Do it yourself confession is the idea of a confessional in which it is possible to self-administer the sacrament of confession. Conceived by Gianfranco Baruchello in 1967, the project is unrealised, like many others of the author, and it can be considered a theoretical exercise. In this proposal Baruchello borrowed the philosophy of DIY (Do it yourself), which at the end of the 1960s was growing in popularity, preaching self-sufficiency and opposition to consumerism: a complex of positions of libertarian and anti-capitalist orientation extended to various fields - from housework to cultural production - canonized after a few years by the punk movement. With a paradoxical approach, the artist extends this ethics to the spiritual sphere, implicitly moving a critique to the ecclesiastical institution to which he opposes the values of self-determination of the individual ("CHOOSE YOURSELF TO WHOM OR TO WHAT YOU CONFESS!" as stated in the text of the project). Do it yourself confession is a project created during the period of political militancy of the artist, close to the revolutionary left and to groups like Potere Operaio and Lotta Continua, which brings together the protesting forces that will culminate the following year in the 1968 season. The proposal is made of two drawings, which present different elaborations of the same project. Read more.
D.X XY is a dialogue on painting between two subjects X and Y, which is reported in the file number one, while in the second file donated by the artist the dialogue becomes a performance thanks to two actors who recite the text written by the artist himself. The two interlocutors impel a nonsense conversation where the act of painting is the fulcrum generating a series of references to pictorial action and often to the impossibility of the termination of this act. The performance revolves around a movable structure that lends itself to expose the Baruzzi designs that are changed from time to time by the two performers. Read more.
Project to create a sculpture for the traffic circle, commissioned by the town of Verduno, a town in the heart of the Langhe where Valerio Berruti has chosen to live and establish his own studio in a deconsecrated church. The sculpture should have been realised with Corten steels, with a diameter of 8,5 metres and 4 meters height. The administration didn’t realized Berruti’s project because it did not include any explicit reference to local goods such as wine and grapes. Read more.
Site-specific project: fresco on the walls of a large scale of a nineteenth century building, recently renovated to become the site of a well-known italian bank. Initially, Berruti was contacted directly by the Director of the Bank in order to realize the site specific project. Only during the vernissage of the new bank headquarter, Berruti discovered that the project had been given to another artist. Childhood is once again the main concept of this work, with the almost stylized figure of a girl that is at the same time minimal and strongly expressive. Read more.
DSpace: http://dspace-unipr.cilea.it/handle/1889/2106
David Bertocchi’s project, Meteorite al contrario (2010) is the launch into space of a normal stone of medium size, which would constitute a kind of meteorite, according to a trajectory opposite the one that usually leads an asteroid to accidentally stumble on our planet. With this project, in addition a to normal challenging of the scientific premises that describes the trajectory and the ablation with the atmosphere of an extraterrestrial impact directly on the ground, the artist is trying to subvert the classic paradigm of contemporary technology: the maximum technology in minimum space, which in this case would be the minimum technology in maximum “space”. The project is closely related to the poetic of the artist, since long time resident in Paris, and it is referable to a system of signs and meanings, an interest in the universe that started with a work in progres born in 1999 entitled precisely Space, which in more than ten years has involved Bertocchi in the creation of a parallel universe: around 3000 images of galaxies and planets invented by the artist. The project has not been realized yet because of its high costs. Read more.
This project derives from the artists’ research around the Turing Test. Two computers set up with basic complementary knowledge responded to the visual inputs that the visitor showed to one of them: the first computer processed the image and then verbally communicated it to the second computer, in fact the first computer spoke to the second describing the image. The second computer, on the basis of information stored in its memory, activated a process of representation of the description, which it then actually represented through a projector next to the image that had been shown to the first computer. The two images were finally exposed side by side, showing the translation process image> word> image. The project needed a great number of technical and scientific partnerships to make the data transmission possible. However, the concept behind the project came to life with two performances the artists realized in 2011 and 2014. Read more.
Bianco-Valente (Bianco, Giovanna & Valente, Pino)
The idea is to put a small gadget on a very famous Duchamp’s work, Roue de bicyclette, a ready-made exhibited in several museums all around the world (Centre Pompidou in Paris, Tate Gallery in London, Moma in NY...). Considering that his work is a reproduction itself, a copy of the lost original, the idea of a “posthumous homage-enrichment” is really close to Duchamp spirit. The introduction of a credit card establishes a link with other artist who changed the art world, investigating the role of money and material goods, such as Dali (Avida Dollars) but above all Wharol. There is a recreational element in this gadget: the artist took inspiration from the playing cards that children put on their bikes to simulate the sound of an engine. The kit, made of a copy of the artist’s credit card and a clothes peg to decorate Duchamp’s work according to Bonacorsi’s instructions, is sold apart in the museum shop. This work was planned by the artist on the occasion of the re-opening of Centre Pompidou collections in 2000, but he never proposed it to the museum: a typical development of Bonacorsi’s work, really influenced by the concept of dépense. Read more.
Bosetto worked for a whole year to design an exhibition presented through living sculptures in a few apartments in Via Eustachi, Milan. The exhibition should have been visited with a map that would have shown to the visitors a series of places, where they could have enjoyed a series of performances. Read more.
Studi per quadri non realizzati. Quaderno 16
Thomas Braida donated some pages from his notebooks to the MoRE Museum. This type of donation sobering to what we might call the pictorial projects in our imaginary, where the notebook (rich in literary references and artistic influences) in the hands of Braida is enriched with drawings and design sketches. Leaving the romantic vision of the artist who depicts life, from Braida's design material emerges not just a simple and quick pencil stroke on a white sheet, but rather pages of notebooks which have a design characterized by a complex use of techniques and colors thanks, pastels, watercolors, markers, pens, and nibs. In all, there are three donations, notebook 16 of 2015-2016, notebook 17 of 2016-2017 and the number 18 of 2017-2018. Read more.
Studi per quadri non realizzati. Quaderno 17
Studi per quadri non realizzati. Quaderno 18
Ciel illuminé / Cielo non illuminato consists of the faithful reproduction of Horace-Bénédict de Saussure’s cyanometer on the internal walls of the Mont Blanc Tunnel. Brognon Rollin’s project originates from the idea of making the mountain disappear, while at the same time offering a visual reference to drivers passing through the tunnel by indicating the approaching end of it. The work stems from an actual fact: Stéphanie Rollin suffers from claustrophobia, and every crossing of the tunnel is a painful experience for her—made a little more bearable thanks to long conversations with David Brognon. Ciel illuminé / Cielo non illuminato is an exact translation of a historical fact, filtered through a personal experience that transforms it into a poetic gesture. Read more.
Drawing realized to design a children's playground. The elements of the game park are inspired by drawings of biologist, zoologist, philosopher and also German artist Ernst Haeckel, who designed more than 100 polychromatic illustrations of animals and sea creatures. Some elements of the drawings, in three-dimensional transposition, are designed to be modified with the aim of making movable some parts, recreate circular movements, extension and elastic. The elements are designed with an internal steel frame to resist several requests, while the exterior is covered by colored rubber, resin, wood, concrete, to recreate different texture to the touch. The project is designed to be installed in a public place, park, square, museum or school. Read more.
http://dspace-unipr.cineca.it/handle/1889/2665
The project was commissioned by Roberto Daolio as part of a series of art works to be placed on the top floor of the Department of Pediatric Oncology of the Sant’Orsola Hospital in Bologna, in collaboration with the Association AGEOP. Cini was invited to be part of the project together with artists Emilio Fantin, Eva Marisaldi, Sabrina Mezzaqui, Sabrina Torelli and Marco Vaglieri. For the department Cini thinks the project PlasticOplalà 1, 2, 3, a series of site-specific interventions whose idea is to create a small botanical garden outside of the pavilion, in the semi-abandoned garden of the pediatrics department. The project was not realized as a result of a number of economical, technical and logistic reasons. Read more.
For the past few years, Mathis Collins has worked with cork harvesters, local populations of Mediterranean forests and villages and artists, and conceived works that focus on ecology, culture and economy of cork regions. Quercus Suber Utopia is a project for the making of a collective artwork, in the regions of South Europe and North Africa where grows Cork trees. The sculptures produced for Quercus Suber Utopia, based on a discussion on community buildings, would to be exhibited in each of the other participating communities in a continuous process of exchange and activity. Produced with cork, the sculptures or scale models of the communities utopian collective space, was to set a pan-regional discussion and understanding of the contemporary ecological and economical crisis of cork trees. Read more.
http://dspace-unipr.cineca.it/handle/1889/3003
Mario Cresci started between 1977 and 1979 a meaningful and interesting experience that was interrupted because of the lack of support from the institutions and can therefore be conceived as an unrealised or at least unfinished project. In Basilicata, where the author was already developing the project Misurazioni, a photographic research with a social and anthropological approach, Cresci started teaching in an unusual school. A design school, founded by Regione Basilicata in application of the law n. 285 of June 1st 1977, devoted to the vocational training in craftsmanship techniques. A school that aimed at using creativity as an economic resource. Unfortunately the project was interrupted almost immediately, remaining therefore unrealized, since the institutions suspended their support to the school. Read more.
Petar Dabac began by tackling the issue of conserving photographic heritage to protect the legacy of Tošo Dabac, his uncle. He proposed the establishment of a Museum of Photography in Zagreb to collect, store and copy photographic documents. The Museum would also have exhibitions, a library and a permanent display. Read more.
Knick Knacks - A Proposal for Trafalgar Square's Fourth Plinth
Knick Knacks is Matthew Darbyshire proposal for the Fourth Plinth public art program in Trafalgar Square, London. The concept builds on an image designed by the artist himself as a christmas card for "The Guardian" newspaper and wants to transform the monumental sculptural base in a shelf that refers to a domestic space. Here Darbyshire presents eight sculptures in coloured polyurethane foam, reproductions of household objects in a different scale. The eight opaque elements would be 3D scanned and modeled from the original objects, CNC routed in polyurethane foam and then laminated in fibre-glass before being chromed, sprayed and flocked. The single clear element would be modeled in much the same way but then cast in clear tinted resin. This installation is a reflection on two feelings which are deeply contemporary, "emptiness" and "nostalgia", and in particular a nostalgia that is expressed through reproductions of objects than - in respect to the original ones - try to mask some of the values that were in present and that remain somewhat hidden below the reproductions’ surface: “From the pop to the patriotic and the colonial to the kitsch”. A composition which could be read on different levels and which presents different layers, which could appear simply ironic but actually refers to some unsettling aspects of the British national identity through "a sort of ‘seduction and repulsion’ mechanism with its critique buried safely beneath the surface The project was not selected for the commission. Read more.
CAPTCHA is the project for a sculpture that reproduces a sports car - a Mercedes SL600 - through layers of transparent polycarbonate, and should have been installed inside the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. The project, which focuses on the “striking formal aspects” of such a sculpture in a specific historical context, can be considered alongside Matthew Darbyshire works and researches on the optical potential of different materials and manufacturing processes, many of which looks at the printing technologies and the three-dimensional modeling of the prototypes used in the automotive industry. The polycarbonate in particular has different reactions to the light, and would allow the sculpture to "oscillate between the transparent and the opaque, or the solid and the empty". Even the choice of the subject can be included in the poetic and the iconography of Darbyshire, as it remains suspended between an intrinsic and ironic social commentary and a formal reflection on the object, the luxury, and its symbolic and subjective values. The FIAC Committee rejected the project, which should have been also supported by the Swarovski company, within the off program of the fair. However the artist was asked if he would make and install it anyway with his commercial galleries resources. Read more.
Drawings for a soft play commission for Barking Leisure Centre, London
This project was submitted as a proposal for the soft play commission at the Abbey Leisure Centre in Barking, London. The elements present in the area, dedicated to the children, are a series of games and spaces reinterpreted following the forms of objects, furniture and particular details of urban furniture. The space is divided into three floors: the ground floor is characterized as a urban public space with a trompe l'oeil painting of a Woolworths shop, a vinyl flooring that reproduces a grey stone paving, a neon sign and a coffee area, while the first and the second recall domestic spaces. Inside the drawings for the project we can find the model of a Volkswagen New Beetle car which works as a children picnic table, a climbing tree, a "store" where children can throw down huge objects made of a soft material and an area where rubber balls come out of bathtubs and sanitary fittings, a rotating wheel that looks like a sofa with a coffee table, a double bed you can jump on avoiding huge swinging lamps and the passages between different levels, made of firefighters poles, ramps and shelves to climb. The Committee discarded the proposal, in favour of one by Marvin Gaye Chetwynd. Read more.
Mojo is a project for the Fosters & Partners designed Bloomberg headquarters at 50 Finsbury Square, London, and consists of banners and an interactive space. A first intervention would "reproduce" inside the atrium of the commissioner’s London headquarters the central courtyard of one of the most famous and poor social housing estate in London, Pembury Estate, which is located in Hackney and results very similar in its size and plans to the City of London building. From the technical point of view, the three sides of the "new and improved" Pembury Estate would be printed on three large “building wraps”, similar to those perforated banners used for covering the scaffolding inside construction sites, linstalled on the north, south and west side of the great inner atrium of Bloomsberg HQ. The fourth side, made of curved glass, would be covered by several smaller banners corresponding to the different walkways, to create the image of a new luxury residential building to confront the facades of Pembury Estate. The "reconstruction" of the social housing estate would thus be realized by adding some details - new balconies, wood paneling, glass coloured surfaces - to renew its image. This aspect is a reference to several projects which in recent years "renewed" this typology of buildings all over England, through architectonical interventions and real estate operations, making them "funky and affordable" but at the same time causing the more or less forced departure of the majority of its original inhabitants. Similarly the east side of the atrium itself would represent a new batch of luxury apartments. Darbyshire also designed a 3D interactive "show home" environment: this installation would occupy the mezzanine of the north side of the Bloomberg HQ and would reproduce an apartment of this new, renewed, social housing estate, ready to be shown to the - imaginary - potential customers. It would reproduce exactly the volumes and plans of a typical Pembury Estate 50 square meters apartment, which will be furnished with contemporary objects, images and design pieces that would, through their non-specificity, manage “to epitomize and critique the aspirations and taste preferences of our time”, as we can see in other works of the artist such as Blades House (2008) or Oak Effect (2012). Read more.
Proposed plan for Hepworth Gallery entrance, Wakefield
This project proposes an intervention in the area in front of the entrance of the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield. Darbyshire here articulates the space through three elements: an unfinished Arts and Crafts half-hipped gable structure in developers vernacular, a B&Q pergola - B&Q is the well-known UK chain dedicated to DIY and gardening - and a medieval trebuchet orientated towards the new David Chipperfield designed gallery. The three signs arranged in the area recall frequent themes in the artist's research, such as a critic to the homogenisation of contemporary design, to the standardization of the spaces, and the questioning of the regeneration processes carried out by government agencies and/or private developers, and stand opposite to the minimalist, award-winning and iconic museum building designed by an archistar. Officially, the work has not been realised for a planning issue. Read more.
Matthew Darbyshire project for Kettle’s Yard - which today is a department of the University of Cambridge and a gallery - was designed for the left side of the building, overlooking Castle Street: during the renovation works for the new education wing, rather than just a billboard the artist proposed a perforated building wrap, similar to those used in building sites where it’s possible to see a reproduction of the façade momentarily hidden. This would lead to a “coming soon” effect in the viewer, and then to subsequent feelings of ambiguity and confusion: Darbyshire instead of the trompe l’oeil of the real future building would have printed on the wrap the vision of a future development of the building in a "Thatcherite, low-cost vernacular" style, intended to be a dystopian cultural one stop shop for the contemporary England. The aim was precisely to comment - through an image which represents architecture and its values – on the possibility that a cultural space such as Kettle’s Yard may in future turn into something different (even if the current renovation works just involved the education wing of the gallery). The title itself - ukfun-ky - refers to a possible “regeneration” of Kettle’s Yard, enacting a criticism of these processes and of the spreading of anonymous and interchangeable spaces in the urban pattern. There are specific references to the policies adopted in the eighties in the UK, which was made of "thoughtless and insensitive developments", was moved only by profit and that now seems to the artist so close to a revival. The Director of the gallery disapproved and an alternative was formulated. Read more.
http://dspace-unipr.cineca.it/handle/1889/2651
This project is - in the artist’s intention - a “quasi-scientific experiment”, and consists of a permanent public sculpture, made of a prefabricated glass architectural structure (approx 5x5m wide and 3m high) produced by a company that usually supplies similar commercial spaces (the artist given example is Kingspan). This space would be furnished following a survey carried out in five public-access buildings from each of the five UK major cities., with the expectation of identifying "the most generic and ubiquitous of design elements". The artist at the same time would collect different ‘codes of conduct’, which should also then be applied - all together - inside the installation. The access to the space would be granted to five people at a time, and thanks to an applied two-way mirror film, “those outside could observe the actions of those inside whilst those inside would experience a sense of isolation and immersion in their immediate confines”, while the rules would be enforced by a guard. The concept revolves around the opportunity of exploring “a new idea of conscious surrender”, instead of the strategies of resistance and disobedience usually applied in the name of creativity and artistic freedom: Darbyshire research about the progressive and growing standardization of the designed space around us, which leads the spaces themselves to be less and less recognizable in respect to their function, here is declined alongside an investigation of the freedom that within these spaces we choose to give up for many different reasons. Starting from the writings by Georges Perec and Marc Augé, but also by socio-political theorists Franco “Bifo” Berardi and Mark Fisher, Darbyshire here comes to theorize a model to wonder "if in fact surrender could be more liberating than resistance", considering contemporary social pressures. The aim is to create a space that does not declare its function, which may appear anonymous and go unnoticed, and that leaves its user confused as to what is expected from it. Read more.
The project consists of an Artist’s book structured on several levels of interpretation which, through images and texts, outlines the moments in which the combination of signs reveal the "forms of the content." The artist's book designed by Maria Adele Del Vecchio is a “personal and abnormal semiology", a product of culture which reveals the contradictory nature of signs and the message they express using a poetic approach, rather than a scientific one. The hypothesis proposed by the artist has been enriched by readings related to semiotics and structuralism, and is nurtured by the belief that reality is entirely composed of signs and that deciphering these signs, composes a more complete picture of reality. The photographs taken are stumbles, glimpses beyond which the artist sees the grids on which life is structured: educated moments that reveal a karst essence along with underlying coordinates. In a brief pastiche, the artist juxtaposes parts of texts by Witold Gombrowicz and James G. Ballard, tracking down a common vision. Well matched and mutually interpenetrating, photographs and texts compose a set of parallel references woven so as to form a large subtext. Read more.
http://dspace-unipr.cineca.it/handle/1889/3001
Jeremy Deller presented two proposals as part of the major public art project connected to the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London, which have never been realized. The Fourth Plinth was originally built in the second half of the nineteenth century as a base for an equestrian statue of William IV, but it remained empty for over 150 years. The debate about its possible use continued until 1999, when the first three temporary commissions were assigned to contemporary artists for site-specific projects. Following the success of this initial initiative, a committee of experts—including Jeremy Deller himself—was established to oversee subsequent calls, invitations, and project selections. This committee officially and unanimously decided on the final use of the Fourth Plinth as a platform for specifically commissioned contemporary art installations. In particular, in the two projects donated to MoRE, both developed in 2008, Jeremy Deller proposed an anti-monumental and deeply political vision, working –in his own words – more from the perspective of a citizen than from that of an artist, and closely tied to the contemporary situation of a country involved in the war in Iraq. The first proposal was a life-size statue of David Kelly, the British scientist found dead after his alleged suicide following statements made to the media expressing doubts about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and the subsequent parliamentary investigation. The second proposal, titled The Spoils of War, involved exhibiting the wreckage of a car destroyed by a bomb in Iraq, bringing a tangible trace of the war into what has for centuries been the heart of the British Empire, and what still stands as a place of strong monumental character. Read more.
The project consisted of inviting an icon of popular culture – such as Iggy Pop – to pose, without revealing his identity to the students, as a model for a drawing class. The results of these sessions would then be donated and preserved at the Smithsonian Institution. The artist’s research here focuses on the importance of preserving the social content and values related to pop music and its enjoyment, placing them in a broader cultural context, and, in particular, on the role that certain bands and musicians play for specific communities of fans or, as in this case, for a heterogeneous and often unaware public. The document is a drawing by Sarah Tynan and serves as an example of what could have been the outcome of the class’s work. The project was organized by the Brooklyn Museum in 2016. Read more.
Jeremy Deller, invited to the Carnegie International in 2004, presented this project—which can be linked to a broader series of research and reflections on the contemporary war in Iraq—with the intention of displaying one of his large banners on the museum’s façade, recalling the one used as a backdrop by President George W. Bush during a speech. This banner bore the words “Mission Accomplished.” In the image, beside the banner, there are two Post-it notes referring, respectively, to the display—also on the façade—of a photograph (taken from existing documentation) showing Donald Rumsfeld, then President Reagan’s special envoy to the Middle East, meeting Saddam Hussein in 1983; and to an ambiguous flyer posted on the doors of some houses in Florida during the 2000 presidential election, which refers to what the artist considers a Republican Party strategy to discourage opposing voters. The flyer falsely stated that, in order to vote, all fines had to be paid, and also indicated an incorrect election date. As reported by the artist himself, the theme of the work was “just too raw at the time.” Instead, for the exhibition Breaking News (Dedicated to Peter Watkins), he created a site-specific work for the miniature rooms at the Carnegie Museum of Art, where he overlapped models and reconstructions of ancient battles with architectural elements, period furnishings, and a television transmitting images. Read more.
Jeremy Deller proposed a structure similar to Stonehenge, or simply menhir-like, to mark the entrances and exits of the Olympic Park, which was to host stadiums and other facilities in London in 2012. The deliberate ambiguity lay in creating a structure—although contemporary—that appeared to pre-exist its context and to foreshadow a possible fate of ruin for all the structures within this high-tech area. At the same time, it referred to the values associated with Stonehenge, an icon of British identity whose meaning remains largely unknown. Read more.
This was the first idea proposed by Jeremy Deller after he was commissioned by TfL to design the cover of an edition of the London Underground map, distributed free of charge in all stations. The proposed design initially featured a bicycle, composed of the colors representing the different lines on the Tube map. It was rejected, as it conveyed a message that could – according to the commissioner – confuse some users of the London Underground service, since bicycle access was not permitted on all lines. The commissioner was TfL – Transport for London, the authority responsible for transportation in the London area – within the framework of the Art on the Underground project, which invites contemporary artists to create both temporary and permanent works for the London Underground environment. Jeremy Deller then designed the cover of the Tube map together with artist Paul Ryan. The work, presented on July 1, 2007, is still visible at http://art.tfl.gov.uk/projects/detail/1119/. It consists of a portrait of John Hough, who was then the longest-serving member of TfL staff. Read more.
In 1996 Braco Dimitrijević, interviewed by Jean-Hubert Martin for "Flash Art", said: If you look at the earth from the moon there is virtually no distance between the Louvre and the zoo. There are cages at the zoo just as there are in the Louvre. My ultimate aim is to remove the doors and see the lions at large in the Louvre. This utopian project, donated to MoRE, is part of that line of research based on the combination between major art exhibitions and live animals, which the artist began to develop in 1981 with the installation Dust of Louvre Mist of Amazon at the Weddington Gallery, where he let two peacocks roam freely through the exhibition of modern art collections. The work that most closely resembles Lionson-line walking freely in the Louvre was realised by Dimitrijević in 1995 for the exhibition at the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt. Against historic sense of gravity featured pythons from the Zoo of Cologne set free inside a specially built platform (with a heated pool and an island) containing female portraits dating back between the 16th and 19th century. As Nena Dimitrijević, art historian and Braco's wife, recalls presenting the project, there’s a tension towards a utopian and unfeasible dimension that characterises his entire career: [Braco Dimitrijević] has managed to achieve many of his projects, that at first seemed impossible, because of his nature and ability to theoretically support his ideas. For example, his use of the façade for the portraits of unknown people encountered a lot of obstacles at the time and opened the chapter regarding the use of urban vocabulary in art. Read more.
http://dspace-unipr.cineca.it/handle/1889/3247
Proposal for Balboa Park Centennial, San Diego
The project proposed to mark the Centennial of the building of Balboa Park with a construction which bring aspects of the various cultural institutions under a single roof. Read more.
The unrealised project Artisti coraggiosi proposed by Pablo Echaurren in 1974 to Galleria La Margherita in Rome, involved the participation of the artist who, seating at a table inside the bare spaces of the gallery, equipped with papers, scissors and glue, would have asked the audience to join him in a performance: the visitors were asked to buy one of his work, deciding the price in advance, without knowing what they were going to buy. The hypothetical buyer was supposed to pay the artist in cash, with one or more notes, depending on his choice. The banknotes would become the artwork: cut, torn or intact, they would have been glued to sheets of paper and signed, as if they were traditional still lifes. Read more.
Rouge Selavy is the title of a work that Echaurren designed in 1977, a fundamental year because on that very date the artist decided to (temporarily) abandon art to devote himself to politics. The artist writes with a blue pen over a lined notebook one of the first projects where the figure of Marcel Duchamp emerges. In fact, the unrealized work consisted of a performative action: to be exact, a parade. In the Eucharren notebook he writes: "making Duchamp banners", then creating "silent" banners (conceptual, we could say), which had to show only verbal elements such as the question mark and question mark made with a red marker. This because? Echaurren explains the reasons in the points below. The artist speaks of the concept of imagination and develops it under various aspects, affirming that the imagination does not stop at a banner, that the imagination must be brought onto the banner itself and finally the same banner is defined as "doubtful" and "without certainties". The title of the work is a distortion, one of the first distortions made by Echaurren on the titles of Duchamp's works (see Mon Alice, a project on display inside MoRE). Indeed, the famous portrait as a woman by the French artist Rrose Selavy is transformed into Rouge Selavy. There is a desire to highlight red as the color of life, in fact the marker strokes on the page that draw the exclamation and question marks on the banners are red. Furthermore, this continuous use of the word imagination can only bring to the mind the famous slogan of the seventies "the imagination to power". Read more.
The project consists of a combined installation of two spinning wheels that move a system of threads, the threads descend from a chrysalis attached to the ceiling. The quote is clear and obvious. In fact, Echaurren mentions the famous ready-made of 1912 but also the International Surrealist Exhibition held in 1942 at the Whitelaw Reid mansion in New York, organized by André Breton with the collaboration of Marcel Duchamp. This exhibition, in addition to being considered a "landmark exhibition" (Tate Papers, 2009; Stedelijk Studies Issue, 2015), presents an installation curated by Marcel Duchamp and created through a complex system of ropes woven throughout the exhibition space. This system allowed the visitor a partial and complicated view of the pictorial works set up on the wall. The French artist's operation was entitled “Sixteen Miles of String”. Echaurren's work combines the two Duchampian operations through the creation of an installation that, like the original design, wanted to occupy the entire exhibition space. In addition to the combination of these two famous works by Duchamp, Echaurren also mentions “The Large Glass”, not directly but by elaborating an installation in which the string came out of the chrysalis that define the sex of the insects. In fact, the threads would have started from the chrysalis to be subsequently taken from the two spinning wheels placed in the center of the room. Echaurren writes a handwritten note: “The insect bride Þ the male molds Þ females with wings”. This reference to the chrysalis also brings out the artist's attention to entomology. In fact, Echaurren has stated several times that as a young man he wanted to be an entomologist. Read more.
Pablo Echaurren's project, like many others, is elaborated through notes written in blue pen on a page of a squared notebook. The artist's intent is already clear from the title "Monumento Fortuito". In fact, in 2015 the artist plans to create a monument dedicated to Marcel Duchamp, an artistic operation that is rooted in the intentions and artistic methods typical of the French artist. For this work Echaurren thinks of the concept of “chance”, wanting to create the monument through the action of "picking up a leftover, a human waste from the street and electing it as an urban monument. The words "rectify it" and "place it on a pedestal" also emerges from the short text, all definitions come to Duchamp's work. With this operation, Echaurren works in the conceptual framework of the French artist, dedicating a work to him with his own design methods. Read more.
Mon Alice is a small plastic sculpture measuring a few centimeters (8 x 4 x 3 cm); it is a maquette for a larger sculpture designed by Echaurren in 2018. The sculpture represents Alice in Wonderland in the Disney version, the one now ingrained in the collective imagination of adults and children alike. To this small sculpture, the artist has painted in ink on the face two mustaches and a slight stubble. Right from the start the work recalls the famous L.H.O.O.Q. the rectified ready-made made in 1919 by Duchamp that depicts Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa with a fine mustache and a goatee drawn on her face by the French artist. A game of ambiguity is hidden in both works. Indeed, both Mona Lisa and Alice change identities by adopting elements typical of the male sphere, Echaurren as Duchamp adopts a well-known figure, an icon of contemporaneity to make changes dictated by a simple and essential gesture. If Duchamp works on language through the play on words in the title (L.H.O.O.Q. pronounced in French sounds like Elle a chaud au cul - She is hot in the ass), Echaurren always works through a written part but only mentioning Leonardo's work in the title of the work, Mon Alice instead of Mona Lisa. The medium clearly changes from two-dimensional to three-dimensional, but Echaurren's intentions would seem to be the same as those that moved the French artist. Read more.
This work by Echaurren also reflects some Duchampian elements and echoes. The unrealized project depicts a bronze sculpture of a monkey holding an iron with its right hand: if the animal is adherent to all the artist's work declined to the universe of primitives (such as the last film Pablo di Neanderthal, released in 2022 and directed by Antonello Matarazzo), the iron recalls in a veiled way Marcel Duchamp's famous phrase "Using a Rembrandt as an ironing board". As with the other works donated to MoRE, this project has no specific commission. The reasons for its not being realized are logistical and appear as theoretical exercises on which the artist continues to question himself. Read more.
The project involves the construction of a 33-meter observation tower as an open construction (the construction method should have included a steel skeleton frame) at the highest point of a landscape. The tower should have been open to the public at all times. Read more.
The idea of the wall painting by Ericailcane was born in 2014 and meant to fit into the second edition of FRONTIER - The Line of Style, an open and evolving platform, based on two complementary operational phases: one dedicated to the artistic development of urban art and one dedicated to a deeper theoretical background. The artist, invited to conceive a pictorial work for the city's historic Gasometer, imagines a continuous narrative centred on the figures of two enormous dogs biting their tails and carrying on their shoulders the allegory of two cities or two sides of itself (Bologna?): one that lives in joyful harmony and one that, as a character shows, walks in a balance on a wire. Read more.
The project was commissioned by Roberto Daolio as part of a series of art works to be placed on the top floor of the Department of Pediatric Oncology of the Sant’Orsola Hospital in Bologna, in collaboration with the Association AGEOP. The invited artists are Silvia Cini, Emilio Fantin, Claudia Losi, Eva Marisaldi, Sabrina Mezzaqui, Sabrina Torelli and Marco Vaglieri. Fantin aims at creating a great book on the fairy tale "The Bremen Town Musicians" and a series of workshops for children in collaboration with the teachers of the school Garagnani Maria Steiner of Bologna (Meet the tale and represent it; Take care; Sculpting with hot beeswax). The book was made and donated to the department , while the laboratories were not realized, due to a series of economical, technical and logistic reasons. Read more.
The project was created for an international competition promoted in 2009 by SEA, the company which manages Milan airport system. As stated in the announcement, the competition concerns the creation of “a new architectural project for the realization of an artwork that is going to change the appearance of the Malpensa airport. Specifically, the commission envisions a highly aesthetic space that is going to virtually represent the access door to the city of Milan. The purpose of this work of art, besides striking the passenger's imagination, is to become a location for cultural events and exhibitions”. Flavio Favelli presents Crystal Garden, a full-scale artwork which reproduces many features of the collective imaginary of Milan, while reminding at the same time Paxton's Crystal Palace. The reference to the architecture of London stems both from the project's title and from the materials that were to be used, such as the iron of old-aged gates and the glass thermoshell of the internal side. As declared by the artist itself, his architectural model is the aviary, which actually becomes a cage built with high-tech materials, which enables many and various activities. The complexity of the documents donated to MoRE portrays a careful planning and a thorough working method, showing also the relationship between the artists and the commissioner. Favelli's project presents many characteristic features of his body of work, which is able to succesfully combine the present with the past; here, the artist employs purposefully a futuristic approach through the usage of high-tech materials that opposes the recourse to found materials as well as to practices and modalities of appropriation. The project was not admitted to the second phase of the competition. Read more.
Flavio Favelli conceives this project, together with the architect Flavio Gardini and the engineer Matteo Grilli, for a competition curated by Bartolomeo Pietromarchi. The artist envisiones the creation of an outline of the old nuclear power plant in Caorso, opened in the Seventies and closed only eight years after. The power plant was dismantled in 2009 by the company Sogin, Società Gestione Impianti Nucleari (Nuclear Power Plants Management Company), which also promoted the competition. Starting from the premises of the designation letter, Favelli conceives a complex full-sized work which represents the shape of the former power plant as a memorial, a sculpture dedicated to the history of a placereflecting a much debatedissue of the last forty years such as the one of nuclear energy. The artwork consist of the full scale creation of the former power plant's outline - width 24.98 cm and height 9,98 cm - countoured by yellow neon. The work could remind of a triumphal arch, even if it doesn't celebrate political or military achievements, but instead it becomes a simulacrum of the power plant itself, a memory-sign of the building's exact structure, employed to try to salvage the remembrance of the landscape. Its urban dimension makes the viewer enter a state of temporal bewilderment, almost a déjà vu, an alteration of memory through the construction of an ephemeral architecture. The project was canceled due to a change in the company's management. Read more.
La vera rivoluzione è non cambiare il mondo(?)
The project involved the creation of a huge sign – La vera rivoluzione è non cambiare il mondo(?) – in every way equal to a claim launched by ENEL, but lacking the question mark and immediately withdrawn due to Greenpeace's denunciation. At least fifteen meters long and composed of green-painted aluminium box letters about eighty centimeters high and six hundred incandescent light bulbs, the lighted work would have involved an energy consumption of three kilowatt-hours, equal to that supplied for the utility of any Italian home. Designed by the artist to denounce the company's false ecological message, the work would remain off until ENEL produced more than 60% clean energy from renewable sources. In 2007, Favini proposed its creation for the Greenwashing exhibition, which was to be held at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo the following year. It was not realized for budget reasons. Read more.
Invited to take part to the second edition of the performance festival curated by Adriana Rispoli and Eugenio Viola, Corpus. Art in action, 7-26 June 2010 at MADRE Museum in Naples, Galindo focused on the social problems that affects the city. As a result, the artist’s project recalls a kind of training practiced by the Camorra: to shoot a person who is close to his killer. The performance was supposed to happen like this: the artist, wearing a bulletproof vest, is locked in a room with a man standing a meter and a half to her. The man is armed with a gun and he shoots at the artist after asking her for three times, in English: “Are you afraid?”. The audience attends in a adjacent room, where he can only listen to the sounds coming from the performance. Immediately after the shot the artist and the man come out (the man from a side door, without being noticed) and the room remains empty and accessible to the public. According to Galindo, the project was refused because it had been considered too dangerous. Read more.
Looking for the island is a video project dedicated to the Garbage Patch, an ‘island “dump” located in the Pacific Ocean that began to form around 1950. This particular island, composed of polymers in the form of bottles, packaging, networks and other kinds of junk, is moved constantly by ocean waves that wear the matter down by reducing it to tiny particles dissolved in water. The floating mass of “particle waste”, which apparently resembles plankton becomes food for fish and birds, reintroduced into our food chain and consequently in our bodies. The artists projects is based right on this contrast between natural and artificial, landscape and industry; through the video they want to document the journey of these plastic particles that paradoxically become feed for fishes, and therefore food for human beings. Challenging the common perception of this place, that is often considered improperly as a real island, this video wanted to place a videocamera waving slowly inside the water, extending and shortening the length of the take from time to time through these fragments of memory. The artists realised specifically for MoRE a series of watercolors that represent the Garbage Patch; moreover, they donated two charts, part of the project, that analyze the ocean and its currents. All the five sketches present a circular design that reminds, indeed, the island or cloud of garbage, while the lines in subtle colors seem to remind a rarefied and immaterial universe The artists were invited to realise this project by Fondazione Hermes in 2007, but it wasn’t selected in the end. It's still unrealized due lack of funds. Read more.
Total Portrait of the City of Zagreb was a project for a documentary film on the city of Zagreb. The only document which has survived is a sheet of paper typed and signed by Tomislav Gotovac himself. He states his intention to observe the city as though it were a human being. The aim was to produce a “21st-century” film, a total vision of the city as a living organism. Read more.
Stelle e lucciole was conceived between 1969 and the early Seventies, and it is one of the first episodes of the prolific collaboration between Franco Guerzoni and Luigi Ghirri, which produced interesting and relevant results. These photographs revolve around the intention of the two artists and friends to capture in a single frame the starry sky and the bright trails of light left behind by fireflies. Indeed, Ghirri shot many takes of that picture, but he was not able to achieve the results he was aiming for due to technical issues. Guerzoni donated these photographs to MORE. To define this project as unrealized would not be fully correct; therefore, as Guerzoni himself agreed, it should be rather described as an unresolved, interrupted project, unable to achieve its expected outcome. Read more.
The two figures “I remember I have seen a mosque inside the Amun Temple in Luxur” and “Development of the decoration of an Etruscan vase according to a nineteenth-century portrayal” were to be part of a broader and more structured project, centred on the theme of the potential image, a topic very dear to the author. The original project envisaged the presence of a third figure representing a mental image, merely potential, hence rendered in a writing. The conceptual nature of such an image would have not allowed any visual depiction. The presence of a fourth figure, devoted to the utopian possibility of exposing films with the only power of thoughts, was merely a working hypothesis. This work, of a cleary conceptual nature, was therefore to be centered on the theme of the “potential image”. Such topic takes on great importance for both the artist's production and the cultural context in which this project was conceived. Read more.
In this drawing Franco Guerzoni speculates - with a theoretical exercise nearer to utopia than to a real project - about the possibility of realising flying carpets. On this drawing we can find, together with shapes and images by Guerzoni himself, a poetry written by his friend Adriano Malavasi. Read more.