Manifesta Diary, Part 1: Rovereto and FortezzaPosted by artreview.com on 22 July 2008 at 11:30am

By Laura McLean-Ferris

'It's happening', announces the invitation to Manifesta 7. This is a cheerful fact not to be taken for granted after a fouryear absence – Manifesta 6, the 2006 edition, was to be held in the divided city of Nicosia in Cyprus, but was cancelledafter the divisions between the Turkish and Greek halves of the island proved too wide to be bridged by an artexhibition. Known for reinvention, Manifesta this year spans 130km and four mountain towns of Italy's stunning SouthTyrol: Rovereto, Trento, Bolzano/Bozen and Fortezza/Franzenfeste.

View from the train / Ricardo Jacinto, Labyrithitis, 2007, in the courtyard of the Manifattura Tabacchi in Rovereto

Three curatorial teams take a town each: Adam Budak (Rovereto), Anselm Franke and Hila Peleg (Trento), and theRaqs Media Collective (Bolzano/Bozen), with the teams collaborating on an exhibition in the fortress at Fortezza. Thisstructure, it would seem, allows for a deeper level of engagement with the area, taking in several types of sites andhistories rather than focusing on one or two. It also seems to circumvent the dubious artworld 'swamping' thatbiennales tend to inspire, where we all sweep into town for a few days, then promptly disappear.

Rovereto, population 35,000, is the teeniest town ever to host a Manifesta exhibition since the operation began in1996. The venue for Adam Budak's Principle Hope is the Manifattura Tabacchi, an ex-tobacco factory built in 1854, anddecommissioned only a few months ago. As I walk into the factory's courtyard, I'm offered some of Tim Etchells' 'ArtFlavours' Ice Cream. From a selection of The Body, Memory, The Spectacle and The Archive, I go for the latter, whichtastes of peach and strawberry, and makes an adequate breakfast.

In the centre of the factory's courtyard is a giant cloud of black helium balloons with a trapeze bar hanging from it, onwhich we are invited to experiment jumping and landing with a 'soft fall' (hanging from the balloons diminishes yourweight by about 35kg). As the guide would have it, playing like this explores the 'decline of modernist utopias and theprecariousness of political balance'. These first offerings set the tone for this surprising exhibition, which utilisescelebration and physicality to investigate hope, both abandoned and enduring.

Christian Philipp Müller's float featuring the American and Russian spaceships Apollo and Sojuz / Müller's Carro Largo, 2008

A float by Christian Philipp Müller, carrying cartoon-style spaceships, waits outside the factory, ready for a paradethrough the streets of Rovereto later in the morning. The piece draws on two sources: the work of Italian FuturistFortunato Depero, who built a float for a factory parade in the 1930s, and an image on a packet of ApolloSojuzcigarettes that he found in the factory on a site visit earlier in the year. The packet depicts the 1975 space rendezvousbetween the American and Russian spaceships Apollo and Sojuz. This astonishing feat became a symbol for thebeginning of the end of the Cold War, and Müller has created a project about it including installations, archives andparades involving locals.

Miks Mitrevics, Collection of Persons (detail), 2007 / Guido van der Werve, Nummer Acht: Everything is going to be alright, 2007

In another installation in the courtyard, this one three-storeys high, Latvian artist Miks Mitrevics has positioned cut-outfigures from personal photos in tiny dioramas, like the beach scene above, lit by desk lamps and underscored withbirdsong. Higher up in the installation, there's a video in which Mitrevics films himself climbing a mountain. With onlyfour minutes of video time on his camera, he returned every day over several weeks, climbing back up to where hefinished the day before, then going on for an additional four minutes each day – another celebration, well-suited to thismountainous region, of clambering struggle and piecemeal progress.

Other works present the mistakes of the past as monuments to lost hope. Vietnamese artist Danh Vo exhibits Lettersfrom Henry Kissinger to Broadway columnist Leonard Lyons, thanking him for tickets to shows such as Hello Dolly, andfeaturing dispiriting lines like 'I would choose your ballets over contemplation of Cambodia any day – if only I weregiven the choice.'

Pianist Guido van der Werne's hypnotically simple film Everything is going to be alright, in which he walks in front of anicebreaker, offers a cryptic but economic parable on grinding progress and imminent annihilation, and expresses the

sentiment found in many corners of this tabbachi: examine past mistakes and then try to find some way forward.

This exhibition sprawls. It's in at least three sites across town, including the railway station, and features guestcurators as well as Budak. Despite the occasional disjointedness, there are many very good pieces by unfamiliar artists,and I admire the show’s hopeful spirit – so rare in exhibitions I've seen recently – as well as its rough-and-readyrambling and genuine engagement with the town, the site and the community.

The fortress at Fortezza / Gdansk's campaign to host the next Manifesta

In Fortezza the next morning I'm treated to another unusual breakfast, this one a gift from the city of Gdansk, topersuade us that the Polish port town should host Manifesta 8 in 2010. Gdansk, you have my support!

Scenarios, the collaborative exhibition that brings together the Manifesta's three curatorial teams, is a slow, sombreand silent affair, resistant to instant immersion, and could not be more different from the shouting, singing, dancingRovereto. At the press conference we are asked to be silent as we make our way through the fortress, the better toconcentrate on the sound-based work that forms the majority of the exhibition. Not much to see here – except thefortress itself, which was built in the 1830s in the wake of the Napoleonic wars, but has never seen active service. Itsraison d'etre remains unfulfilled. It's like an excessively large blister of 'what if?' that has bubbled up on the landscape,informing the curatorial premise of possible future and historical scenarios.

Timo Kahlen, Swarm, 2008 / Listening to Arundhati Roy's The Briefing, 2008

As well as the invisible sound works, a few subtle interventions have been made to the site, including Swarm by TimoKahlen, a sealed metal box in which we can hear bees getting increasingly agitated. Calling to mind an army chargingitself up for battle, or a population exploding, the sound of the angry bees encased in their chamber also prefigures theexhibition that meets us inside the fortress: the low hum of fear and aggression encased in the thick walls.

As well as inviting practitioners from the world of design and theatre, the curators also asked 10 writers to respond tothe fortress, and each text has been transformed into a sound piece. The specificity of this project is its strength. InArundhati Roy's The Briefing (2008), the narrator interrogates the fortress ('fear must have shaped it'), asking how aregion reliant on ski tourism will cope with the decreasing snowfall of recent years. Mladen Dolar's The Voice and theFortress explores, via Beckett, the idea of the voice as a fluid force that can exist in a small membrane between theoutside and inside.

While listening to a range of ruminations on the building itself, its place as a symbol of desire motivated by its secrets(locals were not allowed into the fortress until very recently), its treasures (the fortress held gold during World War II)and its fantastical fears of invasion, the only place to look is at the fortress itself, which comes to stand, in some ofthese works, for Europe itself: an increasingly impenetrable construction whose meaning continues to flux and flicker.

Inside the fortress / Michael Snow, So Is This, 1982, still

The silent film programme, on five screens in one large barn-like room, is excellent, especially Michael Snow's So IsThis (1982), which flashes single words onto a black screen, talking to an audience in a very intimate and captivatingway about filmmaking, censorship and speech. Respite (2007), by Harun Farocki, is a horrifically detailed analysis (viaintertitles) of footage of Westerbork, a transit camp in Holland for Jews being shipped to Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz,taken by the prisoner Rudolf Breslauer under Nazi orders. There is no need to ask the audience to be silent here.Opposite, Karg Goldt's film Bouquet is 100 minutes long, and shows the reduction of a bunch of flowers to its mostbasic visual form: colour, which slowly shimmers, murmurs and changes, like a speeded up passage of time.

Stay awhile and listen. Though this part of the exhibition necessitates slowing down and paying attention tounderstated interventions, there are precious moments of illumination. Philippe Rahm's subtle light installation, ClimateUchronia (2008) mimics the daylight conditions that would exist in a world without greenhouse gases, imagining adifferent, parallel present. On this exhibition site, though barely perceptible, are the sounds and sites of the past,present and possible futures for Europe, and here are moments in which Scenarios stuns, albeit quietly.

Source: http://www.artreview.com/profiles/blog/show?id=1474022%3ABlogPost%3A359334

Manifesta Diary, Part 2: Bolzano and TrentoPosted by artreview.com on 24 July 2008 at 12:30pm

By Shumon Basar

The historical fragility – and fuzziness – of Europe abounds in Bolzano, the second venue of Manifesta 7 (if you'reheading south from the Fortress at Fortezza/Franzenfeste). The town's Austrian history is audible today in its German-and Italian-speaking locals. Mussolini made it a priority to overwrite the Germanic history, and as a result Bolzano hassome notably intact pieces of Fascist architecture that remind you how talented those designers actually were.

One ruined specimen of Bolzano's Fascist industrialisation is the gargantuan Alumix aluminium factory, one-tenth ofwhich is the setting for Raqs Media Collective's contribution to Manifesta 7, called The Rest of Now. In their curatorialstatement, Raqs ask questions centred on the pervasive ambience of disuse and dereliction: 'What gets left wheneverything is taken away? What can be retrieved, and what can be remembered?'

Outside the Alumix aluminium factory / Inside The Rest of Now

In a discussion on the opening day of the exhibition, artists and architects tested out ideas about the future of theAlumix building (now assigned monument status), which here stood for a paradigmatic contemporary condition: what isthe most appropriate political and sentimental approach to historical residue? Jorge Otero-Pailos, a professor atColumbia University, reminded us that, "Preservation is sometimes a process of destruction." Too much past, andthere's no room for the rest of now.

Work by Yokoko, Wright and Harwood (left) and Zilvinak Kempinas (right) in The Rest of Now

The c.50 artworks in the show are mostly threaded together through the plural histories of the building, and thehaunting of its former use and ex-occupants. Yokoko, Wright and Harwood's reconstitution of the phone network thatran through the factory is augmented by mobile phone technology. Analogue meets digital, and aluminium symbolicallyconfronts Tantalum, the precious metal used in cellular phones, abundant in the Congo, and the cause of violentconflicts over its mining. Zilvinak Kempinas runs hundreds of metres of video tape from one of the skylights down tothe floor. It wafts gently, like streamers for a forthcoming Emo party. Other works, like Jaime Pitarch's monstrousMatrushka doll, entitled Chernobyl, invoke industrial disasters and fraught legacies. Franceso Gennari's chemicallypetrified tree is pure post-apocalyptic nature as eerie corpse aesthetic.

The Rest of Now, installation view / Work by Jaime Pitarch

Not all contributions plug into the defunct factory semantics. Katarina Seda creates an epic portrait of her relationshipto her grandmother through the display of 650 items, including a fantastic matrix of drawings and videos. DavidAdjaye's Europolis is also a theoretical monster: the combination of Europe's 27 capital cities into a single 100 millioncity-state. I drifted from one piece to another, in the vast concrete hall, like a slightly desultory pin-ball, struck by dejavu.

Does Raqs' Rest of Now fall dutifully in line with the current curatorial mannerism, that is: the nostalgic recuperation ofindustrial pasts and their attendant architecture? I think it does. We saw it at the 2007 Istanbul Biennial too, hosted inold textile factories and 1970s cultural centres. This trend goes back at least to the (recently demolished) Palast derRepublik in Berlin, which, for a few key years early this century, became an unlikely anti-monument monument forleftist romantics. But is fuzzy sentimentalism really enough? As Rem Koolhaas put it in the book Manifesta Decade(2007), 'We are living in a completely paradoxical moment of modernisation … [that is all] driven by nostalgia.'

Trento's train station / Inside the Palazzo del Poste, venue for The Soul (Or, Much Trouble in the Transportation of Souls)

In contrast, Manifesta 7's third southern-most venue, curated by Anselm Franke and Hila Peleg, feels more decidedly'now'. Set in the picturesque and indisputably Italianate town of Trento, Franke and Peleg's architectural vessel is theRationalist 1929 Palazzo del Poste. The show's title has a neo-Platonic feel: The Soul (Or, Much Trouble in theTransportation of Souls). As nearly twenty years have passed since the Iron Curtain fell, the curators claim that 'in amoment where the enthusiasm regarding the European integration process seems curbed or suspended, this chapter isconceived as a moment of introspection.'

What follows is a slow and precisely curated sequence of cellular rooms, each one dedicated to a single artist. Five'Miniature Museums' are dotted throughout, each one guest authored – by Jimmie Durham, Sina Najafi, FlorianSchneider and others – and are led by a specific concept that might make up a future museum of the soul. They’reclearly indebted to the tradition of the ethnographic museum, where fact melds with wonder.

Trento Museum of European Normality / Video installation by Marcus Coates

Animism mixes with animalism in Marcus Coates' multiple-video installation, in which various individuals are seen intheir homes, unmoving, each accompanied by a soundtrack of birdsong that they have attempted to mimic. In AngelaMelitopolous' video, we see thrill-seeking tourists scare themselves silly on a rollercoaster. Althea Thauberger's film-play Death and Misery imagines a village where Death is trapped in a tree 'and the gravediggers have nothing to do'.Rosalind Nashabishi's 16mm diptych follows an anonymous woman through London's Southbank complex, as seen by aspectral stalker. Eyal Weizman presents evidence from his ongoing project on the idea of 'the lesser evil' in politics andhumanitarianism. The soul, today, can be secular or sacred, it seems.

Compared to the hubbub of Bolzano, Franke and Peleg's The Soul is diminutively orchestrated. Its sobriety is whatmakes it compelling and metaphysically substantial. The overarching theme (familiar to anyone who has followedFranke's long-term interest in the border between inner and outer psychic states) is defined enough to embrace thedisparate works on show, but without subsuming them in a dictatorial imperative.

Is there 'much trouble' in Manifesta's soul today? Perhaps. Recall its founding principle: to invent an agile European artevent liberated from the usual institutional deadweight. And now? Manifesta 7 is four towns, 188 artists, 130km and111 days large. Probably no one will be have the means and the time to properly engage with all of it. I'm leftwondering just how much bigger and geographically adventurous biennials can become. Now a district, then a country,soon after, a whole continent. And finally, the world. If only Ryanair did airmiles. Around the World Biennial in 80days…

Source: http://www.artreview.com/profiles/blog/show?id=1474022%3ABlogPost%3A364436