NABA, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, Milano
2009
Visiting Professor
The months of February and October 2009 I taught an intensive course about "performance art in the public sphere" at NABA, Milan, entitled How to Make a Public Performance. Both of the sessions, 30 hours each, have been conceived as workshops but with a deep historical and theoretical approach. Topic of the first one was "hypnotism" and of the second was the making of an artists journal inspired by the symbol of the "bandana". Aim of the course was to organize a public performance but also to develop a collective work in class documenting it as it was already a performative act.
Artists, designers, architects, film makers, anyone who works today seem to be deeply interested in the relation with the public. Council, exchange and speech become the new goals to catch up through the organization of public events, parades, banquets, protests, actions of disturbance. To make performance today doesn’t mean to represent something on scene for someone to watch at it, but to put in motion a situation in which the public becomes involved, be it aware or totally unprepared to accept the offer.
How to Make a Public Performance: Hypnologic (February 2009)
Hypnotism is an mysterious science with ancient origins that in mass society have assumed more and more alarming connotations, often becoming a form of popular entertainment destined to small cabaret clubs and television programs of Sunday afternoon. Hypnologic holds account of all this but it won’t be a study on hypnotism. Rather, it is interesting that hypnotism and performance art share in the end the same need, that is to transform the space, to imagine a space in which the coordinates we knew previously collapse and that must be re-imagined.
This is the website of the course.
How to Make a Public Performance: Bandana (October 2009)
The history of art and countercultures is plenty of avant-garde editorial projects. One of the oldest media, printed paper fascinates, even in the actual era of the Internet, thinkers, artists and activists. Manifold are the examples of digital editorials today, online magazines with multimedia contents, but printed paper maintains a privileged status as a relational medium. The concept itself of journal contains a high revolutionary potential. To self produce a journal today, in this era of ipertrofization of information, is more than ever a radical act. Bandana is a journal realized during the course and distributed trough a street performance.
This is the website of the course.