you gave a talk in Torino, at Fluxs Atelier, a space run by two artists from your native city, Manuela e Guido.
A talk about your practice, personal and collective outputs from Sydeny.
About 15 people came long, some artists, like Andrea Caretto e Raffaella Spagna, a curators like a couple of the Atitolo curatorial collective and Claudio Cravero from the PAV.
My main interest for this interaction with the art scene of Torino was to create a discussion platform, a point of departure for an analysis of both the Sydney artistic reality, Particularly focusing on the amount of artist run spaces, artist initiatives, and the situation in Torino as it was lamented to me by many, the lack of the above mentioned.
So there i went, got ready a powerpoint presentation with cute bubbles and basic scenography, and launched in another rant of mine. In Italian this time round thou.
I was glad Alice McCauliffe was there too, so that when the subject turned in the nitty gritty of the artscene of Sydney, she happily testified in a very good Italian herself relating of her experience as a director of First Draft.
The evening went on for 2 1/2 hours, with plenty of discussion both on the presented artworks, like The Weedyconnection Project, The Hanging Gardens and Other Tales, SquatSpace, SquatFest, the SquatSpace’s Redfern/Waterloo Tour Of Beauty, BigFAGPress and finishing off with the Rizzeria.
I liked to give a presentation of my work with the framing where it develops, starting from my personal crusade about investigating relationships between human and nature, to the collective work with SquatSpace to the collective facility which is the Big FAG, to a mini-enterprise, and with which i have little to do, but have being one of the original financial supporter.
From there went on to discuss the phenomenon of Artist Run Initiatives, in general as space-creation ecxercise which is very much lacking in Torino and (apparently) all over Italy too.
I never told this people that in Sydney we are campaign for the survival of such spaces, in Torino they don’t have even that.
I brought up the social -or better- urban intervention which is Renew Newcastle,
Yet Spaces do exist.
I was talking inside one myself!
But somewhat it was then acknowledged, what is missing is knowledge of it.
Another interesting aspect brought to me was the incredible division and , somewhat, role playing aspect between artists and curators.
several point came up, one i would to report is the obvius lack of independent exhibiting spaces, where independent, more brave and somewhat not necessarily well resolved, aesthetic interventions…
uhmm
neeway, back in Venezia now.
The work of Healy nd Cordeiro has to be ready for the 1st.
