Italian Pavilion curated by Marco Mancuso – Filippo Lorenzin
NRW-Forum – Düsseldorf
The European project “Streaming Egos”, based on an idea by the Goethe-Instituts of south-west Europe (Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium and Germany) and in cooperation with the Slow Media Institut and the NRW-Forum Düsseldorf, explores the risks, limits and advantages of having a digital identity which is often too far from real life.
A group of curators and experts of the digital media sector worked with a selected group of artists ‒ from each of the participating countries ‒ with the aim of achieving works further exploring themes associated with digital media and reflecting upon how these identities come into being, change and develop under the influence of social media and also depending on the socio-political status quo of each country. Marco Mancuso was called to curated the Italian Pavillon together with Filippo Lorenzin and published the final catalogue with Digicult.
Head curator: Sabria David (Slow Media Institut, Germany)
National curators: Marco Mancuso, Filippo Lorenzin (Digicult, Italy) – Bram Crevits (Ghent University College, Belgium) – Marie Lechner (Preservation & Art – Media Archaelogy Lab, France) – Mateo Feijóo (University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain), Sandra Vieira Jürgens (Wrong Wrong and RAUM: online artist residencies, Portugal).
Invited artists: IOCOSE, Salvatore Iaconesi / Oriana Persico, Alterazioni Video, Silvio Lorusso (Italian Pavilion) – RYBN, Nicolas Maigret, Gwenola Wagon, Jeff Guess (France) – André Alves, Claudia Fischer, Paulo Mendes, Pedro Portugal (Portugal) – Dirk von Gehlen, Enno Park, Martina Pickhardt (Germany) – Monoperro, Sonia Gómez, Gichi Gichi Do, Carlos Rod (Editor: La Uña Rota) (Spain).
The whole project, the web platform and the works were exhibited and presented at the NRW-Forum Düsseldorf, at the so-called Identity Convention ‒ two days of meetings and debates within the project “Ego Update. The Future of the Digital Identity” during which relevant projects for the future were identified so that they can later be treated in a transnational and digital manner.
Throughout the whole of 2016, each country also contributed to the transnational debate by using the online platform of the Streaming Egos project, which can be found at: blog.goethe.de/streamingegos/. Through this platform all participants were able to get to know the work of each country and theme group and play an active role in giving form to narrative and artistic processes. Indeed, while on the one hand the artists were called upon to provide a series of visual insights characterising their productive process, on the other every national curator had the task of involving a heterogeneous group of contributors, including critics, journalists, writers, curators and experts who will periodically publish a series of essays and articles on the blog.
The Italian Pavillon involved the following authors, critics and theorists to contribute to the online platform: Vito Campanelli, Roberto Ciccarelli, Alessandro Delfanti, Stefano Chiodi, Ippolita and Alfredo Cramerotti, Carla Subrizi, Marco Mancuso and Filippo Lorenzin.
One of humanity’s most ancient quests, “who am I?”, has now been replaced by the more modern question “who do I want to be on the net?”. Indeed, anyone can create a virtual online image of themselves ‒ although, at the same time, users feel the need to speak of themselves and be authentic in their digital world. Through the Streaming Egos project, the Goethe-Institut encourages citizens, cultural sector workers and the online experts of Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, Portugal and Spain to react to questions and thoughts expressed by the artists and contributors and to tackle and document such a process through a collective work.
