6 December 2011

Exhibition: Disobedience: An Ongoing Video Archive, 9 December 2011 - 3 February 2012


A new-old exhibition Disobedience: An Ongoing Video Archive, curated by Marco Scotini together with Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas, launches at the Media Lab Complex in Cambridge, Massachusetts on 9 December.

Part of an ongoing, multi-phase and multi-media project, the exhibition represents a collaboration between Milan's Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology through their respective Art MA programs. Since 2005, the project has been staged in Berlin, Mexico, St Petersburg, Eindhoven, Karlsruhe, Nottingham, Zagreb and London. It archives "a geography of civil disobedience", constructing a history of alternative, artistic political activism(s)
in the twentieth century, exploring significant civil and societal movements from Italy 1977 to post 9/11 America.

In light of the current and chronic global presence of the Occupy movement, as well as political and geographic instability throughout the world, the exhibition would seem to offer a timely supplement to the current conception of political strategies of bodily mobilisation and, particularly, their intersection with practices of self-representation and visual significations.

A shell website exists for The Disobedience Archive, which contains, amongst other things, various texts and interviews that resonated with or inspired Scotini's project. Included amongst them are conversations conducted by Scotini with Paolo Verno and Franco "Bifo" Berardi.
"In the political scheme established in the seventeenth century and thereafter, the One is the terminal point and the point of convergence, a point in which all processes in a certain sense cease and this One is the sovereign, the State. The question to ask oneself is not so much if the Many, the multitude, rid themselves of the One, because this would be a dangerous naïveté, but rather how much they prepare themselves for a different One and for a diverse relationship between the One and the Many."
[Response given by Paolo Verno in conversation with Marco Scotini]

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