Adelita Husni-Bey, I Want the Sun I Want, 2011, 9’
John Baldessari, Teaching a Plant the Alphabet, 1972, 18’40’’
Jonathas De Andrade, Olho da Rua, 2022, 25’
video loop
8 September 2024, 4 pm – 10.30 pm, auditorium
#Sonata #Supplement
Democratica, popolare, sperimentale, a day of gatherings co-curated with Christian Raimo
Adelita Husni-Bey, I Want the Sun I Want, 2011, 9’
Adelita Husni Bey, I Want the Sun I Want, 2011, still, 16 mm film transferred to digital format
I Want the Sun, I Want is a film consisting of a continuous, nine-minute tracking shot that leads the viewer through the spaces of a school in Paris lacking internal partitions. The film was shot at Saint-Merri Elementary School, built in the 1960s as part of the “écoles ouverts” (open schools) program, which subsidized architectural experimentation within pedagogical spaces. The audio track of the film was recorded during a series of roundtables held at the Lycée autogéré de Paris, a self-run public high school. Both teachers and students of the lycée were asked to critique and discuss the necessity of schooling by means of drawing and debating, instigated by a series of dictionary definitions of words such as “state”, “education” and “teaching” presented to them via a workshop.
John Baldessari, Teaching a Plant the Alphabet, 1972, 18’40’’
© John Baldessari 1972. Courtesy Estate John Baldessari © 2024. Courtesy John Baldessari Family Foundation. Courtesy Sprüth Magers. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI).
One of John Baldessari’s primary interests as a conceptual artist is to explore how images acquire meaning, and therefore to probe the boundaries of how we define art. In Teaching a Plant the Alphabet, the artist patiently gives an elementary lesson in the English alphabet to a potted banana plant. Playfully and with subtle irony, Baldessari questions an uninspired system of teaching based on the monotonous transmission of knowledge. The absurdity of the act confronts our preconceived ideas and expectations of art and teaching. This video is also Baldessari’s response to the popularity of certain academic disciplines—such as linguistics and semiotics—that influenced many conceptual artists during the 1970s.
Jonathas De Andrade, Olho da Rua, 2022, 25’
One of John Baldessari’s primary interests as a conceptual artist is to explore how images acquire meaning, and therefore to probe the boundaries of how we define art. In Teaching a Plant the Alphabet, the artist patiently gives an elementary lesson in the English alphabet to a potted banana plant. Playfully and with subtle irony, Baldessari questions an uninspired system of teaching based on the monotonous transmission of knowledge. The absurdity of the act confronts our preconceived ideas and expectations of art and teaching. This video is also Baldessari’s response to the popularity of certain academic disciplines—such as linguistics and semiotics—that influenced many conceptual artists during the 1970s. Jonathas De Andrade, Olho da Rua, 2022, 25’
Jonathas De Andrade, Olho da Rua, 2022, 25’
Olho da Rua (Out Loud) casts a temporary community of homeless people living in the streets of downtown Recife (Brazil). Inspired by the techniques of Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, the film stages a series of performative acts that focus on collective dynamics and exercises of gaze in a public square. Bordering fiction and nonfiction, the aim was to engage the cast of non-professional actors in debates about identity, care, family, class consciousness, social and political visibility through actions and words. Out of the script, the images are delicately receptive to the cast’s personality and emotional worlds, and stand as a powerful testimony of contemporary Brazil, with its rich multiculturalism and structural inequalities. To accompany them is a hypnotic soundtrack by percussionist Homero Basílio that uses instruments rooted in Northeastern Brazil. The film is not only a reflection on power dynamics rooted in colonialism—and on how these may be tied to whoever holds the camera—, but also a provocation to the viewer. Using art and radical pedagogy tools to reposition the stories of people who are marginalized and made invisible, the work fosters ways to collectively rethink reality and imagine alternatives.
ADELITA HUSNI-BEY (Milan, 1985) is an artist and pedagogue invested in anarcho-collectivism, theater, and critical legal studies. She organizes workshops and produces publications, broadcasts, and exhibitions using non-competitive pedagogical models through the framework of contemporary art. Involving activists, architects, jurists, schoolchildren, spoken-word poets, actors, urbanists, physical therapists, students, and teachers, her work consists of making sites in which to practice collectively. She has participated in Matter of Art, Biennale of Art Prague, 2024; Quizá manana, Cuenca Biennale 2023; Venice Architecture Biennale, 2023; Happily Ever After, Malmö Konstmuseum, 2023; Termoli Prize LXIII, MACTE, 2023; Work it Out!, Aalborg Museum, 2021; Trainings for the Not Yet, BAK, Utrecht, 2020; Being: New Photography, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2018; Dreamlands, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2016; The Eighth Climate, 11th Gwangju Biennial, 2015; Really Useful Knowledge, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2014. She is a researcher at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics 2020-2022 where she developed These Conditions (2022) at Brooklyn Army Terminal, New York, a hybrid space between exhibition venue, film set and pedagogical space. She represented Italy at the 2017 Venice Biennale with Roberto Cuoghi and Giorgio Andreotta Caló.
Courtesy the artist and Laveronica Arte Contemporanea
JOHN BALDESSARI (National City, 1931 – Venice, 2020) attended San Diego State College, receiving his Master of Arts in Painting. He also studied at the University of California, Berkeley, Chouinard Art Institute and the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1956, he taught a painting class at San Diego State College, and continued teaching for the rest of his career. By the mid-1960s, Baldessari began to consider art in a radical, conceptual framework, specifically creating work with the intent to destabilize the ideas and beliefs that had come to define art. “An artist is a person who can see connections in unlikely circumstances,” Baldessari said. “A piece starts with a hunch, an intuition with no clear work in mind. I set up structured situations with rules I make for myself, then I try to solve it. In this lies the joy of discovery”. Baldessari thought of this new approach as the beginning of his career, and a rupture from his previous work (mainly pictorial). In 1970, in an work titled Cremation Project, he burned all his art in his possession predating 1966. For the next five decades, until his death in January 2020, Baldessari tested the structure of art, images, and language.
JONATHAS DE ANDRADE (1982, Maceió, Brazil) lives and works in Recife, Brazil. He develops videos, photographs and installations based on the production of images and texts, employing strategies that juxtapose fiction and reality, tradition and negotiation with local communities. Parting from the artist’s interests in social issues, his works cross the field of language and anthropology as aspects that challenge the notion of truth, power, desire and social imaginary. He has held solo exhibitions such as Jonathas de Andrade: Eye–Spark, at Maat, Lisbon (2023) and Crac Alsace, France (2022); Pounce and Bounce at Pinacoteca de São Paulo (2023); In the hangover city, at Mamam, Recife (2023); Staging Resistance, at Foam Amsterdam (2022); One to One, at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2019); The Fish, New Museum, New York (2017); The Power Plant, Toronto (2017); Visiones del Nordeste, Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2017); Museu do Homem do Nordeste, MAR: Museum of Art, Rio de Janeiro (2014-2015), and participated in group exhibitions, such as 16th Istanbul Biennial (2019); Artapes, MAXXI: National Museum of XXI Century Arts, Rome (2018); 32nd Sao Paulo Biennial (2016); Unfinished Conversations: New Work from the Collection, The Museum of Modern Art MoMA (2015); and Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today, Guggenheim Museum, New York (2014). In 2022, Jonathas de Andrade presented a solo project for the Brazilian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale.
Courtesy Galleria Continua and Nara Roesler Gallery. Commissioned and produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film
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