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.
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. Read more.
http://dspace-unipr.cineca.it/handle/1889/3246
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.
In bocca al lupo – (ed. “in the mouth of wolf” that is a way to wish good luck in Italian) isan artwork proposed by Liliana Moro for the 3rd International Sculpture Award of the Piemonte Region in Italy, promoted by the Piemonte Region and organized by the Association Piemontese Arte. The project included the creation of a large sculpture in the shape of a wolf in the public park of Savigliano, which could be accessed through a spiral staircase. Like Testa di Pinocchio (the Pinocchio's Head), in this work Moro referred to an iconographic repertoire linked to the world of childhood, combining it with a reflection on public space and with the relationship between interior and exterior. Read more.
DSpace: http://dspace-unipr.cineca.it/handle/1889/3442
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.
Journey from the Yellow Sea to the Sea of Japan
Daniel Maier-Reimer's art is travel. Most journeys are summarized in a single photo, some in a small group of pictures. There is no picture of some journeys. Since 2013, Daniel Maier-Reimer leaves it to others to determine how his travels appear in exhibitions and publications. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lilium Bosniacum is a project that was thought to be realized in collaboration with scientists (e.g. botanist). It would include experiments in order to see if the Bosnian constitution - based upon the Dayton Peace Agreement in 1995 - could be translated, one way or another, into “natural law”. Dayton Peace Agreement was reached in November 1995 at USA Air Force Base near Dayton (Ohio), and formally signed on 14th December 1995 in Paris. It brought peace to the country torn up by war which started on 6th of April 1992. Today, this peace agreement which also serves as the Bosnian constitution has become a political nightmare. Its complex structure makes any kind of progress in Bosnia seem impossible. Lilium Bosniacum (a.k.a. golden lily or Bosnian lily) is a lily native to Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bosnian Lily is also a symbol that has been used in Bosnia since Middle Ages and it became especially popular during the rule of Bosnian king Tvrtko I Kotromanić. With the invasion of Ottomans into the region and the fall of Kotromanić Dynasty, the symbol went out of use. On 1st of March 1992, when Bosnia and Herzegovina gained independence from Yugoslavia, lilies were brought back onto the Bosnian flag. In 1998, after the protests of political representatives of the former Herceg-Bosna and Republika Srpska, the flag of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina was replaced. The idea of the project is to try and create a set of rules and genetically modify Bosnian Lily in order that it complies with the complex structure of Dayton Peace Agreement. In collaboration with scientists (e.g. botanist), the project includes experiments in order to see if this specific “constitutional law” can be translated, one way or another, into “natural law”. All of the process would be photographically and video documented, in order to produce a book/herbarium and a short video documentary. Finally the goal would be to register this “hybrid lily”, if successfully created, to the EU database of registered plant varieties. Read more.
http://dspace-unipr.cineca.it/handle/1889/2999
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
In October 2004, Marko Pogačnik created a series of urban sculptures in Zagreb as part of the "Urban Intervention" project. They were part of a cycle that the Slovenian artist had been developing since the 1980s, entitled Lithopuncture. He saw this as a kind of acupuncture applied directly to the Earth's surface at certain "energy points", rather like acupuncture practised on the human body in relation to the chakras. Four years later the works were partially removed. Read more.
Lonely Dads / The Medieval Hall in UK with disco lights
Invited to submit a project for a medieval hall in the UK, that should have been a collaboration with either local people or an organization, Annika Ström decided to present a performance based upon the idea of lonely men in their cars, supposed to be lonely dads. Fathers who were divorced and estranged from their children. Starting, as the artist states, from a reflection upon the car as a place of solitude and from her direct experience - a common trait to several of her artworks, here derived from her travels and from her recent experience of moving to England - this project was designed as a collaboration with local Father’s Rights organizations. The artist report and the preparatory collage archived here contains all the details of the performance, of the accompanying music - a popular culture quotation, playing a crucial role as it frequently happens in Annika Ström works - and of the way everything should have been filmed and documented: “I planned to get at least 50 Dads. They would drive in to the square outside the medieval hall. One car for each dad. They would stop and remain in their car. They would all simultaneously pull down their car windows and play the same song; The very romantic Pietro Mascagni, as used as the sound track in Raging Bull by Scorsese. When the song was finished, they were to slowly pull away, head to the motorway in a line towards Southampton, where I also had commission as part of the same project. We were to hire helicopters to film the motorway, like a “News Copter” where the Lonely Dads would parade with their cars, missing their children.” Reflecting upon roles and structures inside the families and in the society, here Annika Ström investigate in particular relationships, self-doubts and failures, designing the staging of a dramatic scene where cars would have invaded the historical setting. The artist also wanted to install enormous disco balls inside the hall, but this project too remained unrealised. Read more.
http://dspace-unipr.cineca.it/handle/1889/3244
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.
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.
David Maljković's unrealized work was a reconstruction of the American Pavilion designed and built by John Johansen for the 1956 Zagreb Fair. The pavilion was meant to represent American presence at the fair, which had for many years, symbolized a bridge of exchange between Yugoslavia, Europe, the USA, USSR, Eastern and Western Bloc and non-alligned countries. David Maljković decontextualized the pavilion and proposed rebuilding it as part of a public art project in the city of Lyon, GrandLyon Habitat. 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.
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.
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.
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.
Mislim na umjetnost (I think of art) should be considered as an element of the artistic process, and the project documentation for some of a group of works not (yet) realized. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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." Read more.
Monument for a Forgotten Education (based on Goeritz's and Barragan's “Torres de Satélite”,1958)
Monument for a Forgotten Education is a model version of the public monument of Mathias Goeritz and Luis Baraggan Torres de satellite (satellite towers) which is located in Mexico City and is assumed to be one of the most characteristic public projects of Mexican modernity. Monument for a Forgotten Education is conceived with the aim to replace the walls of the Monument “Torres de satellite" made from reinforced concrete with chalkboard paint on wood, giving an emphasis to the educational awareness, rewriting the history of a certain modernity that deals with abstraction and collective amnesia. The aesthetic values of public monuments have thus been reverted as by the substitution of the original material as well as the different scale of the model. Monument for a Forgotten Education is included to a production of works under the general title of Part Company. These works combine antithetical approaches to community living and social participation by two distinct figures of Mexican Modernism, Greek-Mexican activist Plotino Rhodakanaty (1828-1892) and Mexican artist of German origin Mathias Goeritz (1915-1990). The artist adapts models of public sculptures by Goeritz informed by research on Rhodakanatys’ political concepts. The constructions explore a broader context around social class, politics of sculpture, architecture and design, encompassing rather than isolating these two separate ideologies. Understanding modernity's discourse through Goeritz's approach is an intriguing way to justify the rejection of memory (from collective to interpersonal relationships) and complements Rhodakanaty's ethics through which Goeritz cannot be restricted exclusively to the field of aesthetics, just as socialist narratives may not be solely perceived through a passive reception of a political message. Read more.
http://dspace-unipr.cineca.it/handle/1889/3002
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.
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.
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.
This project, commissioned by the Narvik City Council and Artscape Nordland, proposed to realise a star in the pavement for every child born in during the next 5-7 years in Narvik. This Norwegian city threatened to become vacated, with this work the harborfront would have been covered in stars, made by the same company that provides those for Hollywood's Walk of Fame, and every year a ceremony would have been held to reveal the new ones. The goal of the project is to turn the exclusive into the popular through a local recycling of the "star culture", where every newborn baby will become a star in its own life. Simultaneously the project represented a local mobilization to increase the population of Narvik. Due to budget cuts, the project was cancelled in 2006. <o:p></o:p>Read more.
Ništa [Nothing] should be considered as an element of the artistic process, and the project documentation for some of a group of works not (yet) realized. 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.
This project started from the interest of the artists around the village of San Damiano, near Piacenza, the birthplace of Simone Bertuzzi and Simone Trabucchi. This area hosts both a NATO military base and a sanctuary dedicated to an apparition of the Virgin Mary during the early 1960s: this research was born from an attention focused both on the sound produced by the warplanes' exercises and the nature of the military space, and on the collective religious imagination, in search of a possible dialogue and common points, in the context of a small village alongside the Po Valley. The first version of the project took the form of a documentary based on several interviews and filming of the surrounding landscape: at this stage just two trailers were produced, based on two interviews, and a parallel version was conceived as a live media performance composed of two video projections and a live soundtrack. In 2007, after a first stop decided by the artists themselves, the project was rethought as an installation on two screens, where they could have worked with loops and small variations, starting from shorter narrative models. This also included two structures for the vision of the films and an ambient soundtrack. In addition, during the research, the artists had the opportunity to confront themselves with the artist William Xerra - who was born in Piacenza too - who in 1976 staged Le Apparizioni (Verifica del Miracolo) in San Damiano, a piece related to the Marian apparitions in the area, which included as witnesses figures such as Pierre Restany, Renato Barilli and Vanni Scheiwiller. While being used by Invernomuto in several presentations, publications, showcases and works - with images and references - Noises from Above has never reached a final form and has never been completed: still today the artists consider it stuck in a standby phase. 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
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. 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.
Pjesma se ne vraća u abecedu (Poem is not coming back into the Alphabet) should be considered as an element of the artistic process, and the project documentation for some of a group of works not (yet) realized. 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. 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.
The project was born upon request and on the initiative of Michy Marxuach, curator that in the summer 2000 invites Oreste to participate at PR ' 00 [intervenciones múltiples - múltiples intervenciones] in San Juan (Porto Rico). The one-week event provided a program of shows and activities dedicated to the affirmation of an alternative art scene, where local artists were joined by international artists, curators, critics and institutions. Oreste proposed an installation made of objects, texts, photocopies and images displayed on a wall, that would have interacted with the public like an analogical hypertext: after the selection of an element a member of Oreste would have told its story to the visitor. The curator never answered to this proposal and the project remained unrealised for reasons that have not been clarified. Read more.
This project consists of a series of portraits of the artist, made exclusively from photographs of buildings taken while Jonathan Monk was inside them. The artist was not meant to be the only person in the building, but the only one involved in the project. The selected buildings were the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the TV Tower in Berlin, the BT Tower in London, the CN Tower in Toronto, and the Empire State Building in New York. The result would have been a series of photographs of these buildings, with the artist invisible in the image yet actually portrayed at the top of each structure, looking directly into the camera lens. The project was ultimately abandoned by the artist. Read more.
Prazno miesto [Empty mind] should be considered as an element of the artistic process, and the project documentation for some of a group of works not (yet) realized. Read more.
Preferisco il rumore del mare. Concorso di progettazione Piazza Verdi - La Spezia
The project, realised in collaboration with Studio 5 + 1 AA, was presented in 2009 on the occasion of the design contest to renovate Piazza Giuseppe Verdi from an architectural and artistic point of view. The contest was promoted by city of di La Spezia and P.A.A.L.M.A. (Premio Artista Architetto La Marrana Arte Ambientale) in collaboration with Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio della Spezia. The project was shortlisted among the top five entries. The title-manifesto of the project, I prefer the sound of the sea, is the title of a film directed by Mimmo Calopresti (2000), inspired by a verse of Dino Campana. The idea was to realise a flooring with a decoration made of tiles and rubberized asphalt whose colours were inspired by the mosaics of Fillia, Prampolini e Mazzoni inside Palazzo della Posta. Moreover, they wanted to place inside the square 99 red and blue trumpets, connected to the tide predictions centre in Genoa. The trumpets would have emitted a whistle, registered by the artist, in case of high tide. Read more.
DSpace: http://hdl.handle.net/1889/3444
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)
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