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On June 29 2007 the results of the collective occupation "Associados" was presented in an event, in a
great collaborative banquet. As a machine to produce poesis that receives the anarchic input from a flexible group and
transforms it through interpersonal processes in an artistic experiment, an aesthetic experience.
The "opening", in fact, represented the end of the experiment. As if the classic notion of "vernissage" (the moment when the finished paintings are varnished). At the opening event the "work" reaches it most intense momentum with the addition of a further element to the process: the public. At this point, it also interacts with the exhibitory standards with its rules and role distribution.
The project was created and developed by a provisory artists community (including Roberto Cabot) starting from a collaboration proposal by the carioca artist group Opavivará and Rio based artist Ricardo Ventura. The community included groups and individuals. The first associations called up further collaborations that produced a sort of "momentum" resulting from the apparently random interactions that were flowing throughout the period of production.
At this point, the relation between the processes induced by the configuration of the "Associated" event with its human "protocols" and the exchange and production methods in major networks like the Internet is obvious. The construction attained a necessary critical mass so to allow an autonomous dynamic inside of an open network of individuals.
At the very beginning of the project, which was actually a series of informal meetings of qualitatively and quantitatively variable, the question of how to present a certain number of artist in a defined space without either falling in the tautology of a common curatorial attitude (specially among artists) nor into the hippie fantasy of the "anything goes". In other words, how to establish a selection without an "individual curatorial will", how to create a coherent body without "target groups", without pre-established narrative or literary-conceptual thematic?
The agreed strategy was very characteristic for a group with a core of "cariocas" (residents of Rio de Janeiro).
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Versão brasileira
It was decided to bet on the organicity of relationships and encounters creating obligatory conditions that imposed naturally some rules and dynamics.
For instance, it was decided that 2 meetings a week would be hold in the next 6 weeks until the "opening". This regularity marked presences and absences, so that who was more regularly around had naturally more participation, more space. Like permanently shake sediments the participation of each agent was translated by its presence and input. Her/his contributions as ideas, energy or simple sympathy did cumulate to shape the "collective occupation", creating process spontaneous filters through compatibilities and impossibilities. In practice there were many more than 2 meetings per week.
There were parties, dinners, cleaning sessions, working sessions. The population changed constantly, people coming and going, still building rapidly a core. All interventions came to form in discussions, thanks to a dynamic of interaction through dialogue and collaboration. Numerous protocols of the usual "exhibition making" are left aside in this experience. Starting with the disintegration of the triangle artist-curator-public, as there is not an individual curatorial project of management of the poetic potential of the artists. The conception itself of "exhibition" as a show of specimen in a museum for Natural History or in the logic of "mama, watch what I've done!" based on ego-marketing strategies stayed far away from this happening. The conception of a show as the expression of the vision of a curator also does not apply to this situation. The distribution of the work in space itself happened in the flow of the diverse interactions (sometimes in the form of conflicts) without determinism by a signature or a target.
And finally the already beaten concept of authorship gets annulated by the intrinsic collective and anarchic process, getting territorialization inside of a superposition of territories a rather difficult exercise. Rio de Janeiro, September 2007
View video register of the happening (English subtitles)
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As personal contribution, Roberto Cabot invited a professional call-girl for a public talk about contemporary art and
culture in general during the opening night. The happening was registered in video under the title "I Love Nietzsche" and has its origin in talks during the meetings on participative strategies in art and historical roots of this sort of processes. We obviously came to talk about Beuys. The happening that ended up being called "I Love Nietzsche" was an experiment about those talks. As the idea came to transform Beuys performance "How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare" (1965) in a tropical synchretic hybrid, replacing attributes, as the rabbit by a prostitute. Someone mentioned Roberta, a call-girl that used to go to openings. We invited her for a meeting and she agreed on a participation. The result was "I love Nietzsche". The title refers to a sentence of Roberta, where she explains that Nietzsche is fundamental to her relationship to clients as a model to undestand and impose power. The talks go from considerations on the queston of identity, referring to Fernando Pessoa and the dilema of the insertion and participation of contemporary art in society. |
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