A Conspiratorial Bind: Curating Public Dissensus in Venice

A Conspiratorial Bind: Curating Public Dissensus in Venice Cameron Bishop, David Cross Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia Venetian Bind is a place-responsive public art project unfolding in Venice concurrent with the celebrated spectacle of the Venice Biennale Devised by curators David Cross and Cameron Bishop, and in collaboration with the European Cultural Centre in Venice, they have assembled a team of 24 artists in six teams –researchers and PhD candidates across a diverse range of disciplines, each scheduled to arrive and make work at different times over the six months of the Biennale. This initiative deploys a variety of novel methods using art in subtle, activist and collaborative ways in public space to explore ideas around the commons, public health and climate responsive environments. The project distinguishes itself through its place-responsiveness, and its material and temporal constraints, engaging directly with the environmental and socio-cultural fabric of Venice – a city at the frontline of climate change and its implications. This paper explores the tensions that we bring to bear as curators in this project, between the efficacy of place-responsive and gallery-based practices in contemporary art, while drawing out the themes at play, across our 10 year’s work together as collaborators devising public art projects in sites often overlooked, considered peripheral to the usual political, or economic business of the city In doing so, we ground ourselves in our work as co-conspirators, following Harney and Desideri’s far reaching 2013 essay on curatorial practice, A Conspiracy without a Plot In examining the continuing efficacy of ‘the undercommons’, as a critical ‘practice of space and time that does not conform to the space and time of sovereign, self-possessed individuals or the states they plot’ (p), this study seeks to understanding how ideas of ‘publicness’ can be remade Following Bifo Berardi’s contention that we have shifted in the age of semio-captalism from conjunction to connection as the dominant mode of social interaction, how might public art projects such as Venetian bind employ in Berardi’s words ‘sensibility as the faculty that makes it possible to find a path that does not yet exist’ (pp-12-13). Unfolding a methodology of four parts, this research seeks to mesh experimental art making with the accumulation of new skills, straddling technique, participatory engagement and an understanding of environment and its assorted transitions. These four modes: ritual, encounter, provocation (or bind) and workshop offer, we suggest, a composite method whereby the artist can be simultaneously provocateur, collaborator, student and maker of place-responsive experiences Venice in these terms becomes a dynamic laboratory of communities, histories and technologies, rather than operating in its default setting as an exotic backdrop to display artwork. In seeking to build new understandings of both Venice and temporary public art as critical operations mediated by what Slavoj Zizek calls ‘event culture’, this paper asks four specific questions. How might new curatorial approaches to public art make trouble for the idea of Venice as a neutral, if architecturally rich, art gallery? How can a public art project expand our understanding of Venice as a complex constellation of places, people and ecologies across the lagoon, and not simply understood as a winding pathway between San Marco and Rialto Bridge? In what ways can constraint operate in curatorial thinking as a productive mechanism by which ideas of water, both in scarcity and abundance, might be understood anew And, can 26 cross-disciplinary art practices developed in collaborative groups, expand our understanding of the sometimes-nebulous category of public art? References Berardi, F [Bifo] (2015) Phenomenology of the end, Semiotext(e), Pasadena. Harney and Desideri (2013) A conspiracy without a plot, in The curatorial: A philosophy of curating, London, Bloomsbury.