Jeremy Deller with these two projects, both developed in 2008 for the public art project connected to the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, proposes 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 remaining closely connected to the contemporary situation of a country, then involved in the Iraq War. The first proposal is a life-size statue of David Kelly, the British scientist whose death, officially ruled a suicide, followed statements he had made to the media expressing doubts about the alleged presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the subsequent parliamentary inquiry. The second proposal, entitled The Spoils of War, consists of exhibiting the wreckage of a car destroyed by a bomb in Iraq, thus bringing a trace of the war to what has for centuries been the heart of the British Empire and is still universally recognized as a place of strong monumental character. Read more.
This project represents, first and foremost, a reflection on the feasibility of art projects and on the relationship between the artist and the commissioning body within the contemporary art system. Through the irony and poetic approach that would characterize his later projects, the artist ultimately questions broader dynamics and meanings. In this work, conceived when Jonathan Monk was still a student at the Glasgow School of Art, the artist presents a series of proposals for projects that are, by their very nature, impossible to realize — crazy, as he himself describes them. Closely connected to the designation of Glasgow as European Capital of Culture in 1990, Small Proposals Book is a handmade book containing the presentation of six public art interventions for the Scottish city. These are bound together with a (fake) response letter for each proposal from the official to whom the artist would supposedly have submitted the project, the Visual Arts Officer Tessa Jackson. Both the images and the response letters were, of course, produced by the artist himself. The visual part, through the reuse of everyday images that are exaggerated and stereotypical, aims to emphasize the deep irony and the implicit critique of the dynamics associated with this type of intervention. Jonathan Monk pretends to propose bringing the pyramids to Glasgow Green, moving the Golden Gate Bridge over the River Clyde (although the image used was actually that of the Humber Bridge, which is why the proposal is rejected in the fictional response letter), restoring driving orientation to continental standards, transplanting one of the giant sequoias from Redwood National and State Parks, moving Stonehenge to redevelop the fountain in Kelvingrove Park, and finally relocating Disneyland for a year to the parking lot of the St. Enoch Centre. Read more.
Big Suit Departing was conceived for Berlin Schönefeld Airport. The project consisted of a giant figure—10 × 3.5 m—suspended inside the airport hall at a 50% tilt. The “dummy” has neither head nor limbs and is completely hollow, allowing passengers to see through it. The work is highly realistic, with details such as buttons, eyelets, and fabric meticulously rendered. This characteristic is typical of Erwin Wurm’s work, which partially distorts the reality we live in. This type of “monument” is not intended to celebrate the common man; rather, as in all of Wurm’s work, it seeks to glorify an exorcism of everyday life—a celebration of a different reality, of visionary and distorted perceptions. Read more.
Scott King developed this project, CRASH!, together with historian and writer Matthew Worley on the occasion of the Map Marathon at the Serpentine Gallery. A Better Britain consists of a volume containing twelve projects, originally published as a programme for the Serpentine Map Marathon in London in 2010. Each project is presented through an image created by Scott King using a deliberately “low-fi” collage aesthetic, accompanied by a text by Matthew Worley that contextualizes the proposal. Each project addresses a specific aspect of contemporary Britain through a utopian/dystopian, and often satirical proposition. MoRE also conducted an interview with the authors about the projects, which was published on the museum’s website. Read more.
Karlsruhe Boat is a project for the main venue in the German city of EnBW, a society dealing with and trading energy, and consists of a real size boat – situated in a small fountain-like pool of water indoor – that paradoxically deforms itself climbing up on the wall of the building. Even this sculpture creates a decompensation of perception, which is typical of the Austrian artist, where an object totally defunctionalized subverts its normal role and does something ironic and totally out of the ordinary logic. In this case the boat stands on a small and thin layer of water, placed almost vertically to the floor itself, and magically folds, almost crashing against the wall, in a process of deformation that we can find in some important series of the artist’s work. This “absurd” situation reflects a kind of broken up narrative that is typical of the way the artist operates; his works seem to tell a story that suddenly stops and whose ending is left to the interpretation of the viewer. Instead of the classic final apotheosis of the happy ending, for Wurm’s project we could talk about the apotheosis of paradox; the end is certainly not dictated by the victory of good over evil but rather an event that subverts the rules of the classic interpretation of the user. The artist is giving us a different interpretation of reality, that subverts the traditional forms of sculpture and perception. The reasons why the project remained unrealized aren't specified. 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.
This project started as a cooperation with Coop Himmelb(l)au: the idea was to fill up the consisting building of the so called Adlerhof with reinforced concrete and build new rooms within the huge banana, that should be arranged above that “Sarkophag”. The criticism in this project lies exactly in the relationship with the context and with the place itself: Vogelsang, indeed, once called Ordernsburg, was built from 1934 to 1936, as a former training institution for young party members of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). The artist himself underlined the historical references, which are also summarised at the official page. Erwin Wurm declared that the project has been officially refused for formal reasons. Read more.
The Venus project was studied for the Patscherkofel mountain, which is part of the Tux Alps – near Innsbruck, Austria, and consists in a proposal for positioning a classic wooden table of dimensions of 100x120x76 cm, but actually made in bronze, alongside a dish made of bronze and glossy, coated aluminum, and one knödel, a typical Austrian dish, realized in paginated white bronze. he work is conceived according to the almost theatrical setting,the sculpture creates a kind of suspension between the real and the unreal caused by the decontextualization conceived by the artist. The possible commissioners and the reasons why the project remained unrealized haven’t been specified by the artist. 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.
The Cannocchiale ottico percorribile was designed by the artist for the 1968 Milan Triennale, dedicated to the theme of the Grande Numero, in the never-realised exhibition Interventi nel paesaggio. Inside this project artworks by young artists should have been exposed in town and city centers to offer an artistic vision of the world in scale with the physical environment. In the oral reconstruction provided by his wife Franca Scheggi Dall’Acqua, in support of the two photographs of the project, the optical telescope should have been made in chromed steel and in collaboration with Italsider. Scheggi of this project produced a maquette, also in chromed steel. The Cannocchiale ottico percorribile was to be shown in Florence, between the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore and the Baptistery, in line with Via de ‘Calzaiuoli and Via dei Martelli. The dimensions hypothesized by the artist had to be such as to accommodate about a man of medium height in it, who could have been following the inside path in all its lenght. The work unravels itself in a zigzag and irregular shape, such as to produce an effect of disorientation on the viewer, increased by a very dramatic interior lighting; in addition responding to the theme of the exhibition inside the Triennale it was also a reflection on the Florentine Renaissance perspective, made explicit with its placing in the square in Florence (Scheggi was a native of the city and soaked in humanities); but we can also place it among the top experiences of Paolo Scheggi related to the concept of tunnel and path in the dark that would then be developed in the following years, bringing us the environment ONDOSA (as reported in the bibliographies and biographies of the artist) or ONDOSA NERA (as shown on the projects of the artist himself) otherwise made for the show Eurodomus in Milan, 1970, and then destroyed. Read more.
This sculpture was thought for St. Pancras station, located in northern London; the building dates back to 1861 and its victorian character contributes to frame this work as unreal, even if the artist through his works wants to communicate much more than that and goes beyond this “fantastic” dimension to reach a much deeper reflection on the de-functioning of the object, gazing at reality from a different perspective. The twisting of the vehicle is always part of this techniques of distortion of perception that Wurm adopts almost to create an epiphany of the object itself, a new life and a new meaning. The project was commissioned by St. Pancras train station, but has never been realized. The artist declared that “the truck was planned with a maximum length of 10m, the Commission found that too small, it should have been 20m!”. Read more.
Mind Bubbles is a project designed as an installation for the entrance hall of the head office of the Volksbank Wien, a building by the german architect Carsten Roth.The sculptures seem to be suspended in the air, as if a device had frozen them: a process that inflates, distorts, makes things bigger and smaller, creates unexpected shapes and new realities that become an inspiration for our everyday life. The reasons why the project remained unrealized haven’t been specified by the artist. Read more.
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.
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.
The project donated by Luigi Presicce (Porto Cesareo, 1976) consists in an unrealized performance. The action, with an utopian and theatrical nature, is inspired by the annual event in which the tuna migrate to the island of Favignana, in the south of Italy, to reproduce themselves, and according to the artist to make a journey of love. On this occasion the fish goes through a maze made up of fishing nets to end up inexorably in the death chamber, where they are harpooned and killed. The action has been designed by the artist as a game of reversing roles, in which the men take the place of the tuna and unaware they are ready to participate to the last moment of their life, just waiting to be slaughtered by other men. It is a transposition of the man from hunter to prey, from victim to victimizer, an inversion that creates alienation and a violent trauma. All these elements lead the viewer to a possible kind of visionary hallucination, where the role of Presicce is no longer that of the protagonist of his own performance but of an expert Director of expert careful towards the construction of a new appearance. This performance also draws inspiration from a short aphorism by Carmelo Bene in which the actor claims that the public should pay the cost of the show with his own life. Because of its utopian nature, it has never been possible to realize the performance. Read more.
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. Read more.
Il fiore e la pietra is a project of a urban sculpture for square in Turin, Italy. It was presented by the artist, on invitation by Gianni Romano, at the contest for young artists «Premio Artegiovane/Torino Incontra. Una porta per Torino» curated by Guido Curto, 6th Edition, 2002. The theme draws its first inspiration from B.C. comics by Johnny Hart: a frail flower dialogues with a stone. The ambiguity between solidity and frailty is symbolically set aside the then very adverse situation of FIAT, the most important manufacturing company of Turin, and the problem of the blue collar sleeping area. The environment in which the project was developed is typical of a still common situation in contemporary art: conceived to apply to a contest, it was never realized, as well as all the other projects presented, due to lack of funds. 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.
18.20 (Progetto per il Piazzale Caio Mario)
The project, originally conceived for the public contest «Premio Artegiovane/Torino Incontra. Una porta per Torino», proposed to realize a kind of silent room in the middle of the traffic congestion, with walls made of streams of air that rise toward the high and create a total sound proofing. To delimit the area Marisaldi plans to position a balaustre that works as a boundary. The idea, as the artists explains, is to create a kind of shelter in the middle of the traffic that can become a place for a date or be reached by tram. Read more.
Orbite is a site-specific project designed for the Palazzo della Regione Lombardia in Milan: on two of its façades (the south-east and north-west one) Uberti wanted to install the light drawing of a portion of the orbits of the solar system. The orbital map was taken from the NASA site and redesigned, scaled. The request was made to Massimo Uberti, along with four other international artists, by a manager of the Lombardy Region in 2009. The goal was the development of the new headquarters of the Lombardy Region with large, site-specific contemporary art works. The project Orbite was developed by Uberti in collaboration with N.O. Gallery, directed by Ilaria Barbieri Marchi. The cost of the project was € 200,000 and covered all expenses, from concept design to the set up and the communication plan. Until the delivery of the executive projects, the work was feasible. Once delivered, the reasons for non-completion have never been made public. Read more.
The project was submitted to the commission for the International Competition SPAZIO/MAXXI due percento, published in October 2008, for the creation of two works of art for the MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome: one had to be designed for the atrium of the museum and another one for the outdoor areas. The light work Esser Spazio had to be placed outside the MAXXI Museum, integrating the architectural environment with discretion and inhabiting the final steps of the square above the entrance to the museum. Uberti, coherent with its artistic research which often aims at drawing symbolic shapes and signs on the architectural and urban public space – sometimes with effects of displacement, sometimes to emphasize the characteristics and peculiarities of the place - in this case suggested a sentence, a motto and at the same time a call, asking the public to actively participate in the construction of the museum: then reflecting on the meaning of this new space for contemporary art, on its role in respect to the culture, but also on the shape of the city itself. The project was submitted to the commission for the International Competition SPAZIO/MAXXI due percento, published in October 2008 by the Provveditorato interregionale per le opere pubbliche per il Lazio, l’Abruzzo e la Sardegna, in agreement with the PARC Direzione generale per la qualità e la tutela del paesaggio, l’architettura e l’arte contemporanee. The work didn't win the competition. Read more.
Promise. Progetto per la recinzione del cantiere del Museion di Bolzano
The project was proposed for the enclosure of the construction site of the museum contemporary art in Bolzano in 2008, on the occasion of the inauguration of its new location realised by the Berlin studio KSV Krüger Schuberth Vandreike in the city centre. The artist was invited to take part to an initiative called Arte in cantiere together with some other artists; the chosen project in the end was the work A Change Of Mind by the Scandinavian artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset. The Promise project is an allusion, explicit in its title, to a promise, an expectation introduced by a series of small resin sculptures (20 cm high) hold in 12 plexiglass display cases placed on the perimeter of the museum’s fence, every 2,20 meters. Inside the cases (round-shaped, 25 x 30 x 20 cm) an hostess show the twelve movements of the “pre flight briefing”, performed by the flight assistants before each take off. Two cases present an the back tent open with a view on the museum construction site. The idea was to realise the small sculptures with a software for 3D-modelling through a process of rapid prototyping (a technique already used by the artist in some other projects). The cases were supposed to be illuminated from below with neon lights, as in a light box, to make the artist’s work visible at night. Read more.
DSpace: http://dspace-unipr.cilea.it/handle/1889/2422
This unrealised project has to be considered in relation with Ritz, a project for the realization of an outdoor movie theatre inside a park in Trento proposed the year before (2004), and it consist in the proposal to place of a permanent movie theatre at the P.A.V. (Parco d’Arte Vivente) of Torino, project of the artist Piero Gilardi realized in collaboration with the landscape architect Gianluca Cosmacini. The project, unrealized due lack of sponsorship, consisted in the facade of a movie theatre in deco style outlined in black on a white background, that recalls a movie theatre seen by the artist in the small city of Anzola Emilia (Bo), on a 4 x 3 meters wing made of painted bricks (as “a big A4 paper sheet”), as can be seen in the sketch that documents this work. On the facade are two entrance doors with their tents and lamps placed on each side, while on the top of it can be seen a decoration with three figures that ironically represent three reindeers as they usually appear on Christmas illuminations and decorations and that frame the sign “Cinema Italia”. Read more.
DSpace: http://dspace-unipr.cilea.it/handle/1889/2418
Ritz is a project conceived for the installation of an outdoor movie theatre inside a park in Trento, commissioned by the cultural association Numero Civico. The project, that was not realised, is proposed by the artist the following year with some changes for the P.A.V. (Parco d’Arte Vivente) of Turin. The project, originally thought to be placed inside a wood, consists in the facade of a movie theatre outlined in black on a white background, on a 4 x 3 meters wing made of painted bricks (as the artist explains, “a big A4 paper sheet”). The facade recalls a liberty-decò style building, with the introduction of eclectic elements, and it refers to a movie theatre the artist saw in Antananarivo, Madagascar. To enter the theatre the audience needs to move around the wall, beyond which are placed four seats in concrete destined to be covered with moss. The seats address the landscape instead of the wall, that therefore becomes a wing and hides the watchers. Even though the project won the competition, it was not realised in the end because it was not possible to find an agreement with the neighbour that lived nearby the place that was identified as the most suitable for the realization and for other logistic and organizational reasons. Read more.
DSpace: http://dspace-unipr.cilea.it/handle/1889/2417
Project for the realization of a sculpture for the roundabout located at the entrance of the village of Verduno, in the heart of the Langhe region, where Valerio Berruti chose to live and establish his studio inside a deconsecrated church. <o:p></o:p>It is a tribute to his homeland, the Langhe, observed through the innocent and carefree gaze of childhood, a subject and metaphor for an ideal world, symbol of a purity inevitably lost with maturity. Read more.
Scala by Valerio Berruti consists of a project for a mural on the walls of a large staircase inside a 19th-century building in the center of Alba, recently renovated for its new use as the headquarters of a well-known local bank. <o:p></o:p>Once again, childhood is the central subject of the preparatory sketch, featuring a nearly stylized figure of a young girl whose minimal drawing achieves a striking expressive power. It is an image of poetic lightness, evoking in each viewer memories of past years, family ties, and, more broadly, the notion of memory. Read more.
DSpace: http://dspace-unipr.cilea.it/handle/1889/2106
Arciteatro is a simple and clear project – although very well articulated - that Varisco prepared when she was invited to participate in the competition organized by the Municipality of Milan for the construction of a sculpture intended to be located in the square near the Arcimboldi Theatre. The artist then thought of "inhabit" the public space with geometric - but open - shapes, of the kind that it’s often possible to find in his work, forms that, in their mutual dialectical relationship and tension with the surrounding environment, create a new and different spatial dimension, in which the perception habits of the public are challenged, as it always happens in her work, which are often declined in the concrete dimension of the surrounding space. The project never won the competition. Read more.
DSpace: http://dspace-unipr.cilea.it/handle/1889/2055
This unrealized work donated to MoRE museum consists in a performance staged simultaneously in two different galleries in Berlin, in one venue there are many young mothers with babies, while in the other there are elderly people. The overlaying of the two actions creates a kind of disorientation in the viewer who is facing the two venues to enjoy the same work of art, the visitor entrance is potentially submerged by these presences that are on an ambiguous track between irony, sarcasm and an uncanny feeling of “homologation” of the protagonists. This work can be considered a modern allegorical composition of the three ages of man, on the one hand young women with their children – maturity and youth – while in the other gallery there is the last stages of life. Even if the work has an “aulic” meaning and evokes an iconography of the past, it developed through a ludic dimension which characterizes a great part of the work of the artist. Therefore there’s not only a Marcel Duchamp vein in Scotto di Luzio’s poetic, as we can see in the other project donated to MoRE, but also a performative research that approaches both the avant-garde of the Seventies that the more recent trends of the Nineties, and that is penetrated by a Neapolitan sense humor with ancient roots (remembering Totò and Eduardo de Filippo) that conceals melancholy and irony. The project was created in collaboration wirh the Krome Gallery (Berlin), but a second gallery has never been found. Read more.
DSpace: http://dspace-unipr.cilea.it/handle/1889/2415
TRITON, a 7 days-long event designed and proposed by the artist for the 1977 edition of the Bonn Beethoven Festival, was then restructured and partially reduced in 1984 to be presented under the title LA LUCE DEL SUONO at the 1986 edition of the “Ars Electronica” festival in Linz, Austria. The first two projects of the same title, TRITON, deal, on a different level of detail, with the same event that, mainly involving sound, designed for a duration of seven days, would have involved the entire city of Bonn, starting from the river, on which he passed on a barge that housed the orchestra. It would have been a form of homage to the great composer Beethoven not only in terms of sound/ environment, but also from a visual point of view, considering that in the project this aspect is lagerly considered. LA LUCE DEL SUONO, a project for “a concert of lights and sounds” that would have involved a vast area of the Danube river and nearby land, conceived by Mosconi in 1984 and presented for the 1986 edition of the festival “Ars Electronica” in Linz, is the result of the further development of a core part of the same imaginative unit that shaped TRITON. Read more.
DSpace: http://hdl.handle.net/1889/1999
The project involves the construction of an escalator in the desert. In this project, as in the other one donated to MoRE, Lorenzo Scotto di Luzio works on the opposites, inserting in a totally neutral setting – a distinctive trait of the Eastern world – an element with a strong “western” connotation, that represent the commerce and that clashes with the unspoiled landscape of the desert. In the idea of Scotto di Luzio, the staircase is defunctionalized and will not need any maintenance, it should deteriorate and become a relic, an abandoned monument, almost “commemorative” of a past world. Even here the artist hides a paradox, perhaps a joke: the celebration of the western cult just inside the eastern world, two concepts and two cultures that come together to create a sort of epiphany of the vision, just like a “mirage” in the desert. The artist, in the review of the project, calls it a “bachelor machine”, a sterile and unproductive device, a sort of ready-made on a large-scale, defunctionalized and completely out of context, designed not to be placed in the hall of a museum but in the desert, an aseptic and neutral space. The project was born withouth clients, and with the willingness to propose it to some commissioners in the Emirates, but has never been proposed to any possible commissioner. Read more.
DSpace: http://dspace-unipr.cilea.it/handle/1889/2414
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.
Casa per uno Scultore (Casa per lo scultore Carmelo Cappello)
The project of the house for the sculptor Carmelo Cappello (Casa per lo scultore Carmelo Cappello) has for its own nature of academic exercise to be inevitably assigned to the sphere of 'unrealised'. However, if we leave out an analysis limited to the development of the theme proposed to the students for the course of interior design at the Faculty of Architecture, Politecnico di Milano, hosted by Carlo De Carli, we realize that this project and in particular the set of drawings Ugo La Pietra has entrusted to MoRE could be brought back within a path of continuous experimental exercise than in the earlier years of his research is aimed at proposing a reformulation of the relationship between the arts. Read more.
The documents donated by Ugo La Pietra and named Nodi Urbani constitutes, compared to the Progetto per la Casa dello Scultore Cappello, a further variation of the 'unrealised'. If the casa per uno scultore is a ‘theoretical’ academic exercise that engages even the pictorial research of La Pietra, the drawings titled Nodi Urbani represent the 'frame' of a series of lexperiments carried out in the years following his graduating in architecture at the Politecnico di Milano. Read more.
The projects, partially realised, aimed at creating arbitrarily identities of not existing artists and critics who actively took part to the art system with their pretended and artificial professionalism through fake works and statements or even exhibition well communicated and promoted. The goal was to cause a short circuit in the art system to stress the subtle borderline between reality and fiction, but also between what is arbitrary and what belongs to the specific art system in order to prove its predictability. The projects dates back to 1987-88 and has been described also in the publication How to become an artist in 1992. A partial realisation of the project has been the creation, together with a team of curators, of an invented artist who realised some works and took part to some experimental exhibitions. Read more.
The project, entitled Finestre since its first conception, has undergone several revisions and can be considered only partially realised. The idea of opening windows on adjoining rooms to offer the spectators an unusual continuity of vision between contiguous spaces is conceived initially as a real demolition of the walls of the building hosting one of the seats of Vivita 2 Gallery of Ciotti and Camillo D'Afflitto in Florence (adjacent to an old abandoned cinema). This idea was abandoned for technical and practical difficulties, and in January 1990 the artist realized a different version of the project (inside Vivita 1 gallery in Florence) by exhibiting on the walls of the gallery pictures of the adjoining rooms that were recessed inside the walls that should have been tore down to produce a kind of trompe l’oeil effect (as can be seen in an undated sketch found among the artist's papers that probably dates back to 1989). Read more.
This unrealised project dates back to 1990 and has been published by Jartrakor in 1992. The idea was to test the relativity of individual definitions by asking to a certain number of people to identify an object in their home that satisfies certain requirements such as the relation form-function or that has a specific aesthetical or emotional value for its owner. The objects should then have been exhibited with a very precise setting (e.g. according to the alphabetical order of the owner's names) regardless of the value of each object, responding to a principle of seriality. The theme of this research, that is the “definitions” and the involvement of a generic audience on the most important topics of contemporary art, can be found also in the “Enquiry about art works”, an unrealised project in which the author supposes to ask to common people to create in their mind an art work in details. Thus, among the author's unrealised projects we can see also several projects of unrealised exhibitions, an element that confirms once more his interest for the exhibition practices of the art system. This project was not commissioned. Read more.
The project, part of the author's critique of the system, addresses the issue of how contemporary art is experienced and of the so-called art system in general. An initial version of the project was developed starting in 1991. In one of the artist’s notebooks, we can find notes about a solo exhibition that was supposed to take place in a private gallery in Rome at the beginning of 1992 but was never realized, probably because the art dealer feared a possible misunderstanding of the performance. The project, in fact, was based on the participation of a group of prostitutes, invited and paid to attend as guests. Their presence was meant to provoke a sense of alienation in the spectators, who would perceive something unusual compared to a typical vernissage. The performance was to be documented through photographs and audio recordings, but it was canceled by the commissioner a few days before the opening. An alternative version of the project appeared in a book published by the Jartrakor Study Center in 1992. It was based on the idea of inviting people with distinctive, easily recognizable features (such as clergymen), but dressed “normally,” in order to evoke in the viewers a subtle sense of unease or strangeness. The same project was later described in the catalogue of the exhibition Exhibit A at the Serpentine Gallery in London, which focused on the question of the role and meaning of the “exhibition. Read more.
In 2000 Pietroiusti prepares the draft of a project for a "Museum of forgotten artists”; the idea was to look for artists which were very valuable but forgotten, in order to write an alternative history of italian contemporary art for the last three decades. This project was never realized, but it is possible to find similarities with some other projects realized by the artist. Coherently with his research on the art system, Pietroiusti has indeed imagined an exhibition of artists who gave up working. This idea too is linked to the enquiry on the social role of the artist and his function; for this reason, the idea described in a notebook comes together with a later note that refers to an exhibition of artists that are not recognized by the system, but by a limited and non influential number of people or even just one single person, simply because they produced some art works. Through this project Pietroiusti underlines the importance of one element of the system, that is the necessity to be recognized as an artist, an event that in most cases requires a first acknowledgement by the members of the system itself, a theme on which the artists returns with the institution of a Museum of exiled Italian contemporary art, an itinerant museum without a place that collects marginal and ignored artistic experiences. The project of an exhibition of artists who gave up working was then partially realized thanks to the collaboration with two curators, M. Clark and M. Dickenson, on the occasion of the exhibition democracy! Socially Engaged Art at London's Royal College of Arts in May 2000. Read more.
Since 2000 in the artist’s notebooks we can find several information and notes about the project of a retrospective exhibition that has never been realized. One note dated 2001 sketches out the idea of an exhibition of artists who developed ideas similar to Pietroiusti's ones or who even accused him of stealing their ideas. With this project Pietroiusti continues his reflection on the concept of authenticity, uniqueness, physical and intellectual property of the art work. One more hypothesis, dating back to 2002, rather refers to an exhibition in which the artist planned to exhibit all his art works and to exchange them with new projects realized in collaborations with the visitors or inspired by them. Read more.
The artist developed a never-realized project for the production of different typologies of certificates of authenticity, like for instance one attesting a person's own identity, or unrealized art works or sophisticated certificates printed on papyrus for objects of little value (e.g. A one cent coin). The unrealized project is coherent with the author's research that often investigates ironically the economic system and the attribution of a commercial value to objects. Read more.
Tiramolla 1992 is a project presented by Liliana at the documenta 9 of Kassel, directed by Jan Hoet with a team constituted by Pier Luigi Tazzi, Denys Zacharopoulos e Bart de Baere. The place chosen for the work was the Neue Galerie and the project was particularly complex and elaborated with the support of an engineer of a specialized firm. The plan was to stretch a steel cable till the museum’s last wall; this should go through the whole length of the building and come outside, where it should be anchored at the artist’s car, a red Fiat 126, left turned on with the engine running. The steel cable (that has been reproposed in the work exhibited in Kassel instead of this project, Tiramolla) would have passed therefore through the whole exhibition’s space, suggesting to the viewer a different understanding of the place and converging outside towards an object connected with the artist’s everyday life: her car. Technical and structural problems were the main reason it hasn't been realized; the project was also considered too dangerous. Read more.
Il pop up che non si apre (The pop up that will not open) is an artist's book designed by Luca Trevisani in 2011. The artist starts from his series of works, printed on copper and cardboard, named Fly fishing (2010), to elaborate the structure of a pop up book. In this editorial project many of the attitudes and characteristics of the artist's work are visible, such as the sculptural gesture, the condition of equilibrium, manual skills and the chosen material: the paper. The project was initially designed as a self-production by the artist himself, and then proposed to the publishe cura.books, but it has never been realized for the high costs and because of the many difficulties in finding the necessary financial coverage. Read more.
Il Respiro di uno spazio / Livella il cielo
Il Respiro di uno spazio / Livella il cielo is a project created by Luca Trevisani in 2011 and donated to the museum MoRE in 2014. The artist through his working methodology, that starts here from a scientific data, designs a system of pipes that pass through a house, the network of tubes is sectioned and receives the rain and other weather elements, the water level therefore changes according to atmospheric events. The water, among other things, is also the subject of an artist book, Water Ikebana Stories about solid & liquid things (Humboldt Books, 2014), published by Luca Trevisani. The project donated to the museum has not been realized due to the lack of a commisioner and of a suitable location for the development of the work. Read more.
The project was commissioned by curator Roberto Daolio as part of a series of artworks intended for the top floor of the Department of Pediatric Oncology at Sant’Orsola Hospital in Bologna, in collaboration with the AGEOP Association. The invited artists were Silvia Cini, Emilio Fantin, Claudia Losi, Eva Marisaldi, Sabrina Mezzaqui, Sabrina Torelli, and Marco Vaglieri. For the hospital department, Losi conceived two projects: Caleidoscopi — colored prisms to play with, enclosed in balsa wood cases — and Allora la luna, a sort of luminous sign about two meters in diameter, designed for outdoor installation on one of the buildings facing the department windows. Both projects were meant to stimulate the imagination of young patients and help them forget their condition, even if only for a moment. The project was never realized due to various economic, technical, and logistical reasons. 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. Torelli proposed two projects: Simpatia Cosmica (Cosmic sympathy), conceived for the communication room diagnosis (BCM), and De mi amor mi canto, for the area where the remains rest. The project was not realized due to a series of economical, technical and logistic reasons. 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 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. Marisaldi structures the project into two proposals: the first consists in the publication of a book of pictures to be placed in the bedside tables of the rooms of the parents of the children staying in the hospital, while the second is the production of a textile bag – convertible into a chair - to be filled with toys that could be taken home once the children recovered and were discharged from the hospital. The project was not realized due to a series of economical, technical and logistic reasons. 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. Mezzaqui proposes the creation of an abat-jour lamp to the placed on the bedside tables of the patients’ rooms, in the memory of her childhood. The project was not realized as a result of a number of economical, technical and logistic reasons. Read more.