[spectre] artistic resistance to the Venice Biennale: Mars Pavillion

[Alessandro Ludovico]

http://www.marspavilion.org/

MARS PAVILION - artistic resistance laboratory in the heart of the 
51st International Art Exhibition
Giardini di Castello Venezia 8_11 june 2005

Mars Pavilion opens June 9th but it is not abruptly born just a few 
days before the Art exhibition's grand opening, nor will it 
definetely close once official kermesse is over.
  Mars Pavilion is a stage of a route, it is the starting point where 
a series of (political, cultural, artistic) collectives and inviduals 
chose to temporarly converge to become visible in a consistent 
try-out. Mars Pavilion is a hyper-pavilion. Its being radical mainly 
stands in the reflection about arts and their context: a purely and 
solely artistic context cannot become satisfactory vehicle to all 
those productions that today aim to be talking about our world, our 
society and about globalisation.
  Mars Pavilion is the result of collective labour and it therefore 
does not follow a specific theory. It for instance does not believe 
that traditional aesthetics - i.e. the institutional expo - should be 
overwhelmed. We are well aware of the constitutional value of the 
exhibition's formula, but Mars Pavilion finds its own strength in 
being an occupied space, which comes as a precise political strategy 
and as a social action attitude that most seriously read the relation 
with its territory. This does not mean that Mars Pavilion's goals are 
set in a national and provincial mentality, it actually means that 
Mars Pavilion aims to be part of the irreducible flows that are 
global protests against neoliberism, which tries to neutralise 
differences, creativity and radicality.
Mars Pavilion stands in a paradox, in the involvement of aliens that 
cannot be alienated, of martians that are willing to self-detrminate 
thier lives on planet earth.
  We - martians - believe that experiencing life is absolutely central 
and this is why many of us chose to have political and social action 
deeply rooted in our every day life. We refuse to think that 
elections or benefits are the border of our influence in this society.
  We reclaim artistic experiences without banal conflicts or grotesque 
linguistic ingenuousness. We mean to experiment arts by overcoming 
institutional artistic milieu and aesthetisms, which are sometimes 
unignorable but which too often melt arts into an illusory mirage. 
Mars Pavilion can remind arts of their capacity of expressing a more 
complex panorama, made of territorial practices, of different 
interests and priorities, of social and extra-artistic relations, etc.


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Alessandro Ludovico
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