Art Today Association
Center for Contemporary Art - Plovdiv

24th Week of Contemporary Art

METAPHORAI

Spatial Narratives by:
Babi Badalov, Zbynek Baladran, Alberto Garutti, Mohssin Harraki, Pravdoliub Ivanov, Daniela Kostova, Jiri Kovanda, Juan Pablo Macias, Margherita Moscardini, Maurizio Nannucci, Delphine Reist, Sebastien Roux, Hans Schabus, Olivier Vadrot.

Curated by Katia Anguelova & Alessandra Poggianti

Opening: 14/09 2018 6.00 PM
14/09 – 14/10/2018

Centre of Contemporary Art, The Ancient Bath
Blvd “6 Septemvri” 179 / www.arttoday.org

Exhibitions hours: Tuesday to Sunday: 12 АM – 6:30 PM

“IN MODERN ATHENS, the vehicles of mass transportation are called metaphorai. To go to work or come home, one takes a “metaphor”—a bus or a train. Stories could also take this noble name: every day, they traverse and organize places; they select and link them together; they make sentences and itineraries out of them“ (Michel de Certeau, Spatial Stories in The Practice of Everyday Life [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984]).

Metaphorai is an exhibition that consists of 13 different narrations articulated within the spaces of Plovdiv’s Ancient Bath. Following Michel de Certeau, each of these narrations, which we may call “metaphors”, arise out of those places we traverse, organize, select and connect every day, creating sentences and itineraries that work as valences for spatial displacements of many kinds – from syntactic and semantic to pragmatic ones.

Each narration tells the story of its own movement, implies its own change of position; it narrates its own passage from one point to another, adapting and re-adapting itself to changing spatial features and rules. Each one of the artists acts as a narrative machine; they insert their own lived experiences, their own listening capacity, a valence of various chunks of knowledge filling up the gaps left behind by urban planning. The artists produce a swarm of metaphors and signs organized through different methods and narrative actions inside the exhibition space.

The exhibition Metaphorai is a narrative device whose authors are artists, readers of the city; while walking, they move, travel, find-and-write narrations, create a multitude of metaphors opening a semiotic vital flux, not an escape route: “The great and only error lies in thinking that a line of flight consists in fleeing from life; the flight into the imaginary, or into art. On the contrary, to flee is to produce the real, to create life, to find a weapon”. (Deleuze G, Parnet C., Dialogues, Columbia Univ Press, 1989).

This project is part of the official program of Plovdiv 2019, European Capital of Culture.

Kindly supported by:

Art Today Association
Center for Contemporary Art - Plovdiv

Ursula Biemann, Subatlantic, 2015. Video still.

Operaismo Naturale: Ecology of the Event

Fold 1 of Digital Ecologies 2018-2019: a project in two folds

at the Center of Contempoary Art ‘Ancient Bath’ (6th September Str. 179) and the former tobacco warehouse SKLAD (Ekzarh Yosif Str. 16) in Plovdiv, Bulgaria.

With works on display and interventions by Donatella Bernardi, Ursula Biemann, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Delphine Chapuis Schmitz, Voin de Voin & Simone Gilges, Jonas Etter, David Jacques, Monica Ursina Jager, knowbotiq, Dominique Koch, Marlene Maier, Boyan Manchev, Angela Melitopoulos, Uriel Orlow, Ursula Palla, Elena Peytchinska, Elodie Pong, Isabel Reiss, Oliver Ressler, Dorothea Rust, Kerstin Schroedinger, Pascal Schwaighofer, Sandro Steudler, Axelle Stiefel, Kamen Stoyanov, Milva Stutz, Katharina Swoboda, Una Szeemann & Bohdan Stehlik, Lena Maria Thuring, and Alexander Tuchacek

Curated by Dimitrina Sevova

Co-curated by Katharina Swoboda and Emil Mirazchiev

27 July to 5 September 2018

Opening: Friday 27 July 2018
18:00h Doors open at the two venues
19:00h Welcome and curatorial introduction at Center for Contemporary Art ‘Ancient Bath’
followed by performances by Alexander Tuchacek and Axelle Stiefel

Events: Saturday 28 July 2018
14:00h Curatorial guided tour across the two venues in the presence and with contributions by participating artists, starting at the Center for Contemporary Art ‘Ancient Bath’
16:00h Performative walk and public intervention starting at the Center for Contemporary Art ‘Ancient Bath’, across the two exhibition venues, by Dorothea Rust
17:00h Curatorial guided tour continues at the former tobacco warehouse SKLAD
Evening program at the former tobacco warehouse SKLAD
19:00h Talk by Boyan Manchev, Meteoropolitics
20:15h Performance-lecture by Luchezar Boyadjiev, The Greatest Love of My Life was a Non-Human
21:00h Performance by Voin de Voin & Simone Gilges, Portal 1. From the digital to the physical and vice versa (what is in between)

Events: Sunday 29 July 2018 at the former tobacco warehouse SKLAD
13:30h Artist talks by Kamen Stoyanov, Elena Peytchinska and Marlene Maier
14:00h Performance by Una Szeemann & Bohdan Stehlik, Differences on a shared pillow
14:45h Sandro Steudler, Der Bau: Approaches to a Theory of Data Sculpture (Der Bau: Ans?tze zu einer Theorie der Datenplastik)
15:30h David Jacques, An anti-travel travelogue
16:15h Katharina Swoboda, Vampire Graves
17:00h Isabel Reiss, Combs, Waves and Fields
Evening program
20:30h Public interview with Alexander Tuchacek by Dimitrina Sevova
21:15h Axelle Stiefel, Codex Operator

Events: Saturday 01 September 2018 at the Center for Contemporary Art - Plovdiv, The Ancient Bath
19:00h Performance by Delphine Chapuis Schmitz


Digital Ecologies is composed of two folds of an international group exhibition project and takes place across two venues, the Center for Contemporary Art ‘Ancient Bath’ and the former tobacco warehouse SKLAD in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. The first fold, an exhibition project under the title, Operaismo Naturale: Ecology of the Event, takes place from 27 July to 5 September 2018, with talks, interventions and performances on 28 and 29 July and on 1 September; and the second, an expanded exhibition project building on the first exhibition and its context, from 4 May to 29 July 2019, with an accompanying symposium on 5/6 May 2019.

Digital Ecologies brings on display art works that engage with ecological domains and constitute a constellation of eco-art, of emancipatory art practices and committed aesthetic inventions. They have ethical implications in the age of meta-data and the political economy of valorization of information under post-internet conditions, and in the troubling times of rapid and unpredictable climate change associated with global warming. The exhibition project is a platform to display, but also a laboratory for joint research to invent new concepts, affects and percepts – a space of experiments on how to turn knowledge into practice, and practice into knowledge, with its own temporality.

Operaismo Naturale: Ecology of the Event takes inspiration from the desire by Deleuze & Guattari to write a philosophy of nature in which any distinction between nature and artifice becomes blurred. The ultimate volume of Philosophy of Nature remains an unwritten project in the body of their collective work, in the channels of their non-linear micro-logic of philosophical ideas. It leaves an unoccupied space for us to speculate, to fabulate, to experiment what and how such a philosophy could be that is inevitably a matter of aesthetics and ethics. The unwritten Philosophy of Nature is a project of naturalist materialism in science-fiction that remains an open work, a threshold for ‘heretic’ ideas in the blurred zone between nature and artifice, or what Michel Foucault called points of heresies, which correspond to Deleuze and Guattari’s “Event-centered singularities” and resonances between them that make up the diagrammatic feature of the plane. Their physical magnitude can unexpectedly take us off in a new direction, where there is no longer a need for speculative unity between nature and spirit or between nature and technology, but rather ecologic modulations of micro brains’ plasticity. The plastic forces operate between the organic and inorganic, between human and non-human. Their plastic method is not so much a transformation of one into the other than the passing of one into the other to anticipate the future of social and politico-aesthetic change.

The project interrogates how the relation between the concepts of plasticity in nature, art and the social can be de-instituted, and thought as abstract machine and concrete plastic forces, plasticity as an aesthetic and social force that can be conceived as plastic forces and organic folds in the multi-layered plateaus of matter.

Text (excerpt): Dimitrina Sevova
The text in its full length can be found on the website of the project Digital Ecologies: a project in two folds

A project of Art Today Association, Plovdiv in collaboration with Corner College, Zurich.