FatStudio is proud to present the third edition of R A I D, free and subversive goals are magnifying authorship,recover fringe territories through artistic manipulationand acting outside market’s dynamics. Previously on R A I D, artists scanned society through different artistic practices, working, as usual, within 6
hours. If the first edition dealt with Work as topic, penetrating a huge abandoned mechanical factory, if in the second authors reasoned about Nutrition by manipulating the first laboratory of Pasticceria G.Cova, in the third edition FatStudio is determined to elaborate the fragile topic of School. R A I D , thus, targeted the Istituto Pertini, Turin, a structure comprehensive of primary and secondary school. The educational institute is the one of reference for the Ex MOI area, the former winter olympic village, which, after being abandoned in 2006, is currently occupied by more than a thousand people. Teachers efforts and side school activities fight daily with. problems of criminality and non-integration, as scholar and cultural italian systems have to deal with rude cutoff and massive doses of morphine. Turin microcosm and italian. macrocosm became ruined lands, often on the blasting point. R A I D intends to transform the School into the Chocolate Factory of education, where teachers and alumns. and artists cooperate for one day, hoping the operation to trigger cultural and pedagogic mechanisms. The R A I D development stays the same: 6 hours of action, via web streaming direct; at conclusion the artistic products will be offered on the altar of edition’s topic. R A I D will be acting during the 6 lesson hours, november the 3rd, Artists are free to decide to interact with students and teachers or not. For those who will, five different gathering areas have been found, as 3 gyms, a swimming pool and the huge courtyard. Artists who want to create on their own will be set in the glass classrooms of the secondary school. Painters are asked to work on chalkboard, in order to sell them at the end of intervention and devolve to the school the whole reached amount. Culture feeding itself.
A class room at Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti, Torino, Italia, 2017
The Office of Lost Objects – A Small Memory of Oblivion
Does an object remain an object when no one is there to look at it? What interests me is that, once lost, objects are entirely dead. On the one hand, they have lost all function, and on the other, all emotional memory. They are therefore doubly dead, though not entirely devoid of memory.
This reflection took shape during a performance carried out in an old Italian school, much of which had been left abandoned. In those deserted rooms, I found traces of past presences: forgotten objects that had likely once belonged to students. Fragile remnants of an ordinary everyday life, they lay there in silence, awaiting a new gaze.
I began to collect them, to handle them, to listen to what they might still have to tell. I recorded them—not only the sounds they produced when touched, struck, or moved, but also through spoken descriptions that sought to capture their texture, their weight, their strangeness. I photographed them, as if to fix their fleeting reappearance, and I even sealed them under vacuum—a paradoxical gesture of preservation which, in enclosing them, also “kills” them a second time.
A key aspect of my work is to preserve something of these objects, to rescue them from oblivion through their own image, their sonic and visual traces. Yet preservation always means arresting, freezing; every act of safeguarding immediately entails a form of death.
Collecting and archiving have become one of my obsessions, as though the accumulation of objects and photographs could somehow counteract the inexorable loss that shapes our experience of time.
Thus, this project unfolds as a hybrid inventory—visual, sonic, and textual—where memory and forgetting are intimately intertwined. For it may be that by giving form to forgetting, by making it perceptible, memory finds the possibility of reinventing itself.
performance, Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti, Torino, Italia, 3 november 2017