Fight-Specific Isola. From October 2 – 14, 2012, at Frigoriferi Milanesi, via Piranesi 10, Milano.
An Isola Art Center project in collaboration with Frigoriferi Milanesi.
With AAA (Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée), Paola Di Bello, Stefano Boccalini, Dafne Boggeri,Danilo Borelli, Emanuele Braga, Antonio Brizioli, Daria Carmi, Angelo Castucci, Loris Cecchini,Marco Colombaioni, Gabriele Di Matteo, Grupo Etcetera, Giuseppe Fanizza and Andrea Kunkl, Maddalena Fragnito, Elena Mantoni and Naima Faraò, David Michel Fayek, Kings (Federica Perazzoli, Daniele Innamorato), Fuori Dal Vaso, Valentina Maggi, out-Office for Urban Transformation (Angelo Castucci, Alessandro Di Giampietro, Carmelo Mutalipassi, Lorenzo Ronzoni, and others),Luca Pancrazzi, Maria Papadimitriou, Park Fiction, Pierfabrizio Paradiso, Camilla Pin, Edith Poirier, Rha Ze (Maddalena Fragnito, Emanuele Braga), Andrea Sala, Mariette Schiltz, Marco Scotini,Mirko Smerdel, Bert Theis, Stefano Topuntoli, Elvira Vannini, Daniele Vitale (Polytechnic archive), Fani Zguro.
The experience of Isola Art Center, told through a working-group exhibition that will occupy a plurality of spaces located between Frigoriferi Milanesi, the Isola neighborhood and Macao, developed on the relationship between artistic practice and activist actions, along with the neighborhood and its inhabitants. Considered as a laboratory, an art center, a community-based space that has developed an antagonistic approach to understanding the conditions of the political-economic changes within the city. Financial governance controls urban development, its transformations and its imbalances, in every aspect of work, time and life, resistance and dimensions of the common good. What role can art take in the urban context and how can it contribute to the creation of a radically alternative political situation?
The exhibition, like the upcoming book, Fight-Specific Isola. Art, Architecture, Activism and the Future of the City intends to review this experiment of alliance between artistic production and conflict from a perspective of historical analysis, and will be structured through three different levels of investigation: The documentary materials from the Polytechnic archives of Daniele Vitale and Stefano Topuntoli’s aerial photos that record the urban transformations and new architectural structures of the neighborhood since the early seventies; the more recent artistic and curatorial activities with a number of works created in the context of a “fighting-neighborhood”; and finally the latest developments focused on the effects of gentrification and the planning stages of a green space by Isola Pepe Verde and the community.
Fight-Specific Isola. A short documentary by Camilla Topuntoli. 4,12′