Read more.]]> http://hdl.handle.net/1889/2664]]> UNTITLED aims at creating a photo archive of places and monuments which are significant for foreign citizens based in Italy. Geography, iconography and memory are pivotal for this project, created to give a visual identity to the rich cultural diversification characterising Italian contemporary society. At the same time UNTITLED focuses on landscape and monument identity in this era. This installation had two chances to be shown and presented: in Milan, Quartiere Giambellino, in 2011, and in 2015 in Trieste.
Read more.]]> Read more.]]> This project, presented directly by the artist via email, consists of a single idea: to pull one of Los Angeles’s old trolley cars out of the ocean, where they were dumped after the closure of the city’s streetcar system. Reflecting on his native city—now completely devoted to cars—its past, and its processes of forgetting, Horvitz seeks to bring back to light an episode—the dumping of the trolleys into the ocean—that clearly serves as a metaphor.
The Los Angeles Railway was a streetcar system that operated in central Los Angeles and the surrounding neighborhoods between 1901 and 1963. Several articles and photographs confirm that, during the 1950s, a few of the discarded streetcars from the Los Angeles Transit Lines (created in 1945) were thrown into the ocean. In particular, the July 1959 issue of Mass Transportation magazine[1] featured an informative article about six “old” Los Angeles Transit Lines streetcars being placed off the coast at Redondo Beach to create an artificial reef.
This work by David Horvitz can also be seen as part of a broader reflection by the artist on the concepts of water and time—one that draws upon conceptual practices and applies “the fluid and impermanent dimension of the Fluxus movement and of Oriental culture”[2]. The search for and recovery of a discarded trolley car thus become a poetic and surreal performative gesture—an ephemeral action meant to leave several different traces, much like David Horvitz’s postal artworks, his stamps, or his attempts to mimic the sound of the ocean using the human voice.
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[1] Metro Digital Resources Librarian, Before “Subway To The Sea,” There Was “Streetcar In The Sea”: Creating Artificial Reefs Off The Los Angeles Coast In 1959,  Metro's Primary Resources, Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, May 18, 2011, Available at: https://metroprimaryresources.info/before-subway-to-the-sea-there-was-streetcar-in-the-sea-creating-artificial-reefs-off-the-los-angeles-coast-in-1959/1324/

[2] M. Vecellio, The Water in you, in David Horvitz, nuvola, nuvola, oceano, nuvola, foschia, tu, Loom Gallery, Milano, 2018, s.p.

]]> Attempting to find the “way out” of painting, and depict “the oscillation of matter”, Antun Motika tried to get closer to “the culture of light”. For Antun Motika one of the important and consistent fascinations was the obsession with “pure light” which in various manifestations stretches through his artistic production.

Antun Motika’s experiments with light and the optical fascination shape his idea of liquid painting.

Motika formed his most important breakthrough outside the field of painting in his various experiments with projections, light and movement, his various lumino-kinetic experiments.  Proposals and sketches for different light devices, like light easel, and different apparatuses of projection are found in Motika’s notebooks, gathering many notes on his utopian, imaginative propositions that remain that, designs of unrealized projects. Motika’s notebooks and experiments direct us outside the known artistic canon towards the the changes of artistic cartography of in 1960s. Pages from Motika’s notebook bring into light sketches for lumino-kinetic works, his experiments with light and projections, as plans for various dispositifs and possibilities of their display. Motika produced his projections with various customised projectors (slide projectors, diascopes, episcopes, overhead projectors), transparent backgrounds onto which he applied materials of different sources, organic and inorganic, insects, plants such as herbarium, then pigments, resin, liquids, in order to achieve surprising results upon their enlargement, projected to surfaces as screens.
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]]> 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. 
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]]> http://hdl.handle.net/1889/2650]]> The possible commissioners and the reasons why the project remained unrealized haven’t been specified by the artist.
Read more.]]> http://hdl.handle.net/1889/2332]]> Viene e va is an installation by Liliana Moro that won the 7th edition of “Premio ArteGiovane – Torino incontra l'arte. Una porta per Torino” – conceived for the Iveco roundabout in Corso Giulio Cesare, Turin. The roundabout - that already presented two commas made of stone chippings on the grass – would host two groups of street lamps with a fixed light, one yellow and one white, with two street lamps with intermittent light at the centre, representing two lighthouses, whose function is to serve as a navigational aid for the sailors. 
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]]> http://hdl.handle.net/1889/3446]]> This project consists in a proposal for the redevelopment of the Gorbals Partnership, Glasgow. Inspired by the lyrical settings in which Ingmar Bergman often placed his romancing youth, isolated in nature, protected from judgement and convention, the artist aimed at creating a site that could encompass all stages of a lifetime and maintain the same soft touch and beauty throughout.
The artist statement was: “I would like to propose the creation of a wildflower meadow. For children to play, for teens to have sex, for adults to take walks and for seniors to remind them of their youth”.
Aleksandra Mir should have worked with a botanist to develop a meadow in five years, planting local species and restoring the traditional cycles of mowing and grazing.
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]]> The Yugoslav Pavilion designed for the Paris Exposition in 1950 reflected the social and cultural climate following the Second World War, when the country was distancing itself from Stalinism and embracing the ideology of real socialism. There was a strong cultural revival, and the abstract and concrete historical avant-gardes were being reclaimed and analysed, especially Constructivism and the Bauhaus method. The search for a synthesis in the visual arts and architecture characterised the EXAT 51 programme and related 1951 Manifesto, signed by the Pavilion’s authors.
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