Rizoma: meet the artists of our first project, Pandemos

The Covid-19 crisis represents one of the most significant interruptions of daily life and business-as-usual of recent times. We want to seize on these extraordinary developments and engage a new generation of artists, thinkers and writers in the creation of artworks that will remain as witness to the pandemic event of 2020, while providing a mythopoetic contribution to the transformation of our unhappy, unsustainable, and unjust “normality”. 

Weeks of lockdown starkly challenged us to redefine our previously held values. This applied both on an individual level – from our perception of time to that of personal relations, from our relation to objects, animals or plants to the reassessment of what holds meaning – as on a systemic level – with cultural institutions and artists forced to experiment with new ways of engaging their audiences and guaranteeing the continuation of creative output.

Glimpses of a different present, a possible alterity, have been emerging from this lived experience. The land has been plowed. Has anything of value emerged? Can we pick it up and look at it closely? Understanding our respective practices as an act of care, a power capable of generating new realities, which potentialities should we nourish? You may want to read Lorenzo Marsili’s Non aspettatevi troppo dalla fine del mondo or Jan Verwoert’s Personal Support: How To Care? to situate these questions in a broader context.

We invite artists, thinkers, writers and creatives to help us gather the seeds of a possible future that’s already here, directing our gaze to some of the intuitions that may have emerged out of our recent collective experience. We are looking for up to ten concrete gestures of transformation, forming a small collection of tools to contribute to reimagining individual behavior and collective processes as we move forwards.

PANDEMOS

Pandemos will take the form of a multimedia and multi-dimensional book and flatpack exhibition, in some ways referencing the magic tomes that inhabit the libraries described by Jorge Luis Borges, or the Atlas produced by Aby Warburg. The various contributions will form chapters of a collective work, with each contribution following a language of choice: whether that is a story, a performance, a theoretical text, a musical composition, a visual artwork, or else.

The magic book will be available online, taking full advantage of its multimedia potential. In physical format Pandemos will further exist as an exhibition that can be replicated and is devised both for a public context and for a home exhibition, thus allowing for suitable fruition in times of social distancing. The same contribution may be expressed differently for book and exhibition; they can be complementary elements or approximate translations between the physical and the digital.

ARTISTS SELECTED

We are happy to announce the artists selected from the open call Pandemos. We thank all those who applied – we received a very large number of high quality applications!

More information about the selected projects and the launch of Pandemos’ magic book will be made available on the new website of Rizoma. Online soon.

Artists selected:

•  Oli Bonzanigo
• Michele Bubacco & Carlo Santacaterina
• Michele Maria Cammarata & Roberto Lentini
• Eliza Collin
• Michelangelo Ferrara
• Lina Issa, Batch M. Ballow & Richard Braude
• Alessandro Librio
• Marianna Maruyama
• Ignazio Mortellaro
• Studio Luminescent
• Salvatore Peluso

Timeline

We ask artists to work on their project over the Summer with a first delivery in August 2020. The book and exhibition will be prepared over the months of August and September for presentation in October.

CONTACT AND JURY

If you have any questions, please contact us at info@euroalter.com

The selection jury was composed by: Luca Cinquemani, Giusi Diana, Letizia Gullo, Simone Mannino, Lorenzo Marsili, Izabela Anna Moren, Ennio Pellicanò, Filippo Pistoia, Clarissa Renée Podbielski, Giuseppina Vara, Giorgio Vasta.