MISEDUCATING THE OBEDIENT
a special project developed in collaboration with
the Critical Studies Department born in NABA, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti
Projects curated by:
Valentina Bonsignore Zagni (C.S.D.), Micol Califano (C.S.D.), Vittoria Mascellaro (C.S.D.), Elisabetta Pagella (C.S.D.), Eleonora Reffo (C.S.D.), Marta Seminerio (C.S.D.)
Artworks by:
Chiara Giordano (And What If), Chiara Andolina, Bianca Bellan, Silvia Berry, Ludovica Gugliotta, HETRA, Emma Moriconi, Tonia Paladini, Giulia Terminio
Coordination and general supervision of production and curatorship:
Eleonora Angiolini for Contemporary Attitude
Pictures by Gaia Olga Bianchi
Postproduction and graphic project by HETRA (Giovanna Schivo)
We are grateful to the Critical Studies Department for questioning us, letting us share our point of view on topics that represent the foundation of our project. MISEDUCATING THE OBEDIENT was in fact developed according to the needs and tensions from both parties: emergent curators and artists saw an answer to poetic and formal questions about artistic ideas and opinions, contributing to consolidate the way of working and research that Contemporary Attitude can consider its own way of being an active project in an often static system of artistic institutions.
In February 2021 Contemporary Attitude itslef was living in a moment of stalemate: our initiatives and our desires of growth collided with the invisible wall of the internet, of a pandemic no longer concerning the health of our team and loved ones, but a premise of social, creative, relational issues for our future plans. What prospects could we have expected, without a real perception of time and a refractory vision?
In that specific historical moment, we started reflecting with the participant to MISEDUCATING THE OBEDIENT on several historicized and contemporary topics of the contemporary artistic production: the development of a research methodology, the implementation of a shared planning, the curatorial choice of how to present a work, the communication of this process, the poetics and policy of the use of the artwork itself.
If the contemporaneity of culture is today a prolonged and basically infinite deferral, in which planning is continually reformulated and questioned by new needs of representation to the public, with the curators of C.S.D. we have decided to work on a priori relationships with contemporary art “users”: the body, its interconnection and correspondece with the other and the feeling of being obliged to be channeled into a networked world.
The artists selected by the curators from the C.S.D. focused their investigations on two specific issues, crystallized with the encounter with the language of fashion and clothes: disobedience and cultural appropriation. The latter is implemented in the choice of reserving a substantial space of the research to the choices of fabrics, accessories and clothes, whose symbolic value of their culture of origin is frequently transmuted by the commercial decontextualization promoted by the fashion industry and by collective anti-ethical trends. The theme of disobedience was revealed in the study of the attitude of the bodies, whose being both framed figures and thoughts, descended into the world of social restrictions induced by the Covid19 pandemic, evolves in a systemic suffering, exacerbated by the virtualization of study and work.
Finally, with MISEDUCATING THE OBEDIENT Contemporary Attitude expands the educational mission of this platform, the same goal we want to achieve via the in-progres Archive section, where we research and digitally collect innovations, deviations and differences in the artistic practice of contemporary artists, offering an accessible container for the discovery and visual and theoretical learning of enthusiasts and researchers in the sector of art and fashion.
In February 2021 Contemporary Attitude itslef was living in a moment of stalemate: our initiatives and our desires of growth collided with the invisible wall of the internet, of a pandemic no longer concerning the health of our team and loved ones, but a premise of social, creative, relational issues for our future plans. What prospects could we have expected, without a real perception of time and a refractory vision?
In that specific historical moment, we started reflecting with the participant to MISEDUCATING THE OBEDIENT on several historicized and contemporary topics of the contemporary artistic production: the development of a research methodology, the implementation of a shared planning, the curatorial choice of how to present a work, the communication of this process, the poetics and policy of the use of the artwork itself.
If the contemporaneity of culture is today a prolonged and basically infinite deferral, in which planning is continually reformulated and questioned by new needs of representation to the public, with the curators of C.S.D. we have decided to work on a priori relationships with contemporary art “users”: the body, its interconnection and correspondece with the other and the feeling of being obliged to be channeled into a networked world.
The artists selected by the curators from the C.S.D. focused their investigations on two specific issues, crystallized with the encounter with the language of fashion and clothes: disobedience and cultural appropriation. The latter is implemented in the choice of reserving a substantial space of the research to the choices of fabrics, accessories and clothes, whose symbolic value of their culture of origin is frequently transmuted by the commercial decontextualization promoted by the fashion industry and by collective anti-ethical trends. The theme of disobedience was revealed in the study of the attitude of the bodies, whose being both framed figures and thoughts, descended into the world of social restrictions induced by the Covid19 pandemic, evolves in a systemic suffering, exacerbated by the virtualization of study and work.
Finally, with MISEDUCATING THE OBEDIENT Contemporary Attitude expands the educational mission of this platform, the same goal we want to achieve via the in-progres Archive section, where we research and digitally collect innovations, deviations and differences in the artistic practice of contemporary artists, offering an accessible container for the discovery and visual and theoretical learning of enthusiasts and researchers in the sector of art and fashion.
MISEDUCATING THE OBEDIENT
a film by Giulia Terminio and Massimo Bologna
with original music by Giacomo Vanelli
Incontri Generazionali
by Chiara Andolina and Tonia Paladini
curated by Vittoria Mascellaro
LEARN MORE ABOUT IT ︎ HEREAbitudine incerta
by And What If
curated by Elisabetta Pagella
LEARN MORE ABOUT IT ︎ HEREAracno-Philia
by Bianca Bellan
curated by Elisabetta Pagella
LEARN MORE ABOUT IT ︎ HEREInhabit Us
by Silvia Berry
curated by Valentina Bonsignore Zanghi e Micol Califano
LEARN MORE ABOUT IT ︎ HERE“Mamma sto mandando un vocale”
ongoing project by HETRA
and Eleonora Reffo
LEARN MORE ABOUT IT ︎ HERE
Reclaim
by Maria Ludovica Gugliotta
curated by Vittoria Mascellaro
LEARN MORE ABOUT IT ︎ HERE
More than layers
by Emma Moriconi
curated by Marta Seminerio
LEARN MORE ABOUT IT ︎ HERE
The Critical Studies Department is an experimental research space, a fictitious department, born autonomously in 2020, during the first Italian lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic, by a group of students of the Master of Arts in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies at NABA, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti.
The Critical Studies Department takes shape as a tool to re-imagine the role of students within the educational institution and to define new possibilities for interaction, mutual help and self-organization.
Activator of dialogue, experimentation and collective collaboration, an in-between space, inclusive and multifaceted, a meeting point between the academic world and the outside world.
We think it is the right time to reconsider what has happened in the last two years by proposing unauthorized and non-hierarchical curatorial activities, laboratories and research groups: alternatives to the competitive and individualistic methods of working, not only in the art system, but also in the field of training, education and institutions.
Thanks to
