Un/Certain Space:
A series of Interviews about
Online Art Residencies.
(Pt.3: New Scenario and 63rd-77th STEPS)
The third and closing part of Un/Certain Space interview series brings you New Scenario, a project initiated by Paul Barsch and Tilman Hornig which have established an online ground for exploring alternative forms of curation and 63rd-77th STEPS, a hybrid project run by artist Fabio Santacroce which hosts site-specific exhibitions, online and off-site projects based in his hometown Bari.
How did the idea for New Scenario come about?
The idea arose in the process of the preparation of our first project CRASH which we curated with our friend Burkhard Beschow. We were looking for an adequate format or framework to present this exhibition, so we created the platform New Scenario. Out of deliberations concerning the making and presentation of CRASH, as well as former exhibition experiments and new ideas, we started to fill this platform with follow-up exhibitions.
New Scenario offers different grounds of experimentation for artists, blurring the boundaries between the online and offline duplexity. What importance do you think New Scenario takes when providing this kind of dialogue between the artist, the viewer, and the curator?
The constructed online and offline duplexity has never been a concern or boundary to us. We use an easy accessible online infrastructure to present the exhibition projects and use different apps and technologies to produce them, but we also like to shape things with our hands and build physical things. It’s all just different modes of working that require different skill sets. We experiment with ideas, formats and presentation, and likewise each artist experiments with their own work, materials and so on. There is not really a collaborative experimentation ground in our projects in a micro sense. Experimentation takes place on individual levels in different stages of the process. In most cases the executive part of the production is very specific and leaves only little space for experimentation. We have had artists invited to produce works towards a specific or imagined setting (see BODYHOLES) where they had to experiment within their individual practice towards the dimensions of human orifices. Collaborative experimentation with work and settings have mostly not been doable due to the production process and peculiarities of the projects. RESIDENCY was the only collaborative project, which approached the format of the residency and exhibition space in an experimental way.
We hope that through experimentation with exhibition formats and presentation of art we can shape and influence the way in which artists, viewers and curators approach art and exhibitions and open them up for artistic encounters and joyful interactions. …
What has been your most difficult project to set up so far and why?
The last two bigger projects BODYHOLES and HOPE have been the most difficult, in terms of preparation, organization and production. Mainly because there have been a lot of artists and people involved. Both of these projects took almost a year from preparation to presentation.
How do you envision the future of art documentation?
Whereas now the most prominent actor in documentation is the flat image, it will probably get much more invasive and immersive if we end up living with virtual or augmented realities. The shift back from the flat image to a quasi physical space will happen, but without losing all of the former stages and presentational fragments of an artwork. Old and new forms of documentation will exist in parallel to each other and for different purposes. The most interesting question is whether we can shape the documentation to be interesting and challenging.
Are you already preparing something for the next chapter of New Scenario? Could you give us a glimpse of what you have in mind?
Yes, we always prepare new projects:). We´re constantly discussing and negotiating ideas and possible projects. Once in a while one of us throws out a new idea, and then we keep talking about it, cancel it, begin thinking about it again, transform it, work on it. Is it a good idea at all? Or how could this be done and what does it need to make it work? Is it relevant? Does it create impact? Does it fit in with the other New Scenario projects? Is it a good project to do now, or should we come back to it later?… We keep talking about all these different ideas until we feel that we have found the best possible solution and feel that it makes sense and that it’s the right time to do it and worth doing it … and then we start producing. Some ideas have been with us since we started New Scenario. But to come back to the question: we mostly keep this process hidden. Unless a project addresses the process. We think it’s more magical if the viewer is excluded from production and is only able to experience the finished product. We try to stay unpredictable. New Scenario emerged out of a need to escape the boredom of status quo art presentation, so we have to stay awake and not fall into the trap of predictability and thus the same boredom. Freshness, openness, unpredictability, and overcoming one’s own taste is crucial in order to create something relevant.
And what will your future plans for New Scenario be?
Keep on pushing boundaries and challenging what art and its presentation can be, will be and can become. Blur everything. To free art and defend art from the limited, stubborn human mind and perception. Art is ungovernable. Stay unpredictable!™ 😉
63rd-77th STEPS — Interview by Attilia Fattori Franchini
Fabio Santacroce is an Italian artist living and working in Bari. His latest research focuses on the exploration of distribution platforms and circulation methodologies, analysing visual relationships among online and offline contexts. Since 2014, Santacroce has been running 63rd-77th STEPS, a hybrid entity hosting site-specific exhibitions, online and off-site projects in his hometown Bari. The name refers to the final part of a multi-floor staircase (the area between the 63rd and the 77th step) inside the building where the artist lives. The eclectic programme, launched in a public domestic environment in the provincial Southern Italian city, focuses on exchange and conversation using the digital experience as a vehicle for collective transformation.
AFF: How did you start the project 63rd-77th STEPS?
FS: 63rd-77th STEPS has been a sort of side effect to the isolation and to several failed attempts to set up artistic projects through institutions and other mediators. I was feeling the need to articulate my practice and turn it into a shared experience. This necessity took form specifically in the decentralized artistic area of my hometown Bari. The project’s format solicits the city’s most gritty and sub-cultural streak, while subverting every possibility of romantization. 63rd-77th STEPS investigates the limits and potentialities of the periphery, redefining its spatial and temporal framework within a hyper-connected, hegemonic geography.
AFF: How did you choose the staircase of a building as site for art? In which way does it relate to your work as an artist?
FS: I’ve always wanted to turn this segment of staircase into a project space dedicated to contemporary art. Initially, I thought the strong domestic connotation of the space would prevail
visually but the works placed created enough friction, the right mixture of rawness and poetry. This residual space, with all its limits and its working class ethos, was the perfect set to stage that exacerbated mood and obstinate adolescent excitement, which usually inform my work. Far from being just the umpteenth, odd art location, 63rd-77th STEPS is rather a tension, a reaction to the deceptions and paralysis that we are historically forced to deal with.
AFF: The programme has featured international artists and curators, expanding visually and critically in different directions. Its focus is a new cognitive capacity brought in visual discourse by the advent of digital technology mixed to an interest towards the local settings and the Southern Italy territory. Can you tell me more about it?
FS: I focused on the most recent pop/conceptual practices that investigate and re-configure our present in a curious way, stimulating transversal assimilations of the contemporary, at the same time activating a witty visual dialogue with this ordinary location placed in a popular neighbourhood. This specific environment, subtly imbued with discursive and visual potential, was somehow already linked to the practices of the artists involved and perfectly lent itself to a progressive redefinition of its marginality. The first part of the programme consisted of site-specific solo exhibitions, physically installed on this peculiar staircase, strongly characterised by a retro-vintage architecture and red-brown varnish. The new programme includes off-site and online projects, meant as an extension of the physical and symbolic space. I like to think of 63rd-77th STEPS, as a visual, cultural and critical stance rather than a confined, static place, whose physical and virtual dimension is constantly switching, as well as its artistic and curatorial approach.
AFF: I am very interested in this multi-layered structure you mentioned, thinking of 63rd-77th STEPS as a project existing in different formats and directions. Do you see it as a necessity when operating in a decentralised location, or just a more interesting way to engage with certain artistic positions?
FS: It responds to needs and interests as well as linking to my artistic attitude – to deconstruct the spectacle and employ dilettantism and auto-sufficiency as a critical tool to engage with the discriminatory professionalization and elitism of the art. I operate across sculpture, installation, web art and curatorial practice. My research scrutinizes the politics of power structures, the cultural entertainment and the relationship between an official mainstream culture and its derivative subcultures. The on-line and off-site activities emphasize and dematerialize the residuality of 63rd-77th STEPS. For the online section, the artists are invited to explore and experience the space at a distance, without any physical involvement.
On the other hand, with the off-site programme, the staircase pours out into its urban surrounding and attunes itself to the institutional and other spaces around Bari and Internationally.
AFF: What has been the response of the city, how online and offline relate in this context?
FS: Beyond the physical audience that constantly follows and supports the activity, 63rd-77th STEPS has moulded an online local audience, which might sound paradoxical. Every physical exhibition is “instantly” transferred into the website, which is conceived more as a parallel fruition space than a mere documentary tool. I’ve pushed and insisted a lot on this simultaneous transposition as an active ground for visual and cognitive experience. This constitutes the main newness and challenge in the local artistic scene as it triggers, for the first time here, new processes of art production, distribution and fruition. It requires a certain effort to be fully understood and perceived as a proper exhibition format, alongside the pre-existing commercial and institutional venues.
AFF: How did your building and the local neighbours engage with the programme? What has changed since you started?
FS: The funniest part is related to my neighbours that generously allowed me to set up the project on our common staircase, inside this typical Southern Italian building. Although totally unaware of any contemporary art, they supported and enjoyed it, but are still waiting for me to hang up paintings to recognize it as a proper exhibition space. It’s been a mutual exchange, based on simple gestures that also let the necessity of caring for the common space to emerge. The neighbourhood is a special social dimension related to most of the Southern cities, especially in the popular districts; a necessary and maybe an inevitably forced resource that still preserves a human interaction based on generosity, support and sharing. In a system of ever-shifting hierarchies that is over-legitimized, self complacent and cynical, 63rd-77th STEPS remarks on the importance of shaping your own space of privilege and criticality.
AFF: I perceive 63rd-77th STEPS as dealing with quite opposite elements, as local focus and international programme, domestic and exhibition space, online and offline, collectivity and individualism. Do you feel these elements as present?
FS: They are totally present. As previously mentioned, my practice deals with a kind of duality and interchangeability; it seeks frictions, interferences. Domesticity has always played an important role in my work. I explore it in its intimate and sculptural dimension and approach it as a marker of social status and as a crucial, active receptor of political and technological transformation. Internet burst into our houses and altered the perception and the mediation of the outside world, effecting our domestic living and its routine.
63rd-77th STEPS owes its name from a precise spatial parameter confined to 15 steps, but acts fluidly and exposes its marginality to the service of an exponential investigation in which, physical and virtual, high and low, exhibitionism and intimacy flow into each other. It dwells in a traditional domestic environment where the art practice is economically unfeasible but wears an exuberant mainstream dress. It adheres to a hyper digitized world but refuses its glorification.
AFF: What are the main challenges you encountered with 63rd-77th STEPS?
FS: I would say the same difficulties and frenzies that are usually ascribed to Art, increased by the specific difficult national climate.
O Fluxo with Paul Barsch and Tilman Hornig, New Scenario
http://www.newscenario.net/
& by Attilia Fattori Franchini with Fabio Santacroce, 63rd-77th STEPS
http://www.63rd77thsteps.com/
OFluxo © 2018
