Art Today Association
Center for Contemporary Art - Plovdiv

"For Those Who Are Born Today" by Alberto GARUTTI

"For Those Who Are Born Today" by Alberto Garuttiis a project realized for Metaphorai which is making a link with the city of Plovdiv through a project that addresses directly its inhabitants.
"Ai nati oggi" ("For Those Who Are Born Today") offers a way of signaling and monitoring the life of the city through art.
A plaque placed in Kapana neighborhood reads: “THE STREETLIGHTS OF THIS DISTRICT ARE CONNECTED TO THE MATERNITY WARDS OF THE CITY HOSPITALS “Selena”, “St-Georges”, “Plovdiv” “Topaks", EVERY TIME THE LIGHT SLOWLY PULSATES IT MEANS A CHILD HAS BEEN BORN. THE WORK IS DEDICATED TO THAT CHILD, AND TO THE CHILDREN BORN TODAY IN THIS CITY.”
The hospital’s personnel of neonatology pushes a button each time a baby is born, and the neighborhood’s street lights start slowly pulsating.
This work interpellates the citizens with the intent of arousing in them empathy and a sense of belonging.

Special project for Metaphorai (curated by Katia Anguelova & Alessandra Poggianti)
The 24th Week of Contemporary Art, Art Today Association

The project is part of the program of Plovdiv - European capital of culture 2019
With the support of: Shapdiz Foundation, ADD Bulgaria

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: