Tuesday 30 November 2010

Mains D'Oeuvre - A Snowball Effect - Saturday 11th December


Francesco Pedraglio, Something I don't know and yet I still remember, Performance, Paris 2010

All books that belong to the library of Peter Fillingham and Charlotte Moth will occupy the exhibition space of Mains d’Oeurves for the period of 15th November - 11th December 2010. Fillingham and Moth have invited other artists, writers and curators to share the space with them, in different ways, for the duration of this time.

With Caroline Hancock, Peter Fillingham, Francesco Pedraglio, Falke Pisano, Charlotte Moth,
Film screening :Caroline Hancock
Reading : Francesco Pedraglio
We Love : Falke Pisano & Charlotte Moth

With works for an evening in the exhibition space : Laura Emsley, Judith Dean, Sean Dower, Peter Fillingham, Sadie Murdoch, Sam Basu, Raffaella della Olga, Aurelien Mole, Chloe Briggs, Seamus Farrell

Launch of the mingler cocktail

(so far people participating in various ways)

Anna Barham
Sam Basu
Cécile Bourne-Farrell
Chloe Briggs
Judith Dean
Vanessa Desclaux
Sean Dower
Laura Emsley
Seamus Farrell
Caroline Hancock
Meris Angioletti
Aurelien Mole
Sadie Murdoch
Raffaella della Olga
Francesco Pedraglio
Falke Pisano
Romana Schmalish

Tuesday 23 November 2010

Against Gravity - Live Weekend at ICA

Francesco Pedraglio, Something I Haven't Seen and Yet I Still Remember, London 2010
A performance by Francesco Pedraglio
Saturday 27, 6.30pm
Something I haven't seen and yet I still remember is an performative talk in which, through a selection of texts and visual material, Pedraglio tries to evoke the influence of never-experienced memories on imagining the existence of abstract objects.

Next to it, the new issue of the self-published journal The Mock and other Superstitions is also launched with a series of pre-recorded readings presented by some of its contributors.

Sunday 31 October 2010

Slip Sensor - Cell Projects



Slip Sensor

an exhibition in two parts with

Laura Buckley • Martin Fletcher Systems House • Ilana Halperin • Andy Jackson • Francesco Pedraglio • Maria Taniguchi • Adam Thompson

November 12th 2010- January 23rd 2011

The following paragraph is a re-imagining of Robert Smithson’s work ‘Asphalt Rundown’, 1969, perceived through the ‘Esper Machine’, a photo analysis tool, depicted in the film ‘Blade Runner’, directed by Ridley Scott, 1982.

'In a forgotten quarry a heavy goods vehicle is emptying it’s load, SLIP, an asphalt load that trickles down, a landslide, an imitation of the painter’s abstract drip…. SLIP Zoom in/Enhance 90%, (to take a closer look); crystalline fragments reflect and refract the light. SLIP Zoom in again/Enhance 34; a shiny cube like stone is migrating. Geometric form, at odds to it’s rounded neighbors, SLIP Track 45/Enhance, Stop/Move in/Stop: 14; miniscule slates, identical in appearance, modular entities, removed from their white-walled resting place, SLIP, asphalt, a recognition of our ancestors ideals, split into disparate parts. SLIP, discordant parts chaotically placed in a Perspex toy box ready for the taking, SLIP Pull back to original/De-enhance 230%: a cascade of moving ground, an unsteady platform, SLIP'. Give me a hard copy right there.’

This paragraph contains elements from the film ‘Blade Runner’ directed by Ridley Scott, 1982

The Esper Machine, a voice-controlled computer, analyses a photograph by revealing a three dimensional capture of an event enabling the viewer to zoom into a higher resolution image navigating and scrutinising surfaces and turning corners. As a premise for the exhibition, the above paragraph introduces elements of the works in ‘Sensorical Slip’ (Part I and Part II) through the context of Robert Smithson’s iconic work, Asphalt Rundown’, Rome 1969. Asphalt Rundown is analysed with the Esper’s mechanical precision, to try and piece together its component parts by digitally scanning the work using overlaid grids, as the viewer calls out commands and coordinates. Smithson’s approach to his vast entropic works was to develop a photographic practice, none of which dealt with traditional composition or conventional image making. 35mm slide transparencies reduced representation making the images themselves displacements. Sensorical SLIP loosely refers to the ‘Non-Site’ (an indoor earthwork) as a three dimensional logical picture that is abstract, yet it represents an actual site. The artists within this exhibition re-work and re-analyze the aesthetics left by this minimalist trajectory.

This exhibition will be accompanied by a newly published text by writer and independent curator Francesco Pedraglio. The text, a fictive narrative around the imagined existence of abstract objects, will entwine facts and fictions responding to the exhibition by presenting itself as a contribution of artwork to the show.

Francesco Pedraglio co founded FormContent with Caterina Riva and Pieternel Vermoortel in 2007. His practice now interlaces writing with curatorial and editorial projects, experimenting formats of narrativity with hybrid cross-posting between exhibition-making and publishing.

As a special evening event, the artist Ilana Halperin will present ‘Hand Held Lava’, which was performed at ‘Triple Canopy’, New York earlier this year. ‘Hand Held Lava’ is a collaborative performative lecture by volcanic archaeologist, Karen Holmberg, writer/curator, Andrew Patrizio and the artist, Halperin. The lecture focuses on human interaction with an ‘analog geologic event’ combining a volcanic narrative of historic and contemporary eruption footage. Halperin's practice, combines personal experience with scientific theories recording the places she has visited in a quest to understand geological phenomena. In 1999 Halperin heated up a tiny saucepan of milk in a 100 °C sulphur spring to make ‘Boiling Milk Solfataras’ Edinburgh based Ilana Halperin exhibited in‘Portscapes’. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam in 2010 and ‘An Entangled Bank’, Talbot Rice University of Edinburgh and ‘Experimental Geography’, The Albuquerque Museum, New Mexico in 2009. Solo exhibitions include ‘Physical Geology. (slow time), three solo projects. Artists Space, New York, ‘Alchemy Project’, Manchester Museum and ‘Towards Heilprin Land’, Doggerfisher, Edinburgh.

Monday 11 October 2010

FormContent and The Mock at Salon Light 7 (Paris)



cneai = organises the Salon Light : an annual meeting of micro-publishers of artists' publication at Point Ephémère. For its seventh edition, the Salon Light is part of the program off of the FIAC and will take place from the 22nd to the 24th October 2010. With the presence of some fifty international publishers and 6000 visitors in 3 days, this festive event reveals a demanding but also a very accessible artistic production.
The 2010 edition is divided into four poles: publishers, Motto selection, booksellers and the freebies salon. It highlights the inventiveness of the participants who put their know how in the service of transversal practices: books, magazines, posters, videos, vinyl, websites ...
These publications, often with a limited circulation and sometimes impossible to find, open new doors and create new networks in the world of publishing. Shifted, thrifty and adventurous, the editorial approach of the participants in the Salon Light reflects a willingness to rethink the printed object and its overall production.The salon is punctuated by sales and signatures on the stands of publishers as well as by the Marathon « 11 minutes », a continuing program of performances and lectures conducted by the publishers, the graphic designers and the writers participating.


Wednesday 6 October 2010

The Object Lessons - MUDAM Luxemburg



Nina Beier and Marie Lund’s exhibition The Object Lessons takes as a starting point a fictional short-story written by London-based writer and curator Francesco Pedraglio, following the artists’ invitation to write a subjective text on their 2009 show at De Vleeshal in Middelburg.
This story features the transformation of an artist's subjective gaze into a plurality of view points, as many as the viewers looking at his works.
The exhibition at Mudam will be based on a new series of works taking their inspiration from the sculptures described in the short-story.

The Mock and other superstitions - Le Magasin Grenoble





Le MAGASIN is devoting the 2010 autumn season to SI Sindrome Italiana, a number of events dedicated to the young curatorial and publishing scenes in Italy subsequent to the generation of Maurizio Cattelan.

Some 40 of these artists, born in the 1970s and 1980s, have been invited to present recent works, or ones created for the occasion, in thematic groups developed in the exhibition galleries and the central glass-covered space known as! “la Rue”. Associated with the exhibition is a a colloquium devoted to the contemporary Italian publishing and curatorial scenes The Practitioners!: Curating & Publishing, which will take place on the opening day, Saturday 9 October, and the Open Office project, organized with young Italian independent publishers. The newspaper Transmission will accompany the exhibition.


List of artists (not comprehensive): Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Meris Angioletti, Salvatore Arancio, Francesco Arena, Rosa Barba, Francesco Barocco, Rossella Biscotti, Lupo Borgonovo, Alex Cecchetti, Danilo Correale, Lara Favaretto, Luca Francesconi, Linda Fregni Nagler, Christian Frosi, Giuseppe Gabellone, Martino Gamper, Francesco Gennari, Piero Golia, Sabina Grasso, Massimo Grimaldi, Renato Leotta, Claudia Losi, Rä di Martino, Patrizio di Massimo, Marzia Migliora, Seb Patane, Pennacchio Argentato, Diego Perrone, Paola Pivi, Riccardo Previdi, Pietro Roccasalva, Matteo Rubbi, Andrea Sala, Manuel Scano, Marinella Senatore, Giulio Squillacciotti, Alberto Tadiello, Santo Tolone, Luca Trevisani, Patrick Tuttofuoco, Nico Vascellari, Francesco Vezzoli.


Colloquium The Practitioners!: Curating & Publishing

Saturday 9 October from 2pm to 5.30pm - Auditorium of Le Magasin

With the intervention of Italian independent curators, art critics, directors of institutions, publishers and some French actors, this colloquium should enlighten about the relationships between Italian editorial and curatorial scenes: the question of international positioning of the Italian scene, the place of alternative spaces and independent actors, and the French and

Italian models...

Participants : Alessio Ascari, Chiara Figone, Marianne Lanavere, Luca Lo Pinto, Francesco Manacorda, Simone Menegoi, Chiara Parisi, Francesco Pedraglio, Alessandro Rabottini, Elodie Royer & Yoan Gourmel-220 jours, Andrea Viliani, Elena Volpato.


Open Office!

Salon du Magasin - from 10 October 2010 to 2 January 2011

The young generation of Italian publishers, represented by the magazines Archive Books, Mousse Magazine, Kaleidoscope,! The Mock and other superstitions and NERO present a selection of rare publications,!special projects, and!artists" books.

Thursday 16 September 2010

SALON Du MERCREDÌ - Centre international d’art de Vassivière


DEMATERIALIZATION OF THE MATERIAL

/ MATERIALIZATION OF THE INVISIBLE


The Centre International d’Art et du Paysage de l’île de Vassivière and Chiara Parisi, welcomes Alex Cecchetti’s “Wednesday Salon” with interventions by: Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield, Mark Geffriaud, Yoann Gourmel, Geraldine Longueville, Benoît Maire, Simone Menegoi, Darius Miksys, Francesco Pedraglio, Laetitia Queyranne, Caterina Riva, Elodie Royer, Jennifer Teets, Pieternel Vermoortel.


Dear All,

What is not is not and what is, is.

What is not calls us with no voice and we often respond with imagination. Visualizing the nothingness may seem in this case more a paradox. A large part of the ongoing contemporary tale deals with the dematerialization of the material and materialization of the invisible. I am not only concerned with the process of abstraction and withdrawl of reality, I also intend with invisible what is non-perceptible, inexpressible, non-understandable, but still real. The future is invisible and becomes invisible again as it rolls back into the past. Invisible is also what does not exist and will never be. This is much harder. How and why can we conceive this black hole of void? Can nothingness really be understood with imagination or is it a product of imagination itself? Is this invention a tool for some kind of human project of inverting the universe?

During a conversation with Darius Miksys about dreams, we both agreed that everything is for real, or as a Chinese philosopher once said: ‘all things are in the world and there is nothing behind it’. If the void is here, where is it?

Once again I invite you to a very challenging conversation, something perhaps beyond our capacities. Jump in or out of the pool, when it’s empty or when it’s full, as you prefer. Let’s face the nonsense of the void, the conundrum of nothingness, and the riddle of emptiness. Please come and see how to create the void with a patch.

See you soon or elsewhere.

Alex Cecchetti

Tuesday 31 August 2010

FormContent and The Mock at Unter Dem Motto



Unter Dem Motto. September 3-5, 2010

The Unter dem Motto art book fair is going into its second round. The annual fair hosted by Motto Berlin and Chert Gallery will take place at their locations in Berlin Kreuzberg, from the 3rd to the 5th of September 2010. More than 70 publishers from about 17 countries will present their works and show an eclectic overview of contemporary art publishing, ranging from home-printed zines to publications by established institutions.

Unter dem Motto provides a professional look into the newest developments of the international artistic publishing scene. New this year is not only the extension of the fair to a full weekend, but also the participation of a selection of art galleries and exhibition spaces engaged in publishing, and a program of events.

Thursday 27 May 2010

The Time Machine - Book Works new open submissions series



The Time Machine

Commissioning Editor: Francesco Pedraglio


Book Works is looking for proposals for two commissions in a new series The Time Machine.


I tell you my friends: forget all about archives. What we need now is this Time Machine. It’s no more a problem of understanding what this gathering is all about. We now have to experiment with it, see what we can really get out of it.

What was next? What will be previous?


We welcome international proposals, in English, from all communities, including artists and writers from culturally diverse backgrounds.

For more details and submission procedure, download an application form from our website, or send an A4 stamped addressed envelope to:


Book Works (The Time Machine) at the following address,

or email Gavin Everall, gavin@bookworks.org.uk


Book Works

19 Holywell Row

London EC2A 4JB

www.bookworks.org.uk

Tuesday 11 May 2010

Francesco Barocco

More personal than myself

On Francesco Barocco’s abstract works

I

When we spoke the first time about it, I was reading 14 things I tell myself when I fall into the trap of making the writing imitate experience*. I was reading and trying to get my head around what he meant exactly when he talked about experience.

He said: writing imitates experience.

I thought: that’s possible.

He said: it is a mistake we should be aware of.

I thought: that’s also very possible, but why is that?

Then I stopped reading and started thinking about this other text, the one you have in your hands, paper between thumbs, fingerprints onto the semi-coated paper.

It is a text that refers to a series of abstract works, two to be precise, objects out there (in the realm of experience?) and yet so embedded in their author’s subjectivity, embedded within him as a thinking body which ‘makes things’, precisely like this text is embedded within me as another thinking body which ‘looks at things’, more personal than myself.

The drive is then to aim for a perfect circularity between the two elements (the writing and the work), circularity as perfect as involuntary.

What about writing as experience rather than writing as a representation of an experience? What about an abstract work as a subjective path able to keep an equilibrium between inside and outside, experience and (what is) experienced?

And if this would all be possible, if it would be reachable, what would we do with such manifested intimacy? Could we have it perfectly mirrored in both the work and this text about the work?

14 things he tells himself

Again he said: look at the ‘rejected’, at the ‘never-articulated’ to find the liveliness within an object (or situation).

Again I could agree with that, even though I would imagine this liveliness more like a mood, a taste or a smell rather than any direct preconceived physical embodiment or recognisable element.

One aspect is certain though: we are on the same line by choosing experience over its own representation. Writing overcomes any-experience to become all-experience, nothing-else-than-experience. Similarly these abstract works can be encountered just as mood, taste or smell instead than a series of forms regulated by predetermined patterns. It becomes signified without any prescribed signifier, a research as opaque as a personal feeling.

And since there would be no prearranged third element to compare the two contenders with (the subject on one side, his/her experience on the other), and since they would both be definable just in-practice, the result would be a constant fluid movement between these two sides. The dispute would be over for lack of constituents, it would be a clean monism constantly open to reinterpretation.

Yet this is just a generic proposal that doesn’t completely exhaust the presence and function of an object (this text, the work): how is one to trigger this liveliness through an object without falling once again into predetermined aesthetic or conceptual categories?

I imagine a very personal piece of writing on an inexplicably personal abstract work. Do the two elements escape as such the constricting rules of bureaucratic representation? Should they be bounded to a codified reading as any other writing or artwork, that as one moves closer to look at reality through their translucent experience, can’t help but obscuring it and consequently requiring the intervention of a over-imposing interpretation?

Instead we should look at this dualistic reflection as it is, allowing the writing or the abstract work to see and reflect upon nothing but itself, nothing but experience in constant movement between the viewers (readers) and their existence as viewers.

In such a way the experience would be transferable into an abstract piece of work (and a consequent abstract writing) that has nothing else before or after it, nothing over or below it. The writing would just be writing per se, my writing per se. The work would just be abstraction, nothing else but sedimentations, the artist’s way to escape any aesthetic or conceptual demagogy.

II

Here, writing directly in English is a paradox, a limitation openly translated into an unmediated act, contradiction in movement.

A folded paper, its grids marked by colours’ distribution, layers upon layers, the challenge of control and its constant loss: this is the paradox of a subject becoming pure abstraction, translated into unmediated action.

The work is what it is because it can’t really be explained. There is no other meaning attached to it than the paradox of its existence as unframed movement of the subject onto the paper.

Could all this overcome the suspicions we still have over experience?

Writing in English as ‘foreign body’ emphasises an innate superiority of the writing over the written. Equally, the pure abstraction of the work escapes any crystallisation: not just paper, not just colour and not just subjectivity. It is instead a constant negotiation between all of these elements and more, finally mirrored by their inexorable instability. The strength of the piece has to be found precisely in this constant white noise produced by the artist himself experiencing the work and its limits.

III

Strange intertwined destinies: two men in two different countries, maybe even in two different continents, and with two separate existences. These men share and, at the very same time, are separated by the same object. Maybe let’s not call it an object though. Let’s just say that it is an idea, an intuition. Two perfect strangers in two different points of the globe having, at the very same time, the very same idea. Deciding that it would be the right moment to put it all down, black on white, to share it with everyone else, with the rest of the world, including the respective other man in the different country or continent who is inadvertently sharing the very same thought.

Well that’s a cul-de-sac: they arrive at that point independently and through intricate personal paths, maybe through their own idiosyncrasies and vicissitudes. Yet the fact stays the same: they had the very same intuition and they decided to spit it out, to communicate it to everyone else, unaware of the incredible and fortuitous mirrored case which, in another part of the world, is doing exactly the same, somewhere and somehow differently.

History has taught us that there should be a winner and a loser. One of the two will be remembered, the other forgotten, bounded to oblivion.

Yet I’m not thinking about history here, and for a brief instant the two men are exactly the same man. Their personal differences, their stories and their futures are obliterated by the presence of that perfect thought.

History’s parenthesis: that’s probably what an abstract work, as an abstract writing, should be made of.

IV

It seems as if we could schematise two productive ways of analysing the difficult predicaments of experience: you could simply ‘live the work’ as an immanence, taking unconsciously on board all its conceptual and aesthetic qualities through a subjective mediation of them. Otherwise you could ‘live the explanation of the work’, focusing on the nature of these very same conceptual and aesthetic qualities, but still with a subjective immanent look.

Being able, on the contrary, to clearly draw a line between these two aspects and use one on top of the other, even if just by combining them, that is dogmatism, it is pure institution and has nothing to do with the work itself.


Francesco Pedraglio

* Richard Foreman, 14 Things I Tell Myself when I fall into the trap of making the writing imitate “experience”


Monday 3 May 2010

Reto Pulfer - Der Themenkatalog


Der Themenkatalog

Reto Pulfer

Artist’s book with 132 colour reproductions of his artwork
Colour, 48 pages, 24 x 32 cm, hardcover
Edited by Francesco Pedraglio and Reto Pulfer
With a critical text by Francesco Pedraglio (English) and literary texts by Reto Pulfer (English/German)
Published by ARCHIVE Books, Berlin / Turin
in collaboration with FormContent, London
ISBN 978-88-95702-02

Buy your copy HERE

Thursday 22 April 2010

Salon du Mercredi - 'The Water and the Jar'


Salon Du Mercredi

Tuesday 27 April 7p.m.

at the bar on 20 rue Moret 75011 Paris

How and why we do recognize that something is an exhibition, a show, a spectacle? Come and join us to watch through the unbreakable goggles of representation with interventions by:

Alex Cecchetti, Christian Frosi, Mark Geffriaud, Yoann Gourmel, Géraldine Longueville, Benoît Maire, Raimundas Malasauskas, Simone Menegoi, Darius Miksys, Francesco Pedraglio, Romain Sein, Chris Sharp, Alexandre Singh, Caterina Riva, Elodie Royer, Jennifer Teets, Sandra Terdjman, Emilie Villez, Pieternel Vermoortel and many more.

Organised by Alex Cecchetti and La Vitrine