Representations of everyday life in İnci Eviner’s We, Elsewhere: comedy, use and free will (original) (raw)

« The Theatricality of Exhibition Spaces. Fluid Spectatorship into Hybrid Places », in Anglistica AION 20.2 (2016)

Arts are permeable. The current museographical approach seems to go towards a form of interdisciplinarity which leverages the encounter between arts. From the MAXXI in Rome to the Louvre of Paris, to the National Gallery in London, this interaction between different art fields (dance, theatre, music, etc.), gives rise to new aesthetic proposals. Choreographed exposition and exhibited choreography are the rendition of this kind of negotiation between visual art, museum spaces, and performing arts, which sets up the spectatorship dialectic between temporal and spatial dynamics. Within a migration process, from the black box to the white cube, the theatrical body becomes a work of art, through a process of objectivation. Likewise, spectators participation is choreographed, as well as the very act of observation. The exhibition space loses its structural and statutory hierarchies, becoming a hybrid place, a meta-theatre and simultaneously a meta-museum. Points of view change; the frontal perspective of the theatrical or cinematographic architectures, and the Renaissance monocular gaze disappear. That is a contemporary dynamic of creolization for which, within an exhibition context, the spectator’s enjoyment meets with a theatrical approach, becoming a critical device of transcultural mediation.

“Out our home” Tel Quel: An opinion on the Albanian Pavillion in the Venice Biennale 2021

Forum A+P: Interdisciplinary Journal of Architecture and Built Environment/Science and the City. In the Era of Paradigm Shifts, 2021

In this year’s Venice Biennale, the Albanian pavilion named “In our home” proposed a notion of neighbourliness that presumably existed “less than 20 years ago,” yet one that has now disappeared as a result of “diving deep in the waters of globalization” and moving “toward an isolated indiference and uncertainty.”1 By ‘peeking sneakily’ at such reality through clips of “In our home” (“Në shtëpinë tonë”) – a rather consummated cinematographic totem of our communist quotidian anthropology, the pavilion invites us “to cross [the walls of our globalist apartment] and rediscover the gift of this bond2 .” Such crossing is ‘scripted’ through a pinwheel axonometric composition, in which four neighboring apartments “share a “[‘secret’] space that can only come to life if the neighbors are willing to make the discovery.”3 Some inconsistencies notwithstanding, like the association of a communist era flm with the wrong periodization of “20 years ago” (which should be like more than 30 years…), o...

Art as Encounter , Part of the Publication Being Public, Valiz 2017

In this essay I will discuss the specific nature of art practices in which the artist and his audience are moving away from the more traditional relationship in which the artist merely displays his art in museums or public spaces. The practices I am writing about consist of intimate and personal processes made possible by the grace of the artistic space that is separating itself from the coded space around it. In these practices the public takes on a different role than that of the passive spectator. The involvement of the public in what art is and can be becomes part of the experience. This turns art into something to be a part of rather than something that is simply handed over to you. More specifically, these art practices allow for a time and site-specific situated form of co-ownership, through which the artistic environment created by the artist becomes the condition for experiencing new ideas and insights. In relation to theatre, the French philosopher Jacques Rancière (1940-) writes in The Emancipated Spectator (2015) about “a theater without an audience” that “no longer tempts with its images but teaches the audience something that turns them into active participants rather than passive voyeurs”. (Rancière 2015: 9-10) These practices are not new. New is perhaps the shift of focus from public participation in processes of interaction towards developing a theatrical space that not only makes other types of expression possible, but also taking on other roles and with that, other perspectives. This notion will therefore be the main focus of this text. Whereas Jacques Rancière talks about the aesthetic space (Rancière 2007) because of its emphasis on sharing the sensory (le partage du sensible), in the case of situated art I’d rather talk about the theatrical or artistic space, indicating a space that corresponds to the domain of the arts. But one can also speak of a staged space, a space that has been constructed and is thus able to separate itself from the space around it. In any case, it is important that this space not only mobilises the senses but also the will to act.

Cultural encounters in accessible spaces: Porticoes in Bologna

PROCEEDINGS MARSEILLE, FRANCE, 17/18 OCTOBER 2013 UNEECC FORUM VOLUME 6 ISSN: 2068-2123, 2013

All the changes in today's urbanization plannings seem to be connected with trends in globalization, time-space compression and media infiltration, resulting in the alteration of the surfaces of urban setting. These trends of transformation increasingly span all sectors of the human activities practiced in horizontal spaces or vertical features. Historically, the cultural manifestations and the uses of space have always been characterized and shaped by architectural design. In dynamic and globalized societies, horizontal space and vertical icons are materializing new urban spatialities so that they require new formulation of urban definitions, as well as new conceptual models and methodological approaches. In this paper, the relation between horizontal spaces and cultural encounters is analyzed for understanding what kind of multiculturalism is occurring in Piazza Verdi, sited in the medieval center of Bologna, where the Alma Mater Studiorum University is located. It is renowned that Bologna's vertical spaces have been marked by towers, which are the symbols of the power. In Piazza Verdi, these high towers can be easily detected, but here the urban planning is also featured by horizontal spaces like porticoes and squares. These low spaces allow a free and very simple access for everybody: students, workers, tourists, city users, immigrants. Indeed, Bologna is characterized by accessibility, because of its geographical position and transports network (trains and highways); its image is very positive, as argued by a recent research which studies Bologna brand. According to this study, horizontality is the prevalent image of the city; people like to walk down the porticoes where they can make interesting encounters and where the words are retained by silence. Porticoes seem to be architectural mediators-between outside and inside-so that they could involve different cultures. They introduce to squares which are exploited by different people who share common life, myths and style. Horizontal spaces could then define a sense of community in Piazza Verdi. Actually several cultures are here simply juxtaposed, but not really melted. This one is a problematic area, in which different identities and cultures share the same horizontal space, struggling to impose their own territorial behavior against other cultures, but also against the traditional powers whose architectural symbols are high and vertical spaces, like towers, University palaces and Theater, which surround the same square.

A Theatre of Many Dimensions: the Italian New Spectacularity and the Inhabitable Image (Theatre Journal, Volume 67, Number 4, December 2015, pp. 625-642)

This essay investigates the use of space in the Italian New Spectacularity of the early 1980s; in particular, it takes as its subject some of the early productions of two companies, La Gaia Scienza (Rome) and Falso Movimento (Naples). In these works the use of theatrical space creates an “inhabitable image”—an image invested in continuously illuminating and crossing between the properties of two- and three-dimensionality, between the properties of real and unreal space. In analyzing these works, the essay explores the resonances between the inhabitable image and the languages of site-specific, intermedial, and immersive practices. It then threads the concept of inhabitability through Fredric Jameson’s views on postmodern spatialization, and asks whether these performances could be seen as taking creative advantage of what he describes as a “bewilderment” of the spectator. It concludes with some hypotheses regarding the utopian impulse behind the inhabitable image: the transformed space of the theatre is likened to similar transformations in architecture to wonder whether, although in both fields certain experiments were regarded as fanciful, they were expressions of a kind of utopian thought which, however soft or weak, may still hold political potential.

Flipping the Exhibition Inside Out: Enrico Crispolti’s Show Ambiente come Sociale at the 1976 Venice Biennale

Journal On Biennials and Other Exhibitions, 2020

In 1976, art historian and curator Enrico Crispolti-charged with organizing the show, Ambiente come Sociale, for the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale-radically rethought the exhibition form. In an unconventional move, he strategically chose not to house any artworks within the confines of the gallery space. Instead, he sprawled documentary photographs, videos, texts, pamphlets, and audio recordings on tables like the products of field research. The artworks themselves were site-specific and located elsewhere in various towns and cities across the country. Adhering to the Biennale's overarching theme of environment and decentralization, Crispolti championed artists working in Arte Ambientale (environmental art), who were making art located in the urban context and social reality. Yet, Crispolti turned the institution's theme inside out: while visitors came to its center to see the art, they were thrust outwards towards the peripheries, and outside in the city, where the actual artworks were sited. The ingenuity of this action, and the re-conception of what could constitute installation art, is evident when Crispolti's exhibition is compared to Germano Celant's 1976 Biennale show Ambiente/Arte, a diachronic art historical study of this new art medium. While Celant presented self-referential examples based on formal qualities, Crispolti exponentially broadened the boundaries of installation art to include the environment, urban context, social questions, and political contingency. This paper examines Crispolti's curato-rial strategy as it aligned, but also critiqued, the Biennale as a cultural institution. Furthermore, it frames the exhibition as a medium for artistic innovation, particularly in the definition of environment and installation art.

let it unfold — performative exhibitions: the living interior of the austrian pavilion at expo milan 2015

fictions, fantasies, and fabulations: imagining other interior worlds , 2022

This essay explores the relationship between fantasy, fabulation, and the performative through the lens of exhibition design in general and, in particular, expo pavilions. While studying the case of the Austrian pavilion visited by the author during Expo Milan 2015, it further examines the repertoire of the performative as a spatial fabulation indicator. Furthermore, the essay proposes a dramaturgy of analytical tools that interpret the exhibition space as a metaphor of a fantasy-oriented spatial production, and as an illustration of a performative interior architecture opening newer perspectives through which we may study and analyse interiors. cite as:Kassem, Ayman, ‘Let it Unfold — Performative Exhibitions: the Living Interior of the Austrian Pavilion at Expo Milan 2015’, idea journal, 19, no. 01 (2022), 93–108, https://doi.org/10.37113/ij.v19i01.481keywords:fabulation, exhibitions, performative, unscripted, unfolding, eventlet it unfold — performative exhibitions: the living interior of the austrian pavilion at expo milan 2015