Network culture, Activism, and New Media Art in Italy (original) (raw)
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From Collectives to Connectives: Italian Media Activism and the Repurposing of the Social
The dissertation develops the concept of repurposing as a means for thinking with activists and the issues they confront. It moves alongside pirate television collective insu^tv as they draw on a variety of histories, traditions and technological resources for their practices. Repurposing functions on multiple levels and at multiple scales, from the recycling of materials and spaces to the harnessing and relaying of encounters and events within an ever-expanding field of social relations. When seen as a way of connecting activist groups and communities, the repurposing of media contributes to strengthening an often fragmented and conflicted activist field. Indeed, insu^tv’s use of information and technology brings to the fore the value of media activism for the creation of social assemblages in which the “media” literally mediates between individuals and among individuals and their environment, instituting and developing an ontogenetic relation (Simondon, 1989). Yet, rather than simply making sense of insu^tv’s practices, the concept of repurposing also provokes a discussion regarding the ethics of connection. For insu^tv, this connective ethics can be understood as a set of rules and principles that facilitate the evaluation of actions, communication, and thought according to an immanent mode of collective existence (Deleuze, 1988; Simondon, 1989). For the author, herself a member of insu^tv and an academic researcher, this immanent position helps challenge traditional models of knowing and envisioning social change and instead proposes alternatives that attend to the singularity and relation among new political movements, and to the political potential of research methods that focus on process and fold activism into academia. The methodology is inspired by the militant research methods of the Italian Autonomia movement (conricerca or inchiesta), as developed and performed by activists themselves. While attending to the complexity of social struggles, the concept of repurposing enables an approach to research and experimentation as modes of sociability, where these modes are themselves repurposed through an ethics of connection. This line informs the relation between ethics and subjectivation, as well as between ethics and micropolitics, facilitating the emergence of new modes of political action through the repurposing of the social field itself.
Solidarity and Social Engaged Art in 1970s Italy
Kristine Khouri and Rasha Salti (Eds.), Past Disquiet: Artists, International Solidarity, and Museums in Exile, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and University of Chicago Press., 2018
In 1978, twenty-eight Italian artists donated works to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) on the occasion of the International Art Exhibition for Palestine held in Beirut in the spring of the same year. As was the case with other artworks donated to the PLO by artists from countries around the world, many were said to have been destroyed during the bombing of the city during the Israeli invasion of 1982. Only pictures of the works, printed in the exhibition catalog, remain to testify to this act of international solidarity. Leafing through the pages dedicated to the Italian participants, one encounters oil paintings and drawings, etchings and graphics – some figurative, others displaying abstract forms. Most of the works were donated by artists who were less well-known internationally, and even to the Italian public of the time. Nevertheless, there are some recognizable names, such as those of realist painters Renato Guttuso and Ernesto Treccani, abstract artist Carla Accardi, and sculptor Giò Pomodoro – artists who came to the fore in the 1950s and 1960s, and were acknowledged as masters in the 1970s. Other, younger and lesser-known participants belonged to a network of artists who used to gather in Rome at the gallery Il Gabbiano – a promoter of neo-figurative, socially committed trends – or at the office and exhibition space of the collective L’Alzaia. This essay partly retraces the story and creative practice of this network of artists; however, a stylistic comparison or art-historical comment upon the works they produced and donated to the PLO in 1978 does not constitute its primary scope. Rather, it will try to unfold the rationale at the core of this gesture of international solidarity, and will expand on the concept of “solidarity” itself, as it was differently understood and put into practice by a number of Italian artists and collectives, but also by cultural institutions such as the Venice Biennale.
Matrix Activism: Media, Neoliberalism and Social Action in Italy
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Using the case of the Rome-based media group ZaLab, this article examines the articulations that shape and define the multiple dynamics of connected activism in contemporary societies. The first section engages the existing literature on convergence, commodity activism, and connectivity as theoretical frameworks of my analysis of ZaLab. The second section provides some context on the Italian mainstream and activist mediascapes, both of which shape ZaLab’s media practices. The last section examines a few specific examples of ZaLab’s productions and the activist campaign created to promote them. I conclude with some reflections on the nature of contemporary media practices as part of what I call “matrix activism.”
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This article analyses the relation between curatorial practice and political theory, through a recuperation and proposal of the philosophical work of Greek-French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis. In it, I will isolated the terms the radical imaginary and the radical imagination, and argue that their relation to curatorial practice is exemplified in the politics of cultural spaces that use autonomous social organisation as their means for artistic production. In his writings, specifically in his manuscript The Imaginary Institution of Society, Castoriadis uses the terms to describe the capacity of socialized human beings to rethink and criticize social structures, and sees the radical imaginary and the radical imagination as means of a radical social transformation towards autonomy, or rather towards autonomous social organisation. Within this framework, this article proposes a historical parallelism between three self-organised platforms for art and activism from Milan, such as Laboratorio di Comunicazione Militante, Isola Art Centre, and MACAO, arguing that they are three cases in which autonomous social organisation is a means for artistic and curatorial production. This historical parallelism, constructed around the concepts of the radical imaginary and the radical imagination, demonstrates how the work of Castoriadis is a valuable resource for contextualising and analysing processes politicization of artistic, curatorial and cultural practices. Based on his writings, this article wants to also highlight the importance of autonomous social organisation as a functional framework capable unpacking the complexity of the relation between artistic, curatorial and cultural practices and political and social activism.
Media, Culture & Society, 2014
This article examines the role of discourses about new media technology and the web in the rise of the 5-Star Movement (Movimento 5 Stelle, or M5S) in Italy. Founded by comedian and activist Beppe Grillo and web entrepreneur Gianroberto Casaleggio in 2009, this movement succeeded in becoming the second largest party at the 2013 national elections in Italy. This article aims to discuss how elements of digital utopia and web-centric discourses have been inserted into the movement’s political message, and how the construction of the web as a myth has shaped the movement’s discourse and political practice. The 5-Star Movement is compared and contrasted with other social and political movements in western countries which have displayed a similar emphasis on new media, such as the Occupy movement, the Indignados movement, and the Pirate Parties in Sweden and Germany. By adopting and mutating cyber-utopian discourses from the so-called Californian ideology, the movement symbolically identifies itself with the web. The traditional political establishment is associated with “old” media (television, radio, and the printed press), and represented as a “walking dead,” doomed to be superseded and buried by a web-based direct democracy.