Disobedience Archive (The Republic)
23 april 2013 - 30 june 2013
curated by Marco Scotini
After Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), Nottingham Contemporary, Raven Row (London), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Boston) and Bildmuseet (Umeå), Disobedience Archive is presented at Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea within a format especially planned for the Museum.
The curatorial project dates from 2005 when Marco Scotini planned a traveling exhibition of videos, graphics materials, and ephemera whilst in Berlin. The exhibition-archive explores the links between contemporary art practices, cinema, tactical media and political activism. Planned as a heterogeneous, evolving archive of video images, the project aims to be a ‘user’s guide’ to four decades of social disobedience seen through history and geography: from the revolt in Italy in 1977 to the global protests before and after Seattle and on to the current insurrections in the Middle East and Arab world. From the historic videotapes of Alberto Grifi to the films of Harun Farocki, from the performances of the American Critical Art Ensemble to those of the Russian collective, Chto Delat?, and from the investigations of Hito Steyerl to those of Eyal Sivan, the Disobedience archive has over the years gathered hundreds of documentary elements.
The exhibition, which will be hosted in the rooms of the third floor in the Castello di Rivoli, aims to offer a wide-ranging synthesis of the earlier editions. With the new title of Disobedience Archive (The Republic), the exhibition will include the production of a large Parliament-shaped structure and the publication of “La Costituzione” (“The Constitution”) as a concluding phase to the entire project. The archive takes place in “The Parliament” by Céline Condorelli (1974), with a contribution by Martino Gamper (1971) while the wall-paintings accompanying it are by Mexican artist Erick Beltrán (1972). Aside from “The Parliament”, two rooms serve as thematic antechambers: the first, dedicated to the 1970s in Italy, amongst others, presents works by Joseph Beuys, Mario Merz, Jean-Luc Godard, Gianfranco Baruchello, Piero Gilardi, Gordon Matta-Clark, Laboratorio di Comunicazione Militante, Enzo Mari, Nanni Balestrini and Living Theatre beside documents by Carla Accardi, Carla Lonzi, and Felix Guattari; the second, which considers the first decade of the 21st century, houses works by Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas, Superflex, Chto Delat?, Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, Oliver Ressler, Arseniy Zhilyaev, Critical Art Ensemble, Rene Gabri and Ayreen Anastas, among others. Technical instruments, props and published materials, produced by the antagonist culture of those years are also displayed in these two rooms.
Disobedience Archive (The Republic) is a work in progress reflecting on the various events as they unfolded, in which form and content vary with each venue. In this sense, the exhibition constitutes a sort of atlas of the different contemporary antagonist tactics: from direct action to counter-information, from constituent practices to forms of bio-resistance, which emerged after the end of modernism, inaugurating new methods of being, saying and doing. The archive is divided into nine sections: 1977 The Italian Exit, Protesting
Capitalist Globalization, Reclaim the Streets, Bioresistence and Society of Control, Argentina Fabrica Social, Disobedience East, Disobedience University, The Arab Dissent and Gender Politics which joins the other sections for the Castello di Rivoli exhibition.
The archive includes materials by 16 beaver, Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée (AAA), Mitra Azar, Gianfranco Baruchello, Petra Bauer, Pauline Boudry, Brigitta Kuster and Renate Lorenz, Bernadette Corporation, Black Audio Film Collective, Ursula Biemann, Collettivo femminista di cinema, Copenhagen Free University, Critical Art Ensemble, Dodo Brothers, Marcelo Expósito, Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica, Rene Gabri and Ayreen Anastas, Grupo de Arte Callejero, Etcétera, Alberto Grifi, Ashley Hunt, Sara Ishaq, Kanal B, Khaled Jarrar, John Jordan and Isabelle Fremeaux, Laboratorio di Comunicazione Militante, Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson, Angela Melitopoulos, Mosireen, Carlos Motta, Non Governamental Control Commission, Wael Noureddine, Margit Czencki/Park Fiction, R.E.P. Group, Oliver Ressler and Zanny Begg, Joanne Richardson, Roy Samaha, Eyal Sivan, Hito Steyerl, The Department of Space and Land Reclamation, Mariette Schiltz and Bert Theis, Ultra-red, Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas, Trampoline House (Morten Goll & Tone Olaf Nielsen), Dmitry Vilensky and Chto Delat?, James Wentzy.
The exhibition has been realised thanks to the collaboration of Open Care – Servizi per l’Arte, Milan, that through the Fine Arts Logistic and Transports Department, has organized, curated and supported the transport of some of the exhibited works and the installation of The Parliament by Céline Condorelli; NABA Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti Milan with the contribution of faculty and students of the MA in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies involved also in the organization of panels during the exhibition period; Kuhn & Bülow Insurance Broker, Berlin and Sinergie Innovative, Buccinasco (MI) for the technical support and La Stampa, Turin for the media partnership.