Profile of Manifesta 7

Manifesta 7
Hosted by the Trentino - South Tyrol Region from 19 July - 02 November 2008.

In Italy for the first time it stretches across an entire regional territory - one hundred and fifty kilometres of crossroads of different cultures and intersecting traditions, rich in historical monuments and in sites of industrial archeology.

It involves four cities which together create a single connecting route along the Brenner axis between the north and south of Europe: Fortezza (Bressanone), ex-Alumix factory in Bolzano, the Palazzo delle Poste in Trento, Manifattura Tabacchi and ex-Peterlini factory in Rovereto.

Curated by Adam Budak, Anselm Franke, Hila Peleg and Raqs Media Collective

Click on image to enlarge

What is outstanding in all sections of the show is the use of the different spaces, how the environments play an important role in each of the exhibitions. The most striking of all is certainly the Fortress in Fortezza, a defence bastion from the 1830s, for which all the curators worked together on the exhibition Scenarios, that is formally divided into sound, light and film. They asked novelists, philosophers and artists – among them Renée Green, Glen Neath and Arundhati Roy – to contribute texts that are somehow related to the site or to the process of experiencing this exhibition. These were translated and read by actors, and are played in the different rooms and spaces of the complex that is otherwise left bare. A few chairs by Martino Gamper, put together from old furniture, provide seating; through some of the windows falls artificial light from a piece by Philippe Rahm that exactly mimics the natural light conditions. In a separate building, five silent films are shown.

The whole place is a beautiful sensatory experience, of which the original architecture, the recent extensions, the lights and the sounds of the pieces as well as the views and sounds of the surrounding nature are inseparable parts.

Down in Bolzano, the show The Rest of Now, by Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula & Shuddhabrata Sengupta) is housed in the Ex Alumix, a former aluminium factory in the industrial area of the town. After the clarity of Scenarios, this comes as a bit of a shock.

The pieces do not work well together in the space, they interfere with each other visually; the sounds are bleeding.

Even though many of the works deal with the physical effects of industrialisation, with industrial and other heritage, with landscaping or mapping, they seem arbitrary, an exhibition does not form.

This might in fact be mostly a problem of the space, as in the other two main locations, the rooms are much more varied, they follow on from each other and in their succession also provide directions for the viewers. The Soul (or, Much Trouble in the Transportation of Souls), by Hila Peleg and Anselm Franke, is located in the Palazzo delle Poste, the old post office building, in Trento.

It is enormous and the longwinded sequences of small rooms along corridors are rather confusing at first. However, Peleg and Franke structure the experience by installing small, self-contained exhibitions within the exhibition in most corner rooms, thus presenting among others The Museum of European Normality (by Maria Thereza Alvez, Jimmie Durham and Michael Taussig, featuring quasi-anthropological observations), The Museum of Learning Things (by Brigid Doherty, about graphic representation and museum displays), or The Museum of Projective Personality Testing (by Sina Najafi and Christopher Turner, about obscure personality tests). The exhibition focuses on the creation and development of society, on norms and on culture. Video work plays a strong part in this narrative: Keren Cytter's fragmentary narratives 'In Search of Brothers' (2008) and 'Force from the Past' (2008) play with motifs from iconic films by Pasolini and Fellini. Omer Fast, in his video 'Looking Pretty for God (after G.W.)' (2008) considers almost fantastical attitudes to death and in Roee Rosen's fake cinema trailer 'Confessions Coming Soon' (2007), the artist has a boy read and act out his seemingly outrageous and scandalous confessions, turning it into an extraordinary and very entertaining study about media culture.

Principle Hope, by Adam Budak, is located in an old tobacco factory in Rovereto, the Manifattura Tabacchi. While the show also looks at the conditions of life, at history and culture, it is in tone lighter, more poetic. In the courtyard is the balloon cloud, 'Labyrinthitis' (2007), by Ricardo Jacinto, that takes 35 kilos of everybody's weight, Luca Trevisani's 'Aqua Mescolata Con Olio (Water Mixed with Oil)' (2008) (image) spreads the resulting smoke through the exhibition spaces and the sounds of Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson's 'The Caregivers' (2008), a documentary about Eastern European women who work in Rovereto in the homes of elderly Italian patients with dementia – the text of which is set to music by Karólína Eiríksdóttir – wafts through the spaces. Noteworthy is also the 'Schumann Machine' (2008), an installation and performance by Ragnar Kjartansson in a wooden shed on one side of the courtyard. Together with a pianist, Kjartansson is singing songs by Robert Schumann, smoking cigars, drinking – performing a bohemian artist.

Manifesta 7 is, of course, a PR event for the region and for culture in this region.

Click on images to enlarge