fbpx

Fight-Specific Isola: Art, Architecture, Activism and the Future of the City

Annotated by Matteo Lucchetti
Year

2013

Publisher

Archive Books

Author

Various authors

Topics
Gentrification and Urban Matters
Related

Archive Books
Isola Art Center

Annotation

This incredibly rich book bears witness to the decades-long fight of the Isola neighbourhood in Milan against gentrification, across community art experiences and politically organised actions under the collective name of Isola Art Centre. The presence of artists in this experience helped the daily laboratory that each time invented different formats and words to deal with and describe the ongoing struggles against neo-liberal politics and their predatory consequences on the neighbourhood’s real estate and social fabric. Words such as ‘dirty cube’ or ‘fight-specificity’ helped define the complexity of tactics and strategies that Bert Theis and many other collaborators enacted to bridge their artistic practices with the civic actions of hundreds of citizens, continually reinventing novel discursive systems through which to unfold a new imaginary of the neighbourhood and its futures.

Matteo Lucchetti

We originally coined the term fight-specific art to describe forms of art related to our urban fight. Our work focused on the Isola district has undoubtedly been site-specific. But the decision of siding with the movement and supporting the alternatives suggested by citizens, of fighting against the neo-liberal policies promoted by the political leaders and building speculation, made it necessary to extend the site-specific concept to the new fight-specific one.
The dirty cube concept is strictly connected to the platform concept, a form of open organization allowing artists, activists, curators, theorists, individuals, different persons and collectives to freely carry out their own proposals and projects in a fight-specific frame. The platform is not a collective having defined members: collectives have joined the platform either sporadically or over the long term. Neither is it an 'artist-run-spce'. As a matter of fact, there is no director or curator who has the last word on the program or the projects to be carried out. Decision-making is horizontal and rhizomatic.
Related

Archive Books
Isola Art Center

Related Contents

chevron_left chevron_right
Isola Art Center
“I’m a builder of platforms. Usually, I build platforms with white painted wood, the most known being probably the „Philosophical Platform“ for Sculpture, Projects in Münster, 1997. My platforms, (and pavilions, which I consider as roofed platforms), are social spaces, where all kinds of activities can freely happen. ”The platform Bert Theis would like to
Discover more
Community Futurisms
Community Futurisms: Time & Memory in North Philly, a collaborative art, preservation, and creative research project exploring the impact of redevelopment, gentrification, and displacement within North Philadelphia through the themes and methodologies of oral histories, alternative temporalities, and Afrofuturism. From May 2016 to April 2017, Black Quantum Futurism Collective used the project to launch its
Discover more
Rice is more than just a staple food
When I finally got my own kitchen, I happily experimented with cooking at home, often following the recipe blogs of Indonesian expatriate housewives living abroad. Through discovering food preparation as a ritual of communication between self and others - and as an instrument for both healing and inventing identity - I felt inspired to study food as my core artistic practice.
Discover more
Anti-Eviction Mapping Project
The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP) is a data visualisation, data analysis, and digital storytelling collective documenting the dispossession and resistance of San Francisco Bay Area residents upon gentrifying landscapes. We are a group of volunteer artists, activists, cartographers, and oral historians, connecting the work of the AEMP to numerous anti-displacement groups and organising strategies. Centring
Discover more
Convention on the Use of Space-White Paper: The Law
The criminalization of squatting, gentrification, real estate speculation, rising rent-wage ratios and the sale of public assets to private investors are facets of an ideological shift which sees the millennial apparatus of private property reign over any other kind of stipulation. White Paper: The Law (2015) is holding public meetings to write a functioning, legally-binding convention on the use-value of housing with a focus on squatting, while problematising the manner in which law functions in relation to citizenship, democracy and precarity.
Discover more
Aquí vive gente
La Brigada started as an immediate response to the systematic destruction, abandonment, and dispossession of the Puerta de Tierra (PDT) neighborhood. It developed quite organically, through observation and listening, and the shared recognition that we are all affected as neighbors by these processes. Our initial goals were to reactivate the communication and solidarity bonds in the community by organizing initiatives aimed at the rescue of the neighborhood, its history, and its people.
Discover more
On April 22-2017, a White Cube has been repatriated on the site of Unilever’s first ever plantation of the D.R. Congo
On April 21–22 2017, a White Cube opened on the site of Unilever’s first ever palm oil plantation in Lusanga in the D.R. Congo, 650 km southeast of Kinshasa. Designed by OMA, this White Cube is the cornerstone of the Lusanga International Research Centre for Art and Economic Inequality (LIRCAEI). Next to the inaugural show curated by the plantation workers' cooperative CATPC, the opening weekend included a film programme, discussions on the plantation system and its ties with the art world, and an exchange over skype between plantation workers from Congo and Indonesia. The event was organised by the CATPC and its sister organisation Institute for Human Activities (IHA), that facilitates the dissemination of CATPC’s activities.
Discover more