The idea behind Cartoneros, which came to him whilst travelling to Argentina in 2006 to implement the project on the Fasinpat ceramic factory (Fabrica sin patrones), an example of corporate self-management among the most significant of the country. Mele had been following the labor movement since 2000, after attending a demonstration staged by local workers, until he decided to return to Argentina in 2006. On this occasion he noticed the reality of the “cartoneros”. The economic crisis of 2001 caused the foreclosure of thousands of industrial plants and shops in Argentina, with a subsequent dramatic increase of 3,500 improvised workers for the collection of waste paper and cardboard around the cities. These workers seamlessly blended in with the blind frenzy of the metropolis, rummaging through the trash or dragging stacks of cartons. The project was supposed to include a large installation made of cardboard, stacked from and compressed between the floor to the ceiling, along with some paintings that the artist had painted during his stay in Argentina’s capital as well as an extensive photographic documentation of the workers’ lives, often carried out in secret among the city's neighborhoods.
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In 1997, Aleksandra Mir proposed to the Public Art Fund to collect trees thrown away from the streets of New York City after the Christmas holidays and replant them in a common area until they had dried out completely. The project, while welcomed, was blocked by the city's fire department.
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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.
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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.
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Environmental dimensions. Light, water, photography, sound.
A) Outside: A semi-submerged photographic image of 60x20m. occupies the stretch of water of one of two ancient covered basins of the Arsenale. The image represents simultaneously two circles of water and the symbol of Infinity. A stone thrown in water has created the splitting of the first cell, giving rise to a multiplicative process. The photographic act freezes the action and renders eternal the instant and the becoming of time, Past and present, stasis and change, finite and infinite are simultaneously present: the place is real and virtual at the same time.
B) Inside: 12 light-boxes placed in the niches of the left wall of the Theater of the Virgin transform the wall in a great self-illuminating façade. Light and architecture are welded into a single radiating structure that transmits light within the building. On the floor in front, a water tank of about 16×16 m. reflects the architecture of light, generating the virtual image space. The still surface of the water is perturbed by the undulatory motion of concentric waves that propagate rhythmically from the center of the tank. The vibration of this liquid surface corresponds with the intangible sounds diffused into the great emptiness of the room: visual and sound waves interact, creating the vibrating movement of the water.
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Installation in 2 parts, 2009. Venice, Basin of the Arsenale, Gaggiandre, and Tese delle Vergini, Italian Pavilion.
Environmental dimensions. Light, water, photography, sound.
A) Outside: A semi-submerged photographic image of 60x20m. occupies the stretch of water of one of two ancient covered basins of the Arsenale. The image represents simultaneously two circles of water and the symbol of Infinity. A stone thrown in water has created the splitting of the first cell, giving rise to a multiplicative process. The photographic act freezes the action and renders eternal the instant and the becoming of time, Past and present, stasis and change, finite and infinite are simultaneously present: the place is real and virtual at the same time.
B) Inside: 12 light-boxes placed in the niches of the left wall of the Theater of the Virgin transform the wall in a great self-illuminating façade. Light and architecture are welded into a single radiating structure that transmits light within the building. On the floor in front, a water tank of about 16×16 m. reflects the architecture of light, generating the virtual image space. The still surface of the water is perturbed by the undulatory motion of concentric waves that propagate rhythmically from the center of the tank. The vibration of this liquid surface corresponds with the intangible sounds diffused into the great emptiness of the room: visual and sound waves interact, creating the vibrating movement of the water.
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The title refers to the Atlas Palace, a myth that appears in the Boiardo and Ariosto Orlando, and that here acquires a personal value for Tosatti as a place to deal with, but also in a relationship with the visitors, though the symbols of the labyrinth and the mirror, a central theme in the artist's research between 2011 and 2012. Through a practice divided between art and architecture, often described by Tosatti himself with an analogy with the room in the middle of the "zone" in the Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker, a model of superimposition of identity and desire, here the artist tries to make the apparition of “castles and monuments” true, introducing in the project the themes of electricity and illusion:
“The culmination of the work will consist precisely in a large switch that visitors could turn off, letting darkness and silence fall over the entire building. It will therefore be necessary - also from the visual point of view – to rely on certain image of technology, related to electricity. Obviously the kind of technology that should be used is not be the most modern one, but the one that is present in a shared imaginary, consequently machines and tools form several decades ago, which aren’t used anymore”.
Studying the construction diary and the preparatory drawings we can also highlight the particular attention dedicated to the façade, upon which two “mirror flags” should have been installed to make "the invisible building" recognizable, and the structuring of a path through the different floors. A room should have contained, upon one of the tables that are already present inside the building, a glass of water and a bottle of Novalgina, a painkiller, together with an hidden mechanism that would have created a light and steady vibration to shake the water surface when placed upon the table. Another room was designed to provide the optical illusion of a rhino freely moving inside the space, so to anticipate the top floor switch, where the machinery would have been placed. Classical statues - originals or copies - should also have been present alongside the path, as an archetype of man and as a mirror for the visitor, while at the ground floor, currently occupied by an archaeological excavation, an artist intervention would have been necessary to turn it into a sculptural space.
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Il palazzo di Atlante is a project for an environmental scale intervention, designed for the Ufficio Geologico building located at largo Santa Susanna, Rome. The place is currently abandoned, and was designed between 1873 and 1879 by the engineer Raffaele Canevari: this space is the starting point for a research that Tosatti documents in the attached file donated to MoRE, through a project and several diary entries corresponding to the different stages of the design process. It is possible to consider this artwork within a path that includes several works the artist dedicated to abandoned spaces - in particular we can mention Tetralogia della polvere (Novara, Casa Bossi, 2012) and also the recent cycle realized in Naples, Sette Stagioni dello Spirito (2013 - 2016) -: this ambitious work is considered by Gian Maria Tosatti as an arrival point he can face only after a series of experience, where he "started building rooms, larger or smaller, then dedicating myself to buildings and then finally building larger and larger artworks, sometimes even bigger than myself, and therefore requiring every time an evolution, a development of myself as an artist. "
The title refers to the Atlas Palace, a myth that appears in the Boiardo and Ariosto Orlando, and that here acquires a personal value for Tosatti as a place to deal with, but also in a relationship with the visitors, though the symbols of the labyrinth and the mirror, a central theme in the artist's research between 2011 and 2012. Through a practice divided between art and architecture, often described by Tosatti himself with an analogy with the room in the middle of the "zone" in the Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker, a model of superimposition of identity and desire, here the artist tries to make the apparition of “castles and monuments” true, introducing in the project the themes of electricity and illusion:
“The culmination of the work will consist precisely in a large switch that visitors could turn off, letting darkness and silence fall over the entire building. It will therefore be necessary - also from the visual point of view – to rely on certain image of technology, related to electricity. Obviously the kind of technology that should be used is not be the most modern one, but the one that is present in a shared imaginary, consequently machines and tools form several decades ago, which aren’t used anymore”.
Studying the construction diary and the preparatory drawings we can also highlight the particular attention dedicated to the façade, upon which two “mirror flags” should have been installed to make "the invisible building" recognizable, and the structuring of a path through the different floors. A room should have contained, upon one of the tables that are already present inside the building, a glass of water and a bottle of Novalgina, a painkiller, together with an hidden mechanism that would have created a light and steady vibration to shake the water surface when placed upon the table. Another room was designed to provide the optical illusion of a rhino freely moving inside the space, so to anticipate the top floor switch, where the machinery would have been placed. Classical statues - originals or copies - should also have been present alongside the path, as an archetype of man and as a mirror for the visitor, while at the ground floor, currently occupied by an archaeological excavation, an artist intervention would have been necessary to turn it into a sculptural space.
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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.
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Monolite in bilico consists of a block of slate or lava stone resting on its edge on top of an egg made of travertine from Trapani, and placed on a pedestal of white cement destined for an open space in the city of Gibellina. The exact placement and measurements were yet to be determined. The artist donated his project to MoRE and – given the occasion - recounted the complex history of his work: "After visiting the new town of Gibellina way back in December of 1979, invited by the mayor Ludovico Corrao, I thought of erecting a large monolith made of slate or better yet of volcanic lava, balanced on top of a travertine egg, which was then to be placed in one of the city squares as a symbol of rebirth and a representation of the force of nature. The egg is an archetype of mysterious and symbolic significance, the Sun in the yolk and the Moon in the glare, gold and silver, a reassembled dualism. From this union life is born and perpetuated. The egg prevails over the force of nature by holding up the monolith. That's why it is in the balance. Enthusiastic about the idea, the mayor immediately ordered works to be carried out on the egg. I even had the chance to see it finished, but I never got an answer about the monolith itself, which therefore remained unexecuted. Each time I inquired about the project, I've been given excuses and evasive answers. Thus I ceased to insist because I realized that something or someone was hindering the project. They even went so far as to deny that the egg had ever been made."
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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.
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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.
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This project was born in the aftermath of HH Lim's car accident which occurred on the highway on March 26th in 2005, while he was on his way from Rome to Naples for the opening of the inaugural exhibition of the PAN - Palazzo delle Arti di Napoli, The Giving Person. Il dono dell'artista, curated by Lóránd Hegyi, invited by the artist Yan Pei Ming who had visited Lim's exhibition at Fondazione Volume! in Rome a few days earlier. Despite the severity of the accident, Lim was unharmed and decided to proceed his journey abandoning the destroyed car on the side of the highway. The project was inspired by a series of events that occurred before the departure and during the trip, as well as a work of art by his friend Yan Pei Ming on display in the exhibition - a large red figure of a Buddha, similar to the one Lim has always been wearing on his neck - and ultimately the death of the pope a few days later. The project was never actually developed as it remained a mere thought, an idea the artist had. Lim imagined a large public exhibition to thank the Pope: the work would have consisted of a series of montages made using Photoshop, showing some drawings of Lim – linked to the series of Words - superimposed on the front pages of the newspapers and posted during the funeral of Wojtyla, which took place on April 8th 2005 in the St. Peter's Square.
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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.
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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.
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The project by Giulio Paolini entitled Quadro generale (Overview) was developed by the artist between 2010 and 2012, and intended to be placed near the south steps within the Sully Wing of the Louvre Museum in Paris, which commissioned the piece. Although the artist's proposal had been approved in its final version in the summer of 2012, the initiative was not followed through for various reasons, including the appointment of a new director at the museum. The installation that Paolini had designed included a geometric structure in stainless steel, built around a square hanging from the ceiling in the center of the space. It contained fragments of plexiglass engraved with the same geometric designs which would have been placed on the surrounding walls, as if they had been scattered by an explosion of the nucleus. This complex structure, by its nature variable and cryptic although clearly structured, represents – as Paolini himself stated - the very idea of the museum: "some sort of 'big bang' of continued proliferation destined to an inexorable, vertiginous fragmentation until it almost exhausts much like a 'black hole' that prevents us to decipher it."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The unrealized project of Giovanni Ozzola, titled Un solo orizzonte, consists in a video installation of five projectors that simultaneously show on the same wall different videos of horizons, filmed in five different places with the same degree of latitude, thus following the parallel. It wasn’t realized for logistical reasons, due to the venue.
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