"TALK SHOW"
by Andrea Morucchio
[video dvd 8 min. produced for the group exhibition Dis-orders, 2006 Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation, Venezia]
The video Talk Show consists of the editing together of footage of a discussion amongst a group of activists and artists which took place within the Municipal Greenhouse of the Giardini of Castello, which had just several hours before been occupied and assigned as the operating and exhibiting base of the "artistic resistance workshop" Mars Pavilion. The Mars Pavilion was conceived of as an occupation of a structure (an abandoned nineteenth century greenhouse) next to the Giardini of the Biennale, coinciding with the opening of the 2005 edition of the International Biennale of Art. The project of this occupied pavilion was the result of a collaboration of activists from Lab. Morion of Venice with a group of international artists and three curators: Andrea Morucchio, Interno3 and Marco Baravalle.
The argument, which generated the Talk Show video, was born from the activists' opposition to the work The Sweetest Dream, by the artist Nemanja Cvijanovic; the work which hung within the greenhouse was a blue European Union flag on which the yellow stars were laid out to form a swastika. Thus, Talk Show is footage of the argument (at times rather heated) in which artists and activists confronted each other on the political weight of an exhibited work. The negative reaction on the part of the activists was due to an understanding of the work of art tied to its appearance. Analogous to linguistic communication, in artistic communication, a subject who does not comprehend artistic language, will see the work of art exempt from external references, identifying only its formal and perceivable properties.
Talk Show is the video spectacularization of a "clandestine", genuine, passionate argument, "real - not reality", a repartee which occurred in a rather gothic, dusky atmosphere, colour-desaturated, due to the infrared takes which give the video a dominant "Martian green". Beyond the content, Talk Show exemplifies the founding principle of the Mars Pavilion, or rather of its nature as the constitutive moment of a public space, where with this definition we intend the space of alterity, the place of encounter and confrontation with the other.
Moreover, Talk Show, by manifesting in such a "plastic" way, the opposition of the two modes -- that of the political activist and that of the artist -- of "reading" and therefore of understanding the symbolic representation of a work of contemporary art, evidently underlines the two elements which are at the base of the Dis-orders project, that is, political activism and art. Talk Show documents an apparently insurmountable moment of crisis in the coexistence and collaboration between the artists and activists of the Mars Pavilion. A crisis which the viewers of the Talk Show installation will see greatly overcome thanks to the placing of a small monitor in an angle of the dark room, playing a video document of the innumerable activities which were then put into action by the Mars Pavilion, thus showing that a synthesis between activism and art is possible and that when this occurs, the artistic, social and communicative results are remarkable.
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