Spazi Docili: creare legami con il territorio

Fabrizio Ajello/Christian Costa
Spazi Docili: creare legami con il territorio
(Spazi Docili [Docile Spaces]: establishing links with the territory)
Talk, Strozzina CCC, Florence, Italy
January 12th, 2012 – 6.30 pm
Free entrance





Every ‘public art’ intervention reveals a precise conception of the notion of ‘public’ and therefore defines power relations. That’s why nowadays aesthetic languages are so deeply intertwined with the dimension of ‘politics’.
Using a communication which follows more and more the rules of aesthetics and imitates avant-garde performances, last decades politicians had been trying to exert a more and more stronger influencefluenzardes on the reality and on our unconscious.
The Spazi Docili [Docile Spaces] project came to existence to observe the inability of (Italian) politics in having a fruitful impact on reality. A castration of the soul which produces monsters. Tangible monsters. Our suburbs and public spaces.

At the Strozzina Centre for Contemporary Culture we’ll present Spazi Docili [Docile Spaces] through audiovisual materials, we’ll tell about some of our interventions (like the assembling of the S.Orsola – Saint Ursula - statue, carried in procession and worshipped in the whole San Lorenzo Quarter – to draw attention to the S.Orsola monastery affair), we’ll state our opinion about the different models of public art.
And, above all, we’ll use half of our time for a dialogue with the public, which is for us the most valuable moment of a meeting. We are not interested in i re not interested inlic models of public art system and aesthetic languagesmonologues. Listening more than talking defines intellectuals and artists as such.
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The talk is part of a cycle of lectures and meetings arrangedganizzatiart of a cycle ofnes by Strozzina CCC (Palazzo Strozzi, Florence) during the exhibition Declining Democracy (open until January 22nd, 2012): works by twelve international contemporary artists to create a reflection on the values, contradictions and paradoxes that typify today’s society. The show further addresses the possible declinations of the principles of democracy, which recently is being challenged more and more. (www.strozzina.org).



Spazi Docili [Docile Spaces]

Florence is a brand. The stereotype, known all over the world, of a Renaissance city. Florence, however, is also the undisputed capital of Italian difficulties in understanding and dealing with ‘the contemporary’ and its relation with the past. Spazi Docili [Docile Spaces] is the answer to this disconcerting and exemplary situation in the form of a public art project.
The name, clearly referencing Michel Foucault, postulates the existence of spaces which are ‘docile’ to the ‘Power’ in which the incompetence of the Italian political-bureaucratic-administrative class takes a touchable, concrete form. That is why the specific areas we deal with look more like ‘ideologic concretions’ than buildings. It's interesting to observe how contemporary politics, visual arts, left wing crisis, collapse of any idea of ‘public’, predominance of the economic perspective in every field, connections to the international art system, inability to ‘read’ a space, etc, are inextricably tangled together in these places.

The project started in 2008 and has been conceived and curated by Christian Costa and Fabrizio Ajello. During these four years it has produced field surveys and drifts/dérives (focused mainly on the former Mechano-textile Complex, on the Sant'Orsola - Saint Ursula - former Monastery, on the Osmannoro area and on various other parts of the city of Florence), workshops, exhibitions and talks. We are not simply interested in the production of ‘oeuvres’ to put in the art market; we are engaging in participative processes, which are able to shape the way we live and help to build exciting bonds between the public and artistic practice.
Our field research is available on the ‘news’ page on our website: http://spazidocili.blogspot.com/

Excerpts from Spazi Docili [Docile Spaces]'s concept, fully published on our website:
“Abandoned, neglected, ignored city chunks. Historic buildings walled up, monumental gardens turned into wilderness, crumbling industrial infrastructures, culture places left to die. Here the ‘Power’, turned into unknowable otherness, observes us. The power to overlook or to restore, to change anyway the life of people. It’s not us who are looking at such spaces, but it’s them who are scanning us making us uncomfortable, overwhelming us. […]
Spazi docili [Docile Spaces] aims to explore the ways contexts like Florence deny their own stereotype of open, welcoming, rich, culturally dynamic cities. The exclusion from city life seems to be, for years by now, one of the preferred ways used by ruling classes to reveal their inaptitude to govern urban areas, to renovate them or even, to mark them with cultural policies.”

The project aims to reconnect Italian and Florentine art scenes to the international artistic debate. We dialogue and collaborate with – Italian and foreign - artists, projects and institutions interested in reflecting about interactions between public art, politics, art system and aesthetic languages (please refer to the website and to the Facebook page).