025
☀ Party TV, live streaming. Video, sound. 6h 12"
Stress Test #1: Salsicce di Natale
Director: Andrea Masu
Production: MACA - Museo Arte Contemporanea Alcamo
Curation: Landescape
In September 2021, the artistic direction of the MACA was entrusted to the curatorial platform Landescape, which chose the theme HUMAN NON-HUMAN within which to bring together the activities of the next two seasons. The guiding idea is to transform the museum into a parliament where human and non-human agents meet to confront the collapse of our civilisation. In this sense, MACA's activities are complemented by the educational-workshop activities carried out within the Casa degli Artisti, an organic place of residence and study, pertaining to MACA.
The programming of the 22/23/24 seasons wants to continue the path undertaken in 2021 with the project PARTY TV by Andrea Masu, produced by Landescape, a display work through which MACA has become a device for capturing the fragmented imagery of the artists invited to appear on TV. The Museum is a centre of production in constant evolution, where artists and professionals give life to a rhizomatic ecosystem capable of evolving into collective and dynamic forms. The device was tested to its limits during two stress tests.
Stresstest #1 'Christmas sausages' aired on Facebook on 21/12/2021 for six consecutive hours, where the MACA, which has become a TV studio, hosts a delirious culinary programme, where cooking, directing, skateboarding, tattooing, music, costumes, performing arts, unfinished , green screen are mixed into one recipe: chocolate sausages.
A psychogeographical drift through the town of Alcamo; a drift that starts by waking up in the car and ends at the MACA museum. Alessandro and Giò spend the day going through places and meeting characters from the village with the aim of recovering material to make a Christmas tree at the MACA.
At MACA they are preparing the chocolate sausage tree.
The tree structure to be completed stands in the middle of the aisle like a sculpture. The preparation of the tree takes as long as live. There are mats and cushions on the floor. Everyone works on preparing the sausages for the tree. There are two stations to the right and left of the space, one where you prepare the sausages by putting the meat in the casing and one where you make the chocolate and coat the sausages. Once soaked in chocolate the sausages are placed on the tree structure. The live telephone passes from hand to hand following the initiatives of the participants.
In this context, other situations develop between the participants: discussion of urgent topics, video calls with other live broadcasts, impromptu dialogues, green screen magic, tiktok dances, preparation of comet stars, etc.
024
☀ UMANO NON UMANO
Art Direction
Maca - Museum of Contemporary Art, Alcamo
2021 / 2022 / 2023
A human non human museum. What is a spectrum? A moving image, light that it moves super fast from point A to point B. In this conceptual frame, there’s no room for polarisation. There’s this continuous movement able to shatter the rigidity of all the dichotomies. But this is also the frame within which LANDESCAPE will play inside the museum. It represents the opportunity to question cultural production model. A museum that is a playground for desperate attempts, for mingling around, for drawing and making fire. The museum become a secret place for believers who are not tired to try a miracle. It’s a continuous stress to test our capability to adapt our bodies for the metaverse. Till august 2022, Alcamo will welcome all the spectrums, those creature committed to burn the desire or burn themselves.
We wait for you!
Since 2015 we have embarked on a path that we did not know where it would lead us: to make the languages of the contemporary known in the far south, Alcamo. You have always supported us, with a critical, attentive and sometimes a bit severe gaze. Thanks to all this, we have managed to bring hundreds of artists into residence, to organize dozens of exhibitions, events, performances, talks. All this is our curriculum.
Finally the work done has borne fruit, first the PAC 2020 with the work of Andrea Masu and today the artistic direction of the MACA - Alcamo Contemporary Art Museum until August 2022. We had dreamed and designed it exactly like this. "Human not human" is the thematic frame that will follow us in this coming year.
Artwork by Tomo Studio
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ℜesidents! ☀
023
☀ ℜ3 Leslie Lawrence
24.08 - 20.09 .2021
During his residency, Leslie Lawrence has been working with Leonardo Ruvolo on a film based on the Alcamese historical figure Ludovico Corrao and the concept of the 'Hyperobject'. The film follows an investigation into the idea that objects persist in a greater capacity beyond their appearance and that uncovering this hidden reality will hold the key to overcoming the looming economic and ecological disasters of our age. Traversing the fog gates to the Hypersphere reveals that the Sicilian realm is permeated by Ludovico Corrao, who has transcended his personal history and ascended to the status of a Hyperobject that intrudes upon normal reality.
Leslie Lawrence was born in Jersey, Channel Islands. He studied in the Dirty Art Department, Amsterdam and the Theoretical Psychoanalytic Studies unit at UCL, London. He now lives and practices in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Leslie Lawrence's films are set in exaggerated realities where the actions of artists are entirely consumed by specific political and philosophical ideas. This often involves ambitious co-operative projects with other artists playing characters based on their real-life practices. Taking a critical psychoanalytic perspective, his films probe the outer limits of artistic philosophies as guides of individual behaviour while maintaining a materialist suspicion that actions are truly determined by an individual's class position.
Complementing his co-operative working method, Lawrence also acts as a researcher in the field of group decision-making, integrating his expertise in group psychology with organisational design practices.
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021
☀ After the Maestro
ℜ2 Tom K Kemp and Mónica Mays
16.08 - 16.09.2021
Tom K Kemp uses roleplaying game design, group improvisation and animation to collectively parse the eerie consequences of global systems on intimate and immediate human relations. His works generate semi-autonomous Weird fictions, where gamification and collaborative storytelling are combined into a deviated method of complexity modelling.
Kemp studied with the School of The Damned, an autonomous free art pedagogy programme in the UK. Selected projects and exhibitions have included La Casa Encendida, Madrid ES, Rupert, Vilnius LT, Quad, Derby UK, MKG Hamburg, DE and the Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam NL. He will be a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten for 2021-2023.
Mónica Mays (ES) sculptural work materializes through scavenging and extracting paranthropological symbolism to engage with forms of cosmological belonging. Materials with winding, ambulatory histories of global circulation and redistribution intermingle with fabulations and vernacular stories of the home. She draws on ornamentation in folk and domestic artefacts as forms of tacit, unintelligible speech which pass on the irregular and unspoken histories of their making.
Styleframe for After the Maestro ↑
↑ Sand Shine. Soil, nails, glass, cardboard, 2020
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019
☀ In the Fold
ℜ1 Aurélien Lepetit and Arthur Tramier
08.05 - 08.06.2021
Nomads' locus amenus ,the one belonging to human condition,
the path of humans towards their civilization.
A symbol of spiritual perfection, a place of happiness,
a mirage, a miracle, a secret place that can be reached by crossing the desert.
"Il sogno mediterraneo" Ludovico Corrao
Aurélien Lepetit is an artist and designer based in Amsterdam (NL). S’He graduated from École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts de Lyon (FR), the School of Design of the East China Normal University, Shanghai (CN) and the Dirty Art Department at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam (NL). They have been researching about toxic masculinities and the impact of white cis-heteronormative and patriarchal schemes after experiencing them during their 400m hurdle training practice. It became the base of the body of work STAMINA (2017-2020) which ended after experiencing a burnout while being a precarious cultural worker within several art- and educational institutions in The Netherlands. S’He used this ‘crash’ to reflect, initiate and curate the online interventions Speed Series from a Xeno-feminist perspective and, start a new body of work creating ephemeral multi-sensorial sculptures and mutating site-specific art installations. They hijack environments and situations where they are interested in performing productivity through ephemeral digital archive and the live documentation of a constant evolving practice in ‘becoming’. The exploration of constant growth and the destructive aspect of the human eternal search for limitless life and energies, stamina, bodily exhaustion, burnout, the sustainability of material and their potentialities to be reused, mutated or left, are often reflected upon with a problematic: What stays when bodies cease to be visible?
Arthur Tramier (1991, FR) is an artist and designer whose skills encompass the field of material research. He holds an M.F.A. in Art and Design (aka Dirty Art Department) from the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam. From 2018 to 2020, he has been developing his research on symbiotic and organic design and elasticity at the Art and Design Research Laboratory of ENSAD—PSL University in Paris. He has been working with Alessandro Mendini in Milan and his work has been exhibited in art spaces (Glassbox FR, Deborah Bowmann BE, Kelder UK, De Frabiek NL, etc.) bubbles and squats (Macao, IT, Postnorma NL, etc.) He investigates the complex interrelations between the inert and the living, the synthetic and the organic. His work is caught in a nexus of ever-evolving, transindividuating and transforming forces. He creates sculptural forms and ideas that —like those of the baroque— can unfold, evolve, and envelop, to create a labyrinth of contracting and expanding continuous elastic surfaces. His practice is deeply influenced by Frederick Kiesler’s theoretical, practical, and laboratory research on endlessness, vitalism, morphology, affect, elasticity and multiplicity. His work aims to develop techniques, materials and objects that work within and among the heterogeneous forces that condition synchretic individuations in a complex entanglement between the physical, the vital and the psychosocial.
↑Wellness (Speed - Part 1), 2020. Coloured wax, scent, plaster (detail) @Marineterrein, Amsterdam (NL)
↑ Wellness (Speed - Part 1) Missing pieces, 2020. Coloured wax and plaster, scent, ropes, variable dimensions @Marineterrein, Amsterdam (NL)
(…)absolute interiority, as an inner surface with only one side, nonetheless has another side, or a minimum of outside. The « unilaterality » of the monad implies as its condition of closure a torsion of the world, an infinite fold that can be unwrapped in conformity with the condition only by recovering the other side, (…) as the outside of its own interiority : a partition, a wall, a supple and adherent membrane coextensive with everything inside; Such is the vinculum : the unlocalizable primary link that borders the absolute interior.
Deleuze, G. (1993). The Fold, Leibniz and the Baroque. p.111. The Athlone Press.