30 october—4 november 2018
istanbul

teaching lies
4th istanbul design biennial
a school of schools

workshop

11—12 october 2018
milano

transdisciplinary talks on boundaries
fondazione feltrinelli

seminar

26 may—25 november 2018
venezia

work, body, leisure
dutch pavilion / la biennale di venezia

exhibition

shore leaves

2-ch. video installation
with giuditta vendrame and giulio squillacciotti

delving into the invisibility of labor under automation, shore leaves offers an entry point to the everyday world of seafarers, when the pace of logistical handling slows down. shore leaves are vital for the health and wellbeing of seafarers and they represent the short moments when sailors can connect with their families and friends.

the video documentation was produced during fieldwork aboard bulk carrier and container cargo ships harbored for loading and unloading in the ports of venice and rotterdam, and at the seafarers organizations that in both cities provide practical assistance and support to seafarers of all nationalities.

focusing on the spaces and gestures of this waiting time, the project confronts a reality that is generally concealed. the machinic efficiency in the circulation of the goods on which our economies are highly dependent has a counterpart: while human presence and labor are still indispensable and of infrastructural importance, human bodies strive to adapt to remodeled times and spaces and descend further beneath a threshold of visibility.

fieldwork in european realism

research / open studio installation

acrylic glass [polymethyl methacrylate]; safety [toughened, tempered] glass; wood, formica; perforated aluminium, rockwool filling; limestone, plaster; marble. wax castings of the flooring of a public square.

fieldwork in european realism is weird corporate archaeology; a forensic display deprived of liability, accountability, answerability: what architecture might materialise the post‐national political contract? collecting and listing fragments/relics from the periphery of the field of view, aspects of a nondescript built environment emerge, challenged by gaps and holes.

one of the twelve stars formerly on display as part of the euro‐skulptur in frankfurt – a monument built in the late 90s and left behind by the european central bank – still shows traces of the paint once used by activists to colour it in red, as well as the signature of a german sportsman connected to a subsequent unsuccessful auction. desktops from the european commission in brussels, phono absorbent panels scrapped from a meeting room, decorative motifs featuring the euro sign, and security glasses recomposed into a glazed façade are all treated as equal and singular embodiments of physical matter and representation.

empirical and speculative, this account processes things found in the wrong place, slipped in time: they escape routine; they are doubled. post‐imperial melancholia and the evocation of a haunted aftermath are sidetracked by a political impulse inflected into the very materials, in the concurrent process of institution, constitution and destitution.

reset modernity!

modernity was a way to differentiate past and future, north and south, progress and regress, radical and conservative. however, at a time of deep ecological mutation, such a compass is running in wild circles without offering much bearing anymore. this is why it is time for a reset. let’s pause for a while, follow a procedure and search for different sensors that could allow us to recalibrate our detectors, our instruments, to feel anew where we are and where we might wish to go.

the layout of the exhibition itself offers a set of disorienting/reorienting procedures. no guarantee, of course: this is an experiment, a thought experiment, a gedankenausstellung.

bruno latour and his team organized a set of workshops called “reset modernity! shanghai perspective” in may 2017, which resulted in an exhibition. we concentrated on a set of issues that modernity encounters at a time of deep ecological mutation, emphasizing a comparative perspective between europe and china. the four-day program took place at the shanghai himalayas museum, and used documentations assembled specifically for the discussions, which speak to conceptions of science, our understanding of territory and sovereignty, and handling the role of technology. it a complex process of translating and negotiating differences that the team wishes to launch. the chinese participants are encouraged to bring documents, examples, sites, situations, and concepts to light, thus sharing a different view of what constitutes modernity. the purpose of these workshops is to embrace the process of reassessment to compare how european and chinese thinkers, artists, intellectuals, activists, and officials can handle new situations. the goal is not to reopen the tired cliché of an east/west comparison, but to use the formidable trial of ecological mutation to compare how two cultures react and furthermore, how they reassess their own trajectories of modernization. cooperating with two highly complex civilizations that were initially shocked by various forms of modernizations and then, more recently, endured an enormous counter shock as a result of the new climatic regime, offers an ideal situation for productive encounters.

always implicitly present in any public space, law tends to be algorithmic, quantitative and invisible. local and national regulations discretise human behaviour; sometimes they are rigorous and mathematical, other times loose and under-defined. here, they lend themselves to be represented visually, and through staged choreographies. friction atlas is an ongoing critical archive, where laws regulating behaviours and gatherings in public spaces, sampled from different contexts, are represented and collected.

addressing the issue of legibility of public space, it aims to make regulations explicit, through graphical devices. by drawing 1:1 diagrams, enacting laws on public surfaces, the project makes legal prescriptions and loopholes debatable. through the engagement of the public, the dynamics of authority become also physically discernible. the diagrams represent cases from different cities, including athens, genoa, cairo, washington, stockholm, sydney, new york, and rome.

we invite the public to participate in a choreographed debate, in a rereading of urban space, which will highlight some of its hidden aspects.

the natural world and the technological world are not so distinct. we often think of media as environments, the reverse is just as true — environments are media. the atmospheric envelope holds a latent image of our industrial civilisation and technological culture: did the sky change colors? do clouds have different shapes? are the seasonal movements of bird migration shifting? a matter of concern for scientists, this is an issue we can also address in the context of aesthetics. at the same time, media have peculiar materialities: different textures and grains followed one another; paper and films aged and continued to react to humidity, temperature, light.

for “media atmosphere: taipei”, we dug into collections of images – institutional and amateur films, prints, and digital files – to uncover records of past ambiances: fragments of skies, clouds, rain, mist, sunsets, smoke. we excavated the background, the periphery of the image.

we can look closely at the information in the background, bringing it to the foreground. through a spatial installation that offers materiality to a generative flow of video and audio, we aim to build an atmospheric image, a collective memoir, made of absences, voids, past and present, recorded by multiple hands, across taipei, tightly interwoven.

through the engagement of local inhabitants, visitors, as well as scientists and engineers – the latter visible in the images of cloud seeding and climate control contributed by the taiwanese water resources agency – the question of breathing freely emerged at the same time as a metaphor for freedom and as the literal reality of living through climate change.

the hut of european identity is the unsolicited addition of footnotes and annotations at the margins of the institutional curatorial process that lead to the opening of the “house of european history” in brussels, in may 2017.

during the netherlands presidency of the council of the european union in amsterdam, next to the area where the official meetings were taking place, I erected a small hut – or rather, a canopy – to host a provisional archive, an experiment in makeshift museology. 

inside the hut of european identity, I accumulated factious, partisan material and performative expressions, offering oblique readings through the european project. showing that european characters cannot be agreed upon, the hut hosts an idea of europe as a contested political space – a project, in fact.

fabrics and sheets salvaged from the demolished sector of the “jungle” in calais form and cover an incline that protects the interior from the sun and the rain. under the roof, multilingual banners from athens, a pan-african flag, squatters’ posters, flower crowns dedicated to schengen, stencils from paris — what do we want to keep?