[Academy Lectures 2015.11.25]

1 h 49 minArtists, Anarchists and Watchmakers —a research into early anarchist publishing As a basis for our presentation we will take a number of video fragments of our ‘road trip’ along original copies and facsimiles of one of the early anarchist journal Bulletin de la Fédération jurassienne in archives and libraries in Switzerland, Berlin, Amsterdam and Milan. What started out as an open-minded investigation into anarchism and self-organization in relation to art and publishing, we narrowed down to a micro-exploration of 19th century anarchism in the valley of watchmakers in the Swiss Jura mountains, where anarchists like Bakunin, Kropotkin and the painter Courbet found refuge. Because the subject is enormously complex we decided to focus on the ‘material history’ of one single newspaper: the famous Bulletin de la Fédération jurassienne (the first internationally oriented anarchist newspapers, published in the Swiss Jura between 1872 and 1878). In the CIRA, an anarchism archive in Lausanne, we got to know about early anarchism’s publishing practices, how they were ‘first users’ of the new technologies of their time and set up informal international networks for the exchange of information and ideas. To our surprise the cheaply produced pamphlets, newspapers and bulletins looked very familiar to contemporary zine-making artists like us—making it easy to relate to the collaborative DIY approach (in production as well as distribution), and the particular mix of local and international involvement. If it’s true that utopia’s aren’t fantasies, but spring from people’s real, daily experience, what in the practice of watchmakers of those days made them refuse centralization and hierarchy? And did anarchist ideas shape their practice of publishing? BIO Fucking Good Art is a travelling artists’ magazine published both on paper and online, founded in 2003 by Dutch artists and non-academic free-style researchers Rob Hamelijnck and Nienke Terpsma. Embracing book-proportioned editions as well as humble pamphlets, its impulse has often been to focus on the editors’ investigation of (and with) local artistic communities, self-organization and self-empowerment and the simultaneous mobility and locality of art practice. They are interested in oral history, ethnography, documentary, investigative art, counter- and subcultures, and anarchism

We are against something that doesn't exist. Conversation with Giovanna Costanza Meli

What does the art system mean if you think of the analysis we just formulated? In that world defined by the media, why should we care about an art system? It is the same kind of propagandistic model. The real country, the real situation is different. So the work of the intellectuals I think is to reconnect the "discourse" to the reality. In the non profit field, curators, artists and intellectuals are used to speaking about a way of being out of the system, or against the system, and I also thought to be against something huge. But then I started to consider everything form a different point of view, looking at the reality. So I say there is no art system in Italy, and if we are against this art system, we are against something that doesn't exist. I would say it is sincere to care about the reality

The small Museum of Migrations in Lampedusa

If we consider the museum as an institution, we spontaneously relate it to concepts such as tradition, collection, scientific committee, administration, more or less codified cultural representations, more or less marked cultural policies, dialogue with its context and search for a public. If we refer to the internal debate within contemporary museums, we immediately think of integration and cultural mediation, alongside the debate concerning their public and social function and the educational departments's research. All this plays a big role in the mental image shared by art historians, anthropologists and curators researching hybridization and crossbreeding, and what these notions could mean within the various discourses on identity, on the one end, and self-representation on the other hand. But what is happening in Lampedusa? What have this island and its population to do with cultural and scientific museological debate?The aim of this journey was not to expose ourselves to the famous cultural legacy of classical antiquity and the Italian Renaissance, but to explore – as artists and non-academic researchers – Italy’s contemporary artistic, social and political scene through active witnesses. We started in Rome and ended in Palermo, passing through Florence, Bologna, Lugo, Milan, Viganella, Turin, Rivoli, Lecce, Matera, Bari, Santa Maria di Leuca, Naples and Gibellina