[artinfo] i love Italia: Capital Culture and Link in Milan

[by way of Janos Sugar]

i love Italia: news about the Italian contemporary art scene from UnDo.Net

Prometeogallery:

Capital Culture
curated by Marco Scotini

Capital Culture is a collective exhibition, part of a long project 
that will be developed in different steps and that is beginning its 
journey in the spaces of Prometeogallery in Milan. Capital Culture is 
the tentative of constructing an atlas of images and situations on 
the notion of "capital" in a time of transition and globalization 
like the actual.

If Sergej Ejzenstejn in1927 after October projects a cinematographic 
version of Karl Marx's The Capital, Guy Debord in 1967 substitutes 
many times the Marx's word "capital" with that of "spectacle", 
throughout the practice of de'tournement. A key-phrase in The Society 
of Spectacle says: "The spectacle is not an assemble? of images, but 
a social relationship between individuals, mediated by images", while 
in the correspondent phrase of The Capital you can read: "The capital 
is not a thing but a social relationship between individuals, 
mediated by things". It's not fortunate? that Debord himself realized 
in 1973 a cinematographic adaptation of his most radical book.

What does it mean to pose a direct relation between social production 
and production of images? Between material production and linguistic 
communication? Is it possible to verify in parallel the crisis of the 
representational paradigm and that of representation? Which are the 
actually possible relationships between aesthetic territory and 
political sphere? Which is the contribute of today's artists to the 
general growing of the calling for democracy? We asked to the twelve 
artists of Capital Culture, coming from different latitudes and from 
various experiences of the globalization's phenomenon - from South 
America to the European East -, to present a work that could 
constitute an answer to these questions.

Schizophrenia, economy, work, information, culture, history and 
democracy are some of the themes that will articulate the 
exhibition's discourse but, most of all, the relationship between 
political imagination and collective memory will be the common 
platform for the interventions, that ask to confront on the same 
problem on the basis of their cultural differences. If the capitalist 
model on a globe scale is the ground of the different experiences, 
the participation to the phenomenon and the local derivations open a 
space to critical confrontation and to the production of possible, 
practical alternatives.

If Ernesto Salmeron, proposes the Nicaraguan recent history through a 
series of short movies, Maxim Karakulov's photographs are a question 
on the end of Russian communitarian? and collective idea, without a 
real answer. In the same way, the relation between memory and desire 
in the psychotics in Javier Tellez, the cancellation of historical 
memory caused by the informational overload in the Salvador's urban 
masses in Ronald Moran or the archive on the American military 
strategies in Ian Tweedy are some examples of the series of 
reflections on the transformation of the industrial capitalism in the 
actual transnational and global market, opened by the artists.


Link
curated by Santa Nastro

The Prometeogallery in Milan presents, in the Project space, the 
Enrico Morsiani's solo show Link, curated by Santa Nastro. The 
project articulates itself in two different phases. The first 
contemplates the installation on the walls of 3 wax works titled 
Link, that originate grassed? wires going through the gallery's 
ambient to the entrance door, and going out in the neighborhood, with 
the precise intention of establishing a direct, physical relationship 
between the external world and the gallery's internal space. And it 
happens in the same way inside the art's microcosmos. But the wires 
also create a sort of deferred relation between contemporary culture, 
made of infinite images and events that precipitate on human lives at 
amazing speed, and the introspective space that belong to each of 
ourselves, represented by the circle of the wax works and by the 
state of "flowing" induced by itself in the mind of the public.

The second phase of the project (The Maori Masks-the farest culture) 
is represented by three panels of white wood with photographs related 
to the maori culture, geographically the most distant from the place 
where the artist lives (Imola, Peripheral West). The images were 
fastly downloaded from the Internet and mounted on Ikea boards, then 
posed on three panels with wheels and handles: they will be exhibited 
in public spaces near the gallery (the bar, the restaurant, the 
artist's Italo Zuffi's studio). The project's unity truly belongs to 
Enrico Morsiani's research, that founds its force in the degradation 
of the peripherycal and "decentered" condition.


Opening: June, 21, 2006, h. 7PM
Until: September, 15, 2006
Where: Prometeogallery
Via Ventura, 3 Milan
Hours: from tuesday to Friday 11,30 am - 7,30 pm. Saturday and Monday 
by appointment.
Tel/fax: +39 02 26924450
info at prometeogallery.com
http://www.prometeogallery.com

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
i love Italia - previous mailings:

# Sculptures in the park
'Sculptures in the park' is a work in progress that regularly 
enriches the Park of the Centre for Contemporary Art of Villa Manin 
with site specific installations created by international artists. 
Artistic director Francesco Bonami and curator Sarah Cosulich 
Canarutto invited Pawel Althamer and Michael Beutler to realise their 
new projects. These new installations join the six existing ones by: 
Alberto Garutti, Gabriel Orozco, Paola Pivi, Andreas Slominski, 
Rirkrit Tiravanija, Patrick Tuttofuoco.
http://www.undo.net/cgi-bin/press.pl?id=1147261936

# Antonio De Pascale and Michael Dumontier
Perugi gallery presents two solo shows. De Pascale excerpts 
stereotypes and iconography from mass-consumption products, 
contaminating them with images captured from TV news, 
photo-journalism and the internet: the point break between the 
pervasiveness of the media and the weight of reality. The Canadian 
artist Michael Dumontier is a co-founder of the Royal Art Lodge (the 
others being Marcel Dzama and Neil Farber). He presents a series of 
collages, with an absolute and unquestionable central character: the 
match.
http://www.undo.net/cgi-bin/press.pl?id=1149186208

# Arte all'Arte - Art Architecture Landscape in Tuscany
Features works by Cai Guo-Qiang, Olafur Eliasson, Alberto Garutti, 
Anish Kapoor, Tobias Rehberger, Sislej Xhafa: for this last edition 
all the curators who have worked on the event since its inception 
each selected the 6 artists who, in their view, have most fully 
expressed the spirit of Arte all'Arte. The number of permanent 
installations has risen to 21. An Associazione Arte Continua project.
http://www.undo.net/cgi-bin/press.pl?id=1126794861