ARTIST MEETINGS. VENICE, DECEMBER 2002 – NOVEMBER 2012

In Venice in November 2002 a group of artists starting meeting up regularly to get to know each other through their respective work.

The 254 meetings took place every Wednesday at 6pm between December 2002 and November 2012.

The characteristics of the meetings were:

- One artist at a time showed their work to their peers.

- No public. Everyone was involved in presenting their work to the others.

- Only artists. The meetings were reserved solely and exclusively to artists. Gallery owners, curators, critics etc were not admitted.  

This was to ensure that the meetings remained purely as an exchange between artists with no promotional aims. 

- No selection. Anyone who called themselves an artist could participate.

The Wednesday meetings included both Venetian artists and Italian and foreigners staying in the city.

The meetings initially took place in my studio. After a few years, the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa hosted the artists at Palazzetto Tito. The institute’s sole purpose was to host the events whilst the artists were always in charge of the organisation. The founding spirit of being an initiative only for artists was maintained at the new location.

 

A SPACE FOR THE SILENT

I would like to imagine a space for the silent. I would like it if the public institute brought a symbolic space inside it that represents silence, shyness, reserve. I would like to try to imagine making something emerge that normally remains hidden and on the margins.

How can we bring the public closer to interiority? How can we bring out that which usually remains to one side or hidden, but which is at the basis of the final form of a process; the work? How can we keep open the possibility of a comparison between artists? How can we help artists to meet outside of their studios and private spaces? How can we keep alive a voice which is often just a stutter, a disconnected word, a rumination, a reflection, a reasoning which runs parallel to the relationship the artist has with her practice? How can we help to keep alive an open process in continual transformation? How can we help artistic research to move forward? How can we keep open the possibility of a comparison between artists and a contact between their practices and their thoughts?

I think that due to the very nature of this type of language made as it is of a hesitant, timid, reserved word, an intermediary passage is necessary; a halfway space between the private and the public. We need to try to imagine an intimate space within the public space. By intimate I mean a secluded moment which allows the interiority to express itself towards the external. A reserved corner which reunites people who see themselves in each other and which nurtures an understanding. A being with others, among ourselves.

I realise that it is not easy to think of a public space that has a private space inside it because it is a contradiction in terms; a space that actually excludes a part of itself but this “closed” form would actually open and would help free up thoughts and words which would otherwise remain unexpressed.

This way of selecting, of recognising ourselves among people who do the same thing in many different ways helps lead to a free expression that otherwise would not be possible.

It is only after this passage that we can imagine another, from an intimate space to a truly public space: a space which represents a multitude of individuals, of artists who each express their world with their meaning.

(Written in 2013)