A modernity which forgets

During the Cambridge Festival of Ideas (2015) the program Cologni devised Gropius’ Impington, modernism and power, art and the rural opens up a debate on the importance of the connection between people and places, and the construction of memory, cultural (monuments) and communicative memory (live interaction, Assman). According to Paul Connerton (2009) this connection may be institutionalised, as in the case of the memorial monuments, such as architecture, but it is in often apparently anonymous places, experienced through the individual’s and everyday’s bodily actions that the individual’s memory’s grid is founded. Through the memories that these places evoke the individual can domesticate the surrounding world. However, Modernity has imposed a frantic pace to the transformation of human environments. The result is that memorials and architecture last, but the common, anonymous places that are the individual’s loci of memory (Connerton 2009) are often altered beyond recognition. In particular, with the continuous process of urbanisation of the countryside, an abstract ideal of the rural is often nurtured by our memories of how familiar places used to be. ‘The paradox of a culture which manifests so many symptoms of hypermnesia and which yet at the same time is post-mnemonic is a paradox that is resolvable once we see the causal relationship between these two features. Our world is hypermnesic in many of its cultural manifestations, and post-mnenonic in the structures of the political economy. The cultural symptoms of hypermnesia are caused by a political-economic system which systemically generates a post-mnemonic culture – a Modernity which forgets.’[4] Cologni’s approach through her art intervention enters the texture of the memory construction process by establishing a dialogue with local residents and students, as well as building on documents of people’s experience and influence of the Gropius’s building in the 30’s and 40’s, when it was surrounded by orchards and the farm of the Chivers’ family. These found information give voice to a fictional character as Cologni’s alter ego: one of the 3000 women once employed here and coming to the Corridor Club at Impington. With these in mind Cologni’s body of work include these aspects in the exhibition: The archive material presented shows mnemonic lacunae, missing details about the people who came to work, study and live in Impington; A visualisation and materialisation of overlooked spaces for interaction in the Corridor Club revival; The sculptures as architecture off-cuts of unused spaces between the bay windows at the front of the Gropius building, occupying the space of a crouched body, are moved around the site, as from her drawings. Cologni’s response is symbolically in memory of all people whose nomadic way of living inevitably shows paradoxes like cherishing their memories, while also erasing part of them to make room for new ones in the encounter of a new place

The artist's performative practice within the anti-ocularcentric discourse

The thesis discusses the development of my artistic research in relation to the critique of the ocularcentric Western philosophical tradition developed by twentieth century French thought, as referred to by Martin Jay and Amelia Jones. The work reviews the positions of both authors with respect to the relationship between Lacan's Mirror Stage and Gaze and Merleau-Ponty's Chiasm or Intertwining, within two areas of investigation: the self and strategies for its engagement with the external world. The research was conducted by adopting an evolutionary approach, which allowed me to test hypotheses through artistic experimentation. The structure of the thesis encompasses these two theoretical discussions in relation to my artistic practice, fully presented in the enclosed cd-rom. The first discussion, in Part I and II analyses the Mirror Stage and the emerging of the self, its psychological implications and manifestations in the history of art, with particular emphasis on self-portraiture, the performative self, Body Art and my own production. In Part III, the concept of Chiasm/Intertwining - developed from the notions of visuality and Gaze - is discussed in relation to inter-subjectivity in Body Art. The issue of the interaction between artist/audience and environment is also investigated in my most recent artworks, which question the primacy of vision over the other senses. I believe my original contribution to be both in the content of the artworks and the methodology adopted, rather than at theoretical level. By adopting a set strategy in the creation of my work, I challenged the static artist-audience relationship implicit in the one-way perception of representations based on central-focus perspective. My hypothesis, which encompasses a two-way artist-audience interaction, was first tested in the body of work I produced in 1999. The theoretical argument of chiasmatic intertwining I subsequently developed, allowed me to place my practice within the antiocularcentric discourse and confirmed the direction undertaken in the practice to be satisfactory. The validity of my initial hypothesis was further confirmed by the participation of the audience in aspects of the art making process of the recent videolive installations

SPA(E)CIOUS PRESENT, Dynamics of collective and individual experiences of space and duration within specious present, adopting technologies for enhancing audience engagement, while producing forms of documentation

I consider the workshop as a form of peripatetic participatory practice where produced and shared knowledge informs the artist's creative process. This is based on the multidisciplinary approach of my current project Rockfluid (rockfluid.com), where site specific art practice is underpinned by elements of cognitive psychology and philosophy. Hence, here the relationship Memory – Time – Perception is informed by Bergson's notion of the present within duration and as produced by the body in space,24 and by Merleau-Ponty's reference to 'sensation' as the basis for knowledge.25 On the other hand the role of memory in the present is seen from a shared perspective (psychology and philosophy of science) including the definition of specious present26 as well as the nature of retention as involving perception of duration. The variable within this is an element of interference in our experience, which will vary every time Spa(e)cious takes place (e.g. the image above is for the next few events where exercises will take place on an unstable platform). As the series develops from this, a dialogue with art critic and film maker Helena Blaker also shapes the contextualisation of the outcomes. Methods: The exercise aims at creating the physical and psychological conditions to enhance an awareness of the perception of time and space through interaction in three parts, involving psychology, drawing, video and performance

Pilastri invisibili. Il ruolo delle donne ebree nella storia dell'emancipazione della condizione della donna italia | Invisible pillars. The role of jewish women in the history of the women emanicapation of italy

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Figura/Sfondo. Un dialogo | Foreground/Background. A dialogue

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Caring-With Dialogic Sculptures. A Post-Disciplinary Investigation into Forms of Attachment

The ‘art practice as research as art’ discussed set out to investigate through dialogic art how identity formation is linked with micro-social experiences and place. The project “Seeds of Attachment” by Elena Cologni is centered around a newly developed non-verbal strategy in the form of a sculptural prop, informed by psychologist Margaret Lowenfeld’s “Mosaic Test” (1938-1954), and discussed in relation to historical precedents in socially engaged art. The activation of the prop during encounters with ‘mothers’ on the school-run route, aimed at offering a context for an understanding of how their attachment to their children influenced the development of an attachment to place. This relational approach is defined as caring with, and underpinned by care ethics and ecofeminism. The implications of the adopted non-verbal dialogic artistic approach are considered in relation to new forms of gendered spatial practices to research on place, including affordances of place, and how these might lead to future post-disciplinary research

CARE: from periphery to centre

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