The Disobedience Archive

Taking over Turin's Castello di Rivoli, the first Italian venue of the "Disobedience Archive", curated by Marco Scotini, is a contingent archive that expresses itself in the “here and now” of the exhibition.

The year of 1968 held division and collective, political and existential explosion. In Italy, it preceded the FIAT Mirafiori clashes and the great strikes that quickly led to the Hot Autumn of worker strikes. Poet, novelist and artist Nanni Balestrini has produced many works on this difficult period of Italian history, transforming the linguistic space into a public space of political reflection that belongs to the community. It is no surprise, then, that the first Italian venue chosen for "Disobedience Archive (The Republic)", an exhibition curated by Marco Scotini, should be the Castello di Rivoli in Turin — or that a Balestrini collage should begin (or end, depending on which way you turn) the ephemerals section that contextualises the exhibition in a parliamentary ante-chamber laid out with documents, publications, objects and works. What Parliament? The one that artist and architect Céline Condorelli designed as a display, so that visitors could enjoy and learn about the film legacy built up by "Disobedience" over its long existence, which started about ten years ago.

disobedience_scotini_063 — "Disobedience Archive (The Republic)", installation view at the Castello di Rivoli, Turin

The Parliament is a fragmented circle divided into four semi-circular sections. Unlike a real parliament, these are physically separated by the museum walls into four equal communicating rooms. This is no institutional structure designed to protect and guarantee debate and dialectic between the elected majority and the opposition on which the very nature of a parliament rests. It is an attempt to bring the voice of dissent and social reconfiguration to a non-representational republican charter.

Every room contains two theme areas, recognized by a selection of historic occurrences, global movements and specific experiences linked to nationality, countries and genre politics. Dividing the floor into sections and compartments removes individual contributions, images and sounds from the so-called parliamentary debate, which becomes isolated and presented as such, on its own.

disobedience_scotini_253 — "Disobedience Archive (The Republic)", installation view at the Castello di Rivoli, Turin

"Disobedience" did not originate to reconstruct history but to piece together, archive and un-archive experiences with a view to potential narrations. It is a contingent archive that expresses itself in the “here and now” of the exhibition. The event is once again far from random in Turin — or rather, in Italy — if read within the more general perspective of the Italian situation, where the Montecitorio chamber has repeatedly subjected democracy to tension and stress thanks to a now-endemic conflict between politics and the judiciary and between numerous state institutions. It is not a matter of separate reasoning with a capital A for art and P for politics, but of restoring a natural hybrid that can construct a "grammar" — drawing on Foucault —, one with minor and major languages, but nevertheless recognisable.

disobedience_scotini_024 — "Disobedience Archive (The Republic)", installation view at the Castello di Rivoli, Turin

If aesthetic means lending visibility to something that previously had none, it is hard not to see this "Disobedience" experiment as such. It places itself at the centre of the reflection not only on the language of the activist cinema but it also transforms the practice of disobedience into one of the Fine Arts, to cite Marcelo Exposito, an activist-artist present in archive since its debut.

Since 2004, "Disobedience" has criss-crossed the world and in every location has preceded, run into or shared protest movements that have left their stamp on the global map of recent years: at Boston's MIT shortly before the Occupy movement invaded the Financial District in Manhattan; at Atlanta's Georgia State University on Martin Luther King Day; and in Mexico, England, Sweden and the Netherlands. For every place, city and historical circumstance, "Disobedience" has used the display as a mobile means of absorbing the very nature of disobedience: visceral, chaotic and plural.

disobedience_scotini_070 — "Disobedience Archive (The Republic)", installation view at the Castello di Rivoli, Turin

In 2010, Xabier Salaberria’s display for "Disobedience" was based on the image of Lissitzky’s Soviet Pavilion and that of the first Documenta in 1955. In 2011 at MIT, the Urbanos Studio's installation combined the archive videos with the works produced by American students in the workshops and records of local political and artistic actions. The exhibition design is conceived as a long strip of garden but also remembers the spaces of the protest sit-in camps, the codes of which soon filled the global media.

The display changes each time to host and promulgate the nomadic experience of an archive that takes a conscience upon itself, pushes for the rewriting of movements, the sharing of self-empowerment practices and the reconstruction of protest, thus developing a new aesthetic, didactic and political choreography.

disobedience_scotini_248 — "Disobedience Archive (The Republic)", installation view at the Castello di Rivoli, Turin

The 2000s and the years that directly preceded them were crucial in the development of an artistic trend that absorbed forms of activism into art space: from Catherine David’s Documenta X, which expressed a strong desire to demolish the linguistic standard and sanction the realisation of a new trend of doing art in the real world, to Arthur Żmijewski’s recent Berlin Biennale in which the Kunstwerk venue was radically taken over by the Occupy movement. If activism and the citizen community press us with an appeal — “what do we do?” —, a possible answer can be: “disobey”. Martina Angelotti (@martinanji)

disobedience_scotini_067 — "Disobedience Archive (The Republic)", installation view at the Castello di Rivoli, Turin

Through 30 June 2013
Disobedience Archive (The Republic)
Castello di Rivoli
Piazza Mafalda di Savoia, Turin

disobedience_scotini_262 — "Disobedience Archive (The Republic)", installation view at the Castello di Rivoli, Turin

The Disobedience Archive

Taking over Turin's Castello di Rivoli, the first Italian venue of the "Disobedience Archive", curated by Marco Scotini, is a contingent archive that expresses itself in the “here and now” of the exhibition.

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