HOW TO DWELL AMONGST RUINS

We take the vantage point of those who move on the borderline between artistic and political production. From this observatory, a true laboratory of practices, it is possible to announce the end of “the art world” seen as that limited sphere, separated from the contexts in which it operates, of artistic activity. The promotion of a discourse “organized by the State” on art, on its production and conservation, can definitively be added to the rubble of the century that has just finished. This model, which has produced forms of serious underfunding and unconstructive gigantism, as well as the trading of favors, incapacity to create projects and cultural servility, now seems to have broken down. Large cultural institutions are closing, abandoned or inserted in the infernal machinery of real estate speculation. Even the laughable 0.3% of GDP set aside by our country for culture seems like a distant memory. Market rhetoric has not intervened, as some hoped, perhaps, to straighten out this mechanism, and it has even dramatically worsened certain harmful aspects. At the same time, the narrative connected with the crisis has joined up with the transformations in the sphere of sovereignty, feeding a downward spiral that runs the risk of catching unawares those who are not ready to grasp the new level of the challenge that faces us. This scenario leads us directly into the political nature of art. Where new forms of government and self-government emerge, in real or symbolic, metropolitan or nomadic territories, artistic production cannot help but come to terms with this process, becoming itself a part. In other words, the institutions of the art world, to make sense, can only be institutions of the “common”: places of cultural conflict and ongoing tumultuous negotiation regarding the terms of their very existence, capable of breaking their own boundaries, which have been decidedly narrow for over a century. The laboratories of these original institutional forms are already all around us, in our cities: they are liberated spaces, theaters removed from the rhetoric of national culture and the appreciation of the market – which, in the end, is nearly always the real estate market. They are the demand for an income of existence and citizenship for that intermittent, linguistic and relational work that was once the province of a few categories of intellectuals and artists, who today represent the great majority of the factory in which we live, and in which we have to imagine new forms of conflict and transformation.

DAVIDE SACCO
Member of ESC, independent atelier, occupied in 2004 and composed for the majority by students, researchers and precarious workers. A centre of research and political elaboration, ESC is a place for the organization of precarious work and of social struggles on a local and global level.