Athanor’ second web exhibition spans projects which deal with the theme of accumulation from different perspectives. The title itself is intended to question the way in which accumulative processes of collecting and archiving can be considered as “sacred” acts, while the care of the archivist — or the passion of the collector — can be seen as deeply connoted by a religious or spiritual dimension.

The way in which the contents are displayed in this online exhibition aims to foster viewers in discovering these four archive-based projects. As the Italian art critic and curator Marco Scotini said about exhibiting archive materials: “‘what’ displayed artworks and documents are is never independent from ‘how’ they are staged”¹. The basic interface of the projects’ webpages provides a neutral background: an attempt to not put some contents in relief, but rather “to put them in the viewer’s sight”, as the architect Lina Bo Bardi once declared apropos of her setup design for Museu de Arte in São Paulo², a three dimensional rendering of the concept of accumulation.

Lina Bo Bardi, gallery setup, Museu de Arte de São Paulo, 1968

If this concept is the leitmotif which binds the projects together, they are indeed very different both in their premises and their visual outputs.

Paolo Patelli’s The Hut of European Identity plays around the inciting statement that there is no such thing as an “European identity”, at least not in a definite and conclusive way. Starting from the concept drawn for the House of European History (HEH) — a museum recently opened in Brussels with the aim of providing access to “transnational processes and events in Europe through museological interpretation”³ — the project’s theoretical framework highlights the lack of concrete points of reference transversally agreed by all the cultures forming Europe. Rather, this work-in-progress identity is made up of military conflicts and ideological clashes; the harmony and equity figured by EU institutions seem to be no more than the bridges depicted on € banknotes: an archetypal, distant, fake version of reality⁴.

Paolo Patelli, The Hut of European Identity, Amsterdam, 2016

As a counterpart to the HEH, Patelli built a more modest “hut”, as an “unsolicited addition of footnotes, annotations on the margins”⁵ and as a collection of material culture items regarding Europe’s political life, including pamphlets, flags, a loudspeaker.

The symmetrical and perfect compositions featured on euro–notes are completely reversed by the urban–organical accumulations created by Ryota Matsumoto. Athanor exhibits just a sample of the prolific production of Matsumoto, visual artist, architect and urban planner. His artworks are morphological refletctions of contemporary urban milieus, whose inputs, defined as “socio–cultural entities”⁶, come from both the architectural practice and the art history.

William Baziotes, Untitled, 1932

Taking into account assorted and peculiar references, from Futurism and Surrealism to Abstract Expressionism and more recently Julie Mehretu’s large–scale abstract architectures, Matsumoto acts as an alchemical catalyst able to give shape to chaotic, yet perceivably ordered, compositions. The abstract imagery is a result of an hybrid technique between analog tools (ink, acrylic, graphite) and digital media (3d parametric modeling, algorithmic processing, compositional custom softwares). The layering of multiple perspectives, together with the sibylline titling, contribute to convey a strange feeling of votive awe towards these manifold image–divinities.

Indeed, a sense of awe is what Antoine Lefebvre and Farah Khelil should have felt while browsing shelves in the Avranches Library, which houses thousands of precious manuscripts from the Abbey of Mont Saint–Michel, but also worn out books, devoured by book–eating insects. As a part of their ongoing project bookworms, the two artists, both book lovers, reflected on the importance of books as factor of knowledge transfer.

Alain Resnais, Toute la Mémorie du Monde, 20’, 1956

Appropriating the title of a doc movie by Alain Resnais⁷ — a display of the intricate mechanisms of cataloguing, storing, retrieving books in the Bibliotheque Nationale Française — ALL THE MEMORY IN THE WORLD sees the risks of physical damage to a book object as a metaphor for those ones, much more dangerous, which affect cultural transmission as a whole.

The process of accumulation and its close relationship with the identity of the collector is the focus of Nicolas Vamvouklis’ research: Collecting Queerly. Here presented in the form of a weekly log, this research⁸ explores gay identities and identifications as they are communicated in and through art and provides a critical approach to the study of collectors. Starting from historical imagery depicting collectors and their possessions, the log will then outline the turbulent existence of the Greek collector and gallerist Alexandre Iolas, the relationship with his collection and the villa which housed it.

Alexandre Iolas, Villa Iolas, Agia Paraskevi, 1964 ca.

Archive materials will be gathered together and discussed from a contemporary perspective, in order to set a new layer in the field of queer studies. Questioning the very nature and definition of collecting, Vamvouklis underlines how the act itself, rather than the collected items, is keen to become an object of veneration.

¹ Dal Sasso, Davide (2016). “Dialoghi di Estetica. Parola a Marco Scotini”, Artribune

² Bo Bardi, Lina (1950). “O Museu de Arte de São Paulo”. Habitat - Revista das Artes no Brasil, quoted in Stephen Mark Caffey, Gabriela Campagnol, “Dis/Solution: Lina Bo Bardi’s Museu de Arte de São Paulo”, Journal of Conservation and Museum Studies, 2014

³ http​:​//​www.​europarl.​europa.eu​/visiting​/en​/brussels​/house-​of-​european-​history

⁴ On the usage of fake imagery on euro-notes: https​:​//​www.dezeen.com​/2013​/05​/02/​sam-​jacob-​opinion-​money-​design/

⁵ Patelli, Paolo (2016). “The Hut of European Identity: Some Context”, http​:​//​neweuropeans.​org/​the-​hut-​of-​european-​identity-​some-​context/

⁶ Matsumoto, Ryota (2016). http​:​//​www.​ryotamatsumoto.​com/​p/​about​.html

⁷ Resnais, Alain (1956). Toute la Mémoire du Monde, 20’. https​:​//​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=i0RVSZ​_yDjs

⁸ Inspired by the conference Other Objects of Desire: Collectors and Collecting Queerly, held at the University of Chicago and later transcribed into the homonymous publication edited by Michael Camille and Adrian Rifkin: https​:​//​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=5mZdtN​xCkH8

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The term mediagenic¹ — which shares the same roots with photogenic — applies to an artistic instance when this is composed of a set of features which solely happen under a specific medial context, often casting reflections over the medium itself. Projects featured in this web exhibition ironically reflect on the daily usage of technology and social media, and their links with art processes.

The Case of Pavel Pavel by Giorgio Ruggeri, a scholar in digital curatorship, documents the constant production of images by a Lithuanian artist nicknamed Pavel Pavel. The visual collection only exists on his Facebook private page, and this webspace itself is the piece of art, a quotidian and reiterative piece of art which gathers multidisciplinary and multi-medial elements. The social media platform concurrently constitutes the artwork foundation and its disguise: the accumulative, junky structure of the news feed in which Pavel Pavel operates, provides a camouflaged environment to his aesthetic practice.

Similarly, Facebook.com/com... by Kasper Lecnim parodies the information flow of the Facebook news feed, denying its content and minimizing it to a basic, zero degree: an accumulated void. The blankness of Lecnim’s webspace is odd and relevant, in a world of ordinary and irrelevant items.

This extravaganza, or the “excess of information nonsense”, is the starting point to read Symphony for 12 personal computers (again, by Lecnim), a software performance made up by a continuous process of crashes and rebooting propelled on Windows machines. The related sounds contribute to the shaping of a specific melody, which is possible only under these circumstances, thus it is mediagenic.

The “mediagenicity” is finally undisguised in G.I.S. Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe by Jeroen Bouweriks. Here the object of artistic construction is represented by Messenger chats, the medial environment used by the artist to ask other artists, curators and media theorists to Google-search for the “original” version of Manet’s painting and to attach it within the conversation. Bouweriks’ project stimulates at least two different arguments. The most obvious one deals with the processes of image interpretation and artistic appropriation, by which a universe of different versions of the painting appears, all these versions being related to each other and towards the original by comparative links: equal to, similar, opposite. While questioning concepts such as “original”, “authority” and “autonomy” in the arts, G.I.S. LDSLH also offers the possibility to reflect about the slipperiness of the public / private boundaries, and how we deal with each other in a context that we assume it’s public or not. The displayed real-time conversations include off-topic details (current mood, future plans, memories) which could eventually become objects of voyeuristic interest. The intimate setting of a private chat clashes with the public recognition of these digital personæ: the project feasibility relies on the factual truth that each of the contributors has a Facebook account.

¹A brilliant example can be found with Daniel Scott Snelson’s project PDF Composite Mixtape

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