Disobedience
An ongoing video archive
Curated by: Marco Scotini
Assistant curator: Andris Brinkmanis
14.11. – 18.12.2008
Kungu street 3, Riga,
LV – 1050, Latvia
Disobedience is an archive and a video station about the relationship between artistic practice and civil and social disobedience. Founded in 2005, the project curated by Marco Scotini is a guide to geography of recent protest, from the social struggles in Italy in 1977 to anti-globalisation actions before and after Seattle. In particular, Disobedience is an investigation into the practices of art activism emerging from the fall of the Soviet block and the events of the 9/11 that today are developing on a global scale. A new and different kind of political and artistic collaboration characterises the current phase of post-Fordism. With regard to the relationship between art and politics, a radical shift away from modernism is evident; the forms of art activism are determined by a common recognition that traditional democratic politics is largely bankrupt. Contemporary dissent manifests itself less as theoretical criticism or protest than as defection, exodus and exit. Abandonment rather than confrontation, the search for new participatory spaces, constituent practices, micro-actions on a local scale, forms of self-organization and empowerment are the main strategies of the new movements. In the end Disobedience is an atlas of the plurality of resistance tactics such as direct action, counter information, parallel planning process, self-managed architecture, media activism and other tactical strategies.
The goal of the archive is to create a common space for artistic output and for political action, understanding that society itself is changing and with it the language it produces as a political subject and as a media object. Disobedience is designed as a long-term work-in-progress and is presented as non-comprehensive and provisional, intended to expand over time. The archive contains ten sections of which six are presented here – Reclaim the Streets, Protesting Capitalist Globalization, Disobedience and Society of Control, Disobedience East and Argentina Social Factory. There is also a section dedicated to the Italian 1977 “workerist” movement (operaismo) as a form of introduction to the configuration of contemporary Multitude.
Since 2005 the archive has been exhibited in Berlin, Mexico D. F., St. Petersburg, Eindhoven, Karlsruhe, Nottingham and Zagreb.
Display of the exhibition in Riga Art Space is designed by Czech artist Zbynek Baladran and will be shaped as a three dimensional dictionary of basic terms of civil disobedience, partly suggested by the participating artists.
Participating artists:
atelier d’architecture autogérée, Beth Bird, Dodo Brothers (Andrea Ruggeri/Giancarlo Vitali Ambrogio), KanalB, Grupo de Arte Callejero, Black Audio Film Collective, Department of Space and Land Reclamation, Critical Art Ensemble, Etceterà, Marcelo Expósito, Harun Farocki/Andrei Ujica, Alberto Grifi, Ashley Hunt, Non–Governmental Control Commission, OUT (Mariette Schiltz/Bert Theis), Park Fiction, Post Programmed City Territory(PPC-T), Radek Community, Oliver Ressler (with Zanny Begg), Paula Roush (msdm), Paola Salerno, Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas, Dmitry Vilensky, Wayruro
Riga Art Space, Kungu street 3, Riga, LV – 1050, Latvia
Open: Tuesday – Sunday 12:00pm – 7:30pm, Closed on Mondays
Opening 14.11.2008 6.00pm
Meeting with curator / 14.11.2008 / 4:00pm
