Seminal bricolage (first attempt)

Seminal bricolage (first attempt)

Agnes Calf, Dorota Gaweda & Egle Kulbokaite, Mikko Kuorinki, Erik Larsson, Nicola Lorini, Martina Gold, Tabita Rezaire, Freddy Tuppen

Curated by Like A Little Disaster

10 July / 8 August 2016, @Foothold, Polignano a Mare

In his book ‘The Savage Mind’, the french anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss uses the term bricolage in opposition to the analytical methods of western thought. The term refers to an associative practice experienced by many non-western societies, wherein solutions are invented following paths made of fortuitous, unstable and contingent discoveries.Bricolage constructs multi-directional theories by arranging and rearranging, negotiating and renegotiating heteroclite materials and information, leading to the discovery of new functions and meanings, and original forms of knowledge by crossing strategies of production. Bricolage focuses on the pleasures of a conversation, rather than a monologue. It has a fragile nature that rejects persistence, it is elastic and always in the process of becoming. It is characterized by a perpetual revision, through forms which are built and rebuilt, and where unexpected links pick up new and different meanings through seemingly related fragments.

The term is commonly used in connection with extemporaneous and amateurish manual activities. ‘Seminal Bricolage’ aims to explore the dynamics of bricolage as a mental exercise, as critical language, and in relation to the mythopoeic. The work brought together in this project is the worm in the fruit of a reality considered to be unlimited and arbitrary, as nothing but a collection of fragments.
Sidestepping preset rules, the artists of “Seminal bricolage” play with simulated platforms, actively manipulating microworlds of transition between subject and object, and the intermediate dimensions between the real and the potential. Avoiding merely being a bricolage of materials, they are drawn to the ideas embodied in the fluidity of their materials. This hybridized materiality invades their works, blurring its own meaning in a haze of scents, projections, plastic hoses, mayonnaise, earplugs, vaporized kombucha, the history of twerk, a website, a postgender avatar, a hypersexual performances, identity collages, embroidered bath towels, pairs of slippers and an empty can at the mercy of the winds.
‘Seminal Bricolage’ is particularly focused on the use of objects, materials and signs for their perceived cultural and political value, or as a syncretism of references that begin to complicate each other by their proximity. The works are conditioned, both explicitly and implicitly, by complex intersections of class, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. These correlations become a filter of sorts, reconfiguring the connections we have with the world, our environment, our community, with reality, and above all with our very idea of alterity. Bricolage is the cornerstone of all natural and cultural systems, from the evolution of the species to DNA’s composition, from the organization of thought to developments in knowledge and linguistic constructs, to the making of art. The human mind itself can be considered as the result of these types of accumulations. Bricolage is everywhere!

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