SUPERPOSITIONS THREE // Living Together

Living Together is an artistic research and production program curated by Katia Anguelova and Lucrezia Cippitelli in the context of the exhibition series Superpositions, initiated by ICA-Sofia.

The program aims at proposing a complex network of audiovisual projects and installations, which will gather in Sofia an international community of artists who reflect through their practices on the idea of living together, coexisting, co-creating, inhabiting as a collectivity, recalling common hidden memories, inventing outer spaces and outer lives in common.

The program follows the strategies proposed by Superpositions series, a set of events which follow each other, organized in three chapters on two main displays: public screenings of the work of three artists followed by a site-specific exhibition within the spaces of ICA-Sofia.

The program of Living Together proposes a different concept for every chapter: “Making”, “Speculating”, “Narrating”. Each chapter explores the possibility of understanding and practicing “Living Together” through a pragmatic series of actions: making as creating, developing, proposing, activating; speculating as inventing, through speculative fictions, possibilities of life in outer spaces, ways of conceiving, dimensions; narrating as the act of recalling and share hidden or forgotten histories.

The program is based on a long-term exchange and dialogue with each one of the invited artists, with the purpose of developing the activity in dialogue with Sofia and its publics: artists are indeed proposed to develop new and site-specific productions. Site-specificity is not conceived exclusively as an attribute to the installation of the artworks in the exhibition space. Rather it is intended as possibility to create for, from and together with a space and local community.  Artists are called to think together forms of artistic research which root on local history or culture, and to translate them into spatial interventions within the walls of ICA-Sofia gallery.

Living Together is an artistic proposal and at the same time an invitation to actually live together, and to develop together narrations which take the shape of images, objects, events, dialogues. Spectators are invited to see exhibitions and to coexist with the artists, their artworks, eventual guests, in an ongoing public process of meeting, learning and sharing individual - collective experience.

The first chapter, Making, invites Døcumatism & Menelaos Karamaghiolis (Greece), Juan Pablo Macías (Mexico/Italy) and Kamen Stoyanov (Bulgaria/Austria) to present their video works in one of the Sofia’s public underpasses (Tzarevetz underpass). Macías and Stoyanov will develop in the second display their installations for the exhibition's chapter Making titled Machines, Texts, Voices, a project under construction for the spaces of ICA-Sofia. Spectators will visit and participate to a series of actions and encounters, in an environment which will be an ongoing production space. Both artists are interested in analyzing and understanding the world through the prism of Anarchism, as an historical view and as a form of producing models of coexistence and community-making. With Proudhon and Kropotkin, art is a possibility of imagination of forms of democracy which is more insightful and deeper than societies embodied by neo-liberal western models.

For the second chapter, Speculating Zbyněk Baladrán (Czech Republic), Riccardo Arena (Italy) and Emre Hüner (Turkey) will screen their videos. The projections will be followed by the exhibition Speculating Ex-Tempore where Arena and Hüner cooperate to the conception of two dialogating installations which combine theoretical and visual research highlighting methods and forms of collective imaginative knowledge. For the artists, “speculation” is a frame in which action and mind are complementary elements which question the notions of truth and ambiguity, and underline how conventional knowledge and narrative systems constitute our material reality. The formal elements of the installations are part of a long-term iconographic research and construction of archival materials where the artists propose an open method of production, a process of thinking rather than reaching a conclusive outcome. The two installations become components of a complex rhizome, when contemplated, they activate spectators’ perceptions, enable their connection and create new narratives, individual-fictional, and create cultural devices of imaginary knowledge.

The third chapter Narrating invites the duo Alexandra Gelis (Colombia/Panama/Canada) and Jorge Lozano (Colombia/Canada), Alessandra Ferrini (Italy/UK) and Jihan El-Tahri (Egypt/France) to tell hidden histories through their audiovisual projects. In the following exhibition, Jihan El-Tahri together with Radostin Sedevchev (Bulgaria) will develop a new project which investigates Bulgarian history and its relationship with the “non-aligned countries”. The exhibition will be developed after a residence of El-Tahri in Sofia, where together with Sedevchev, he will conceive a work based on the rediscovering of some objects belonging to global travelers during the so-called Cold War. Dealing with cultural symbols in changing times, the two artists will evoke the contradictions inherent in social reality. The alliances and solidarity have developed networks of co-operations and imagination of possible different futures faded out after the 1980’s, leaving the stage to the neoliberal world where travels and commuting from the Global South are undermined, criminalized or conceived only as illegal migration to the West.

Living Together is a program of artistic research and artistic production curated by Katia Anguelova and Lucrezia Cippitelli in the context of the SUPERPOSITIONS THREE exhibition series initiated by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Sofia (ISI-Sofia). The events are realized with the financial assistance of the National Fund "Culture" under the program "Creation" and Gaudenz B. Ruf, with the support of the Municipal Security Company "Egida - Sofia" Ltd. 

¹ Superposition is a fundamental principle of quantum physics, according to which every elementary particle exists in all its theoretically possible positions simultaneously; but when measured or observed, it gives a result corresponding to only one possible configuration.

COMMISSIONS

Chapter I Making

Juan Pablo Macías

Kamen Stoyanov 

Chapter II Speculating

Riccardo Arena

Emre Hüner

Chapter III Narrating

Jihan El-Tahri

Radostin Sedevchev

CONTRIBUTIONS

Chapter I Making

Døcumatism & Menelaos Karamaghiolis

Chapter II Speculating

Zbyněk Baladrán

Chapter III Narrating

Alessandra Ferrini 

Alexandra Gelis 

Collaborations

chapter ONE

Fondazione Shapdiz

Cultural-educational center and museum collection "Dr. Vasil Radoslavov" Lovech, hosted by the Stefan Noykov Foundation

Thanks

chapter ONE

Michele Giulini, Brice Delarue, Emilia Klayn, Evelina Kuzmova, Yordanka Yaneva, 

chapter TWO

Emil Haralampiev and ITELY-B

Team

Katia Anguelova and Lucrezia Cippitelli - curators

Reneta Georgieva - coordinator  

Zahari Dimitrov - visual identity

ICA:

Sophia Grancharova & Radostin Sedevchev - project managers

Kalin Serapionov - video program and consultation

Martin Penev - technical support

Luchezar Boyadjiev - translation and correction of texts

Gergana Mudova  - PR