FURLONG | A search for Terra Nullius | 2018/9
MULTI CHANNEL MOVING IMAGE INSTALLATION
Channel 1: 8.14 min, Channel 2: 6.35 min, Channel 3: 3.52 min | SOUND DESIGN BY KEVIN TOUBLANT
Furlong is a disused term to describe an acre’s length. The work questions the need to mark and occupy territories, create borders while exploring ideas of mapping and owning grounds.
The first and third channel travel through time using digital maps from the last century, in Europe, the Mediterranean and Middle East, finding out that historical and political changes have left their marks in the geological texture of the land and in the sea. In the second channel, an animated graph illustrates the measurements of the territories, as they move, on the other screens. While exposing the military device for scanning the ground from above, the journey through the repetitive, strategic, mechanical process of measuring also articulates a frantic search of an untouched, unknown, perhaps fictional place: Terra Nullius— a land which isn’t occupied, owned or inhabited.
Primeval mountains, ancient terrains, and oceanic voids: by capturing the texture of the land and its natural features, the vertical view in the work longs to reveal the secret histories beneath the surface, unfolding magical yet turbulent scenarios to imagine new worlds.
Furlong was part of NEU NOW, an initiative of ELIA:
existed from 2009-2017 as a transdisciplinary art festival devoted to presenting the work of exceptional emerging artists across Europe. This special, digital publication, wraps up the project as it existed with a digital publication, showcasing the work from one artist selected from each of the nine years.
https://issuu.com/elia-artschools/docs/neu_now_2019_digital_publication_-_v8_final_26.9.1
In September, 2019 a tenth and final edition of NEU NOW as it existed was digitally published in the event documentd below, and an installation was presented at the closing of the ELIA Academy 2019 in Stuttgart, Germany
https://vimeo.com/378983672
This Project was part of a group show at The koppel project, London
Texts by Chantal Faust, Curated by Paula Zambrano
https://thekoppelproject.com/events/natur-blick
"I think I scan, I think I scan, I think I scan. And I touch, in order to see. Scanning is a visual movement, a sweeping glance, a skim, an analysis, and a conversion. To scan is to look quickly, and also to look carefully. In the digital realm, scanning demands proximity, it is intimate in this way. The seeing eye of the machine is a reader of surfaces, recording traces of a perceptual and tactile encounter. In the land of the flatbed, touch, vision, and memory become inseparable. In this sense, the seeing organ is more akin to a tongue than an eye, a close-up form of perception and ingestion, licking blindly in the dark." Chantal Faust 2018
Review: http://thisistomorrow.info/articles/natur-blick
Furlong was part in ÜberMauer_BAM: Biennale Arcipelago Mediterraneo
BAM-Mediterranean Archipelago Biennial, Italy. 2019. It was part of
http://bampalermo.com/ - https://bampalermo.com/events/gili-lavy-furlong/
ÜBERMAUER, THE EXHIBITION / http://fondazionemerz.org/en/exhibitions/ubermauer_bam-biennale-arcipelago-mediterraneo/
This takes the form of an exhibition project spread throughout the city of Palermo bringing together historical and unpublished works by established international artists like Shilpa Gupta, Alfredo Jaar, Emily Jacir, Zena el Khalil, Shirin Neshat, Damián Ortega, Michal Rovner e Driant Zeneli, Italian artists or residents in our country like Francesco Arena, Claudia Di Gangi, Patrizio Di Massimo, Claire Fontaine, Giuseppe Lana, Andrea Masu and Gili Lavy and Palermo-born artists such as Stefania Galegati, Ignazio Mortellaro and Michele Tiberio, who will open their studios to a series of visits and public meetings.
In the year that sees the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots and the thirtieth anniversary of the Tienanmen Square uprising and the fall of the Berlin Wall, ÜberMauer proposes a path of analysis and testimony on the possible variations of ‘wall’, understood as a symbolic, political, historical and psychological feature. Extending between the sea, the Kalsa and the Cassaro, the installations and projects will appear in numerous public and private spaces scattered throughout the city: the Teatro Garibaldi, the Teatro Bellini, Piazza Magione, the Convento della Magione, the Spasimo and the Sala sopra le Mura, the Church of SS. Euno e Giuliano and elsewhere.
“Every city is a community in its own right”, wrote Aristotle, thus revealing one of the great tensions that still accompany contemporary societies: that between the universalism of notions such as “humanity” and “justice” and the often rejecting character of the polis, defined by contrast with those who do not have the right of citizenship. Every border traces a line of demarcation that is both inclusive and exclusive: it identifies the “we”, the space of familiarity and solidarity, and “the other”, the space of extraneousness and indifference; each wall circumscribes the friend and stigmatises the enemy.
But is it possible to found a political community on encroachment? And resolve what Zygmunt Bauman considered the challenge of the moment, that is “designing – for the first time in human history – an integration that is no longer founded on separation”? Is it possible to imagine a space already and always defined as the overcoming of itself, constitutively multiple, in which a plurality of boundaries intertwine and question each other, inside and beyond every frontier? This is what happens in Palermo: at the centre of the Mediterranean, a cultural and political hub between continents, on the strength of a transcultural and intersectional vocation lived in a manner based totally on compromise. A city marked by contradictions and conflicts, experiences and stories that can in no way be reduced to a single identity.
The walls of a ‘plural’ city collect – and often dramatically – testimonies of the passage of many types of humanity, the legacy of the entire community and culture. In the interpretation of art, some iconic places of the polis that are full of memories offer themselves to epiphanies, hopes or anxieties. Blocks, edges and walls can be mental, physical, cultural or economic but the intervention of artists in any case tackles awareness, stance, the ability to dynamise poetic concepts and materials towards a perspective of continuous change and inclusion.
The most well-established artists will offer the result of their work by playing the role of ambassadors of a city that has been able to make the theme of reception and integration the centre of their administrative and cultural development, in line with the more than millennial tradition of a territory placed naturally as a bridge between peoples, experiences, stories and communities. All the participating artists will draw in visitors and citizens to a packed public programme of meetings, workshops and studio visits.
