Beatrice Catanzaro's Groups
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City as Image
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(1) Art and social rel...
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Beatrice Catanzaro's Page
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Profile Information
- Age
- 32
- Artistic Field or Interest
- Public interventions / installations
- Profession
- Artist
- Artistic and professional experiences
- I Graduated at the Academy of Brera (Milan) with a pilot project in Art Therapy in the frame of the re-conversion, in Italy, of psychiatric structures into community based housing system. In 2002-04, I attended the Master in Public Art and new artistic strategies at the Bauhaus University in Weimar (Germany), with an exchange programme at the Art and Humanities department of the Brookes University in Oxford (UK). In 2003 I was selected for the Residence Programme at the Ratti Foundation in Como (Italy) and in 2004 for the International Artists in Residency Program Unidee, at the Pistoletto Foundation, for which, subsequently, I worked as tutor and project developer in 2005 and 2006. In 2005 I was granted with the Movin'up award from the G.A.I. (Young Italian Artists) to develop a project for the Urban Festival 05 in Zagreb (Croatia). In 2006 I initiated an extensive participatory project in Milan, Bocciami, with the support of the Municipality of Milan and the Region of Lombardy. In 2007, in collaboration with the CEPT University, I developed a participatory project, CUTTING CHAI, commissioned by the Vastu Schilpa Foundation, in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. In the summer 2007 I participated at the Artist in Residence Program Arts Site - the state of the world, at the Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, Portugal.
Currently I live in Lisbon. At the very present moment I am collaborating with the MART Museum in Rovereto, for a project which will be presented in July 2008, in the meantime I moved to Lisbon, where I am currently taking a course at the Maumaus Independent Visual Art School, focused on critical studies and post-colonial studies. I have been practicing, in the past five years, on a quiet independent base and often in context of non-studio based residence programmes.
At present, my field of art research regard the possibility of re-enacting historical situations (or discourses), by constructing other narratives, in order to unfold the story of History.
- Statement
- How can we re-think the production of visual culture, aware of the complex relation between representation and power1, and challenge the production of stereotypes2, by unfolding them and reviling their complexity?
Currently I am developing a project on the use of visual representation during the dictatorship in Portugal (1932 – 1974). Specifically I am addressing the case of the Exposiçao do Mundo Portugues (Exposition of the Portuguese World) held in Lisbon in 1940, involving Portugal and the “provìncias ultramarina”3, where representations and representative of the colonies were put on display for the citizens of the metropolis. Several pavilions and monuments erected in 1940 are still in place and some are proactively producing, as tourist attraction, a discourse giving legacy to certain patterns of power and cultural homogeneity. I am interested in the possibility of generating another narrative around those symbols, juxtaposing to cultural homogeneity and purity, syncretism and hybridity.
Furthermore, my actual research, addresses the relation among centre and periphery: “For the Portuguese, the colonies were the barbarous domain, the margin that would be illuminated by the imperial centre; however, for an evolved Europe of the centre and north, Portugal, from the 17th century onwards, was situated on the periphery of
civilization”4.
The systems of categorization you are addressing were at the core of a project I initiated in Ahmedabad, Gujarat – India, in spring 2007. The city of Ahmedabad belongs to the fastest growing urban areas in India, with more than 5 million inhabitants it received the status of mega city according to UN guidelines and undergoes rapidly changing circumstances. Yet the Ahmedabadian society is strongly traditional and organized in strict hierarchies often based on casts affiliation that drastically reduce the possibility of relations among social groups. Furthermore, Ahmedabad has been witnessing an increasing number of riots between the Muslim and the Hindus community. The tension among those communities has risen alongside the global mystification and construction of the relation Islamism/terrorism, re-contextualizing ancient diversity with a contemporary believes in an illusory clash of
cultures. I am interested in exploring how internationalized propaganda discourses unfold in peripheral local context.
Collaborative practice represents a valuable strategy to broaden the complexity of our understanding, by multiplying the view points: Reloading Images remind me of a chronotope5: quoting Paul Gilroy from “the image of the ship as living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion”6. In juxtaposition to cultural homogeneity, the ship as metaphor of chronotope where ideas, cultures, politics were given shape … I like to imagine Reloading Images as a ship (where we might be the pirates). As my work does not find in regular exhibition spaces its appropriated condition, I am interested in the possibility of exploring a more open strategy for collaborative practice, outstanding certain relations of power emended within the gallery/museum sphere. Indeed, I find your working proposal interesting as it seams a good balance between a real/physical encounter and the virtual network.
I aspect to acknowledge myself with other modes of operating within the arts, yet outstanding the narrow circuit of galleries/museums/biennales in order to possibly apply, in the context of Portugal (and Italy) other working models.
In Portugal as well as in Italy, in fact, there is a quasi complete lack of alternatives to the mainstream/commercial art production and almost no consistent examples of self initiated artists based activities.
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1
I specially refer here to “Unthinking Eurocentrism. Multiculturalism and media” by Robert Stan and Shohat Ella, Routledge, 1994; “Orientalism. Western Conceptions of the Orient” by Edward Said, Penguin Books, 1995 (new edition with revisited introduction).
2
“The stereotype is a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always ‘in place’, already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated”, “In the location of culture” by Homi Bhabha, Routledge, 1994.
3
‘Overseas provinces’ - the realise in 1951 of the UNESCO statement on the nature of race and racial difference, revision of the statement on race realized in 1950, represented the directive for ending the problem of racism assailing the world and to come to terms with the fact that racial and cultural mixing had not only taken place throughout history but they should be acknowledged and further promoted. The revision of the State’s Constitution, effective June 1951, constitutes a prompt, defensive response to the wide decolonization process after World War II.Salazar and his entourage, move to disconnect Portugal from colonialism and consequently from racism, this explain the elimination of the term “colony” and the substitution with “province”, and the displacement of “empire” by “overseas” (ULTRAMAR).
4
Postcolonial theory and lusophone litteratures, edited by Paulo de Medeiros – Utrecht, Portuguese studies series, 2007.
5
M.M. Bakhtin used the term chronotope to designate the spatio-temporal matrix which governs the base condition of all narratives and other linguistic acts. The term itself can be literally translated as "time-space".
6
“The black Atlantic – modernity and double consciousness” by Paul Gilroy, Cambridge MA and London, 1993.
- Research interests
- The subject I intend to explore relates with the very notion of non-linear history and the possibility “that human history did not follow a straight line, as if everything pointed toward civilized societies as humanity’s ultimate goal. On the contrary, at each bifurcation alternative stable states were possible, and once actualized, they coexisted and interacted with one another (Manuel De Landa).
Departing from the very understanding of non linear history and thinkers as Manuel de Landa and scientist as Jared Diamond, I am interested in looking at the very geographical and climatic conditions that signified the beginning of the human civilization from the Middle East: the domestication of animals and plants and the subsequent development of written language
By just opposing geographical and environmental (a scientific history so to speak) condition to an anthropocentric historical perspective, represent in my opinion a starting point to critically reflect on the unfolding of the so called clashes of civilization as a post cold war discourse that allowed new relations of power, based on cultural diversities, to be drawn.
Aspects as the orientation of the continents, influenced the speed of diffusion of agriculture and domestication, of written language and technologies; the trajectory from the Middle East to Europe, along the Euro Asiatic axes relates with the similarity of natural conditions: days have the same length and seasonal variations are equal.
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