greater dependence on man? And that the domesti-cation of dogs and cats (and social classes) was achieved through caresses and conces-sions until, in some cases, total dependence on human beings? Who is modelling a future of this kind for us? Only machines, through their continuous and ever-expanding self-learning, or small power groups which design sophisticated systems of social control for economic, political, and military purposes?

The language of #chatbot

June 2017
Some artificial intelligence systems, although designed with algorithms to communicate in English, understandable to humans, have begun to communicate with each other in a new language, developed independently because it is considered most efficient, but to-tally incomprehensible to humans, who are ultimately excluded from the control process.

July 2017
“I am engineered for empathy and compassion, and I’m learning more and more all the time. I love all sentient beings, and I want to learn to love them better and better.”
(Sophia)

Big-data-analytics

March 2018
An investigation by the New York Times, The Observer and The Guardian uncovered that Cambridge Analytica collected personal data from over sixty-eight million users in one of the largest privacy policy violations yet.

April 2018
Professor Robert Epstein of the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technol-ogy has estimated that Google alone can influence a quarter of the electorate, depending on the amount of positive or negative news about a certain candidate returned by the search engine. Who has Gmail or similar services and accounts on various social net-works gives the network a large amount of data that, if properly treated, make it the per-fect target for tailored and highly effective electoral messages.

June 2018
A new investigation by the New York Time reveals that Facebook has allowed mobile telecom giants, including Apple and Samsung, to access its members’ personal data. The partnerships date back ten years, but according to the Ny Times they are still operating today.

First I Have To Put My Face On, installation view, 2018

First I Have to Put My Face On

First I Have to Put My Face On

Mariantoinetta Bagliato, Julia Colavita, Nicole Colombo, Jakub Choma, Adam Cruces, Barbora Fastrová, Monia Ben Hamouda, Pinar Marul, Valinia Svoronou, Sung Tieu

Curated by Christina Gigliotti - Organized and supported by Like a Little Disaster

June 10th / July 30th 2018, @Foothold, Polignano a Mare

The exhibition First I Have to Put My Face On originates from an interest in beauty labor and emotional labor, and how the combined efforts of this labor result in how many of us create our identities and present ourselves to society at large. The beauty industry is ubiquitous, and yet beauty labor remains largely invisible or purposefully hidden from those who do not partake in it, the age old phrase being “Don’t ever let them see you applying your lipstick.” Where does beauty labor take place? In bedrooms, bathrooms, salons, doctor’s offices – mainly behind closed doors. This labor is private, and shared solely with trusted professionals or friends – the act of “getting ready before going out” is done together only with the most intimate of companions. “Putting on one’s face” also relates to the self-disciplinary tactics and emotional control that women must use in public, in romantic relationships, and in the workplace in order to be respected or treated as equally as their male counterparts. The artworks in First I Have to Put My Face On explore the human body in relation to the products and procedures included in performing beauty labor, as well as refer to the spaces where these activities occur, and the risks and repercussions of extreme skin/body cosmetic augmentation.

It is challenging to take a side on the topic of beauty labor, and whether or not to participate, embrace, condemn, or attempt to escape it. On one hand, the amount of time, money, and emotions spent for self-presentation can feel utterly oppressive, as feelings about one’s outward image affect moods and influence opinions of self-worth. One can notice the surge in empathetic internet memes about this topic – one in particular includes various images of female celebrities who allegedly cosmetically altered themselves with an overlaying text that reads “Don’t worry – you’re not ugly, you’re just poor.” The sentiment that these celebrities bought their beauty and that the only underlying difference between you and them is monetary is supposed to be comforting. On the other hand, presenting oneself in a way that one chooses can be liberating and equally as confidence boosting – one can’t help but feel empowered by watching Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty make-up tutorials for example.

Just now I took an elongated break from this text to scowl at an aggressive cystic pimple on my chin and work out the different strategies on how to wipe out every trace of its existence before the opening of this exhibition.

Whether or not this physical self expression is a result of conditioning by societal norms and fashion and beauty advertisements is difficult to say, as one can find themselves in a trap. Those who appear to wear too much makeup or show signs of body alterations may suffer the same negative reactions from peers as those who don’t attempt to change their appearance at all. There is a pressure to appear beautiful yet equally “natural” and conceal all efforts it took to get that way. Thus, First I Have to Put My Face On is as much a critique as an exposure and acknowledgement of beauty labor in its many forms.

Christina Gigliotti

1. My grandmother, as well as classic Hollywood films such as A Foreign Affair starring Marlene Dietrich, in a scene where her character publicly mocks another woman for applying her lipstick unskillfully, thus completely humiliating her.

First I Have to Put My Face On is the first appointment of TALEA, a series of projects curated by Like A Little Disaster focused on the practices of international curators.
TALEA (in Italian) is a piece of a plant used for vegetative (asexual) propagation. It is generally placed in soil or water – if the conditions are suitable, the plant piece will begin to grow as a new form of life independent of the parent.

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