Lab Fight-Specific Isola
“The rigid, isolated object (work, novel,
book) is of no use whatsoever. It must be inserted into the context of
living social
relations.”
Walter Benjamin, The Artist as Producer
with Antonio
Brizioli, Tania Bruguera, Angelo Castucci, Edna Gee,
Grupo Etcetera, Maddalena Fragnito, out-Office for Urban Transformation, Maria
Papadimitriou, Dan Perjovschi, Steve Piccolo, Camilla Pin, Edith Poirier, Christoph Schäfer, Mariette Schiltz, Sašo
Sedlaček, Bert Theis, Camilla Topuntoli, Nikola Uzunovski, Daniele Rossi,
Wei-Ning Yang and others.
Isola Art Center is an open platform of experimentation for
contemporary art that has developed in the Isola neighborhood in Milan, Italy. Grappling
for over one decade with an urban situation crossed by conflicts and widespread
transformations, the project remains “no-budget”, precarious and ultralocal.
Abolishing any vertical logic of labor, the process of Isola Art Center engages Italian and international artists, critics
and curators, art collectives, activists, architects, researchers, students and
associations of neighborhood residents. The Isola neighborhood has been
undergoing processes of gentrification for some time, with policies of
capitalist territorialization that directly undermine the social character of
the zone itself, which is being increasingly privatized and deprived of shared,
collective spaces, threatening fundamental rights of urban existence.
Isola Art Center operates with an instituent
practice that implements escape routes from the neo-liberal logic of financial
and real estate speculation, working with art as a disruptive tool of
revelation and exposure.
Lab Fight-Specific Isola in Ljubljana is a workshop that operates with elements
from the 13 years of history and the present praxis of Isola Art Center, which are presented in 1:1 format. The workshop is
structured around three types of components: situations, publications and
materializations.
The situations we propose are collective
works where artists and curators intervene in a horizontal way. A screen
printing workshop, several wall paintings, moments of gathering, the flight of
the Isola Sun-Cloud produced to
create a new horizon against real estate speculation at Isola, and finally the
presentation of the book “Fight-Specific Isola” which narrates the neighborhood
struggle.
The publications shown in the space,
besides the Fight-Specific Isola book, include prototypes produced by different
artists, while the materializations are fight-specific works created in the
context of the Isola neighborhood.
With the workshop at the MSUM of Ljubljana, Isola Art
Center sets out to share the specific terminologies and concepts developed
during years of struggle, in the conviction that they can be useful as weapons
in other conflicts or urban mobilizations. In particular, the idea of operating
in a dirty cube, rejecting the distorting “beautification” of the occupied
building; the encoding of a fight-specific art, able to take concrete forms
depending on local necessities; and the notion of the dispersed center, which
makes it possible to think of the art center not as a physical space, but as an
attitude of the mind and body.
With Lab
Fight-Specific Isola we want to trigger imaginaries of urban practices,
calling forth another unconscious and the desire for other forms of relation.
www.isolartcenter.org / tel: 0039
339 6057 111 / facebook Isola Art Center
Understanding
Brecht, New Left Books, London 1973 , p. 87.
Gerald Raunig sees the instituent
practice not as an action against the institution, but as a
flight from institutionalization and structuring. If the term institution
suggests a static quality, the idea is to replace that static nature with the
organization of a dynamic praxis.
See Instituent Practices, No. 2 Institutional Critique,
Constituent Power, and the Persistence of Instituting, January 2007,
available at www.eipcp.net/transversal
