Postgraduate Programme in Curating presents
Curatorial Practice: Fucking Good Art
On the basis of our latest book Italian Conversations - Art in the Age of Berlusconi, we will outline some ideas and experiences about how the network, or as the Italians say, Archipelago of privately organized art spaces in Italy operates, and how this is becoming a new ecosystem. In Italy the lack of a public infrastructure for the presentation and production of contemporary art and discourse is pressing people to self-organise and to find new solutions, in- and outside the market, creating a network and a scene build out of the existing little islands.
Italian Conversations - Art in the Age of Berlusconi, was presented in spring 2012 in Rome and Rotterdam. It is a reflection, on an itinerant residency that the artists held in Italy in 2011, and that brought them to 7 different cities/territories in Italy, where they were introduced to the scene by a 'cicerone', a knowledgable guide.
"Interestingly, the invitation from Nomas Foundation in Rome to give an outsider view on the Italian situation, was based on Nomas' interpretation of our previous issues: The Swiss Issue and International edition Berlin. Rather than simply presenting the perspective of outsiders, our idea was to involve our seven partners in the editorial process to create a dialogue of perspectives."
Short bio
Dutch artists and non-academic free-style researchers Rob Hamelijnck and Nienke Terpsma are best known as editors of Fucking Good Art, a travelling artists' magazine or editorial project for research in-and-through art. It is also sometimes described as a 'zine' published both on paper and online. In the past, the artists settled for shorter or longer periods in, among other places, Munich, Berlin, Dresden, Copenhagen, Riga, Basel, Zurich, São Paulo, Brussels, Tbilisi, and Italy-to make editions on the basis of the local context and in a constantly changing collective of makers and thinkers.
The magazine's editorial approach and other projects are closely linked to oral history, anthropology, documentary film, and investigative journalism. They are interested in self-organisation and DIY strategies, art and activism, resistance and anarchism.
From beginning of February to end of April the artists and editors of Fucking Good Art 'escape to Switzerland', where they found temporary cultural asylum in the Embassy of Foreign Artists in Genève. They will use this shelter from the chilly cultural weather of budget cuts and closing institutes in the Netherlands, to study the hisstory and principles of anarchism and self-organisation, and work on their new project, a series of small publications under the title The Countryside Issue.
Postgraduate Programme in Curating CAS/ MAS ZHdK