Francesco Urbano Ragazzi
Prima Visione
Travelling Southwards
Galleria Nazionale di Palazzo Arnone, Cosenza.
10, 11, 14 Dec. 2012
A public talk organized by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi with the participation of Marina Fokidis, Miltos Manetas, Akram Zaatari.
South is an unfailing topic. If you would like to fully understand the meaning of it, you should go as south as you can. The problem is that there is always something to the south of us. We can just use South as a coordinate for our travel instead, without claiming to reach a centre or an end.
Akram Zaatari, Marina Fokidis and Miltos Manetas are the fellow traveller toward south of Prima Visione – the residency program hosted by Galleria Nazionale di Cosenza. The three international guests will try to translate the idea of South from a simple geographical category to a state of existence, during three public lectures.
The first appointment will be on Monday 10th December at 5 pm with Akram Zaatari, who has been selected to represent Lebanon at the 2013 Venice Biennale. Co-founder of the Arab Image Foundation, he investigates the Middle East media history through survey and disparate media tools: from old photographic films to YouTube videos. The main focus of his work is to define Arab masculinity and its conflict between simmering violence and love. In this occasion, through a screening of his latest works, Akram Zaatari will show how images and their diffusion can contribute to change a whole society.
The 11th of December at 5 pm will be the turn of Marina Fokidis, independent curator and director of Kunsthalle Athena. The Kunsthalle Athena is a no-profit institution, founded in 2010 and based in a suburban area of Athens. Its mission is to connect contemporary art to social contexts and to create methods of cultural co-production. The format used for the Kunsthalle will be presented by Marina Fokidis to show how an institutional space could be inclusive, plastic and generative in spite of the economical crisis. The curator will speak also about South, an art magazine “aiming at contaminating the whole world with the infamous southern stereotypes and ideas”.
The 14th of December at 4 pm last lecture will be attended by the artist Miltos Manetas who has a key role in the multimedia art and culture, driving projects like the Neen Group, Internet Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and the ElectronicOrphanage. In the artistic path of Manetas the creation of temporary communities in and offline has grown as much as his interest in painting. His speech will be about the Middle South, an open, geographic, ethical and aesthetic category theorized by himself.
