Solidarity Action #1: Istituto Svizzero di Roma

Beginnings

Curated by Salvatore Lacagnina

March – July 2012

Right from the start the Istituto Svizzero di Roma (Swiss Institute in Rome) decided that our gesture in solidarity with the 7th Berlin Biennale should not be limited to a single project, but should invest the entire life of our institution.

We appropriated from Berlin methods and points of view that we required. We tested them in Switzerland and Italy, in different historical and social conditions. In June 2011, theater workers occupied Valle, a historic theater that the city of Rome wanted to privatize. Connected to this ongoing action, renowned jurists are contributing to the elaboration of a new form of management of the theater that will be neither public nor private. Thus art, law, political activism, and theoretical reflection are walking hand in hand. We consider this a paradigm that enables a discussion about cultural institutions.

Drawing upon this local situation, we first decided to adapt the 7th Berlin Biennale’s first newspaper P / ACT FOR ART to our context, and use it as a handy tool to reflect on the possible development of artistic institutions. The debate around contemporary institutions is also a lively one within various groups of political activists, and in our research we found commonalities between the political collective ESC – Autonomous Atelier in Rome and the Polish group Krytyka Polityczna. We are supporting collaborative actions between them and Swiss political activists, especially those involved in the Occupy movement, as part of our "Solidarity Action".

Besides the institutional issues, another part of our work concerns the language of art and the energy that it can generate for the construction of meaning and willingness to engage with reality. So we are developing a project similar to the Draftsmen’s Congress, initiated by Paweł Althamer for the Berlin Biennale. This is an important act for the Swiss Institute in Rome, as it relates to similar activities developed in recent years, in which we experiment with a return to the basics of artistic language. We are also developing the project Invisible Switzerland, which invites artists to intervene or to narrate the invisible aspects of the complex social and political reality of Switzerland. Other projects are becoming concrete, and more will follow. For us, this is a process that will not necessarily stop with the end of the Berlin Biennale.

by Salvatore Lacagnina

www.solidarityaction.istitutosvizzero.it