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NABA is glad to present Blackout Book, the exhibition-book conceived by Marco Scotini, NABA Visual Arts Department Head, and Andris Brinkmanis, Course Leader of the BA in Painting and Visual Arts, that will be published on Artribune divided into four episodes, every Wednesday starting on May 5th.
The project draws inspiration from the eponymous work by the artist, writer and poet, Nanni Balestrini, who has often been invited to participate in the lessons, conferences and projects of the Visual Arts Department of NABA. Balestrini, towards the end of the Seventies, conceived the idea of a sort of opera for a single voice, in collaboration with singer Demetrio Stratos, aimed to combine fragments of news taken from the accounts of the New York 25-hour blackout in 1977, a poetic act split into four narrative chapters and never actually realised. A blackout is not only the sudden and momentary interruption of light but is also the pausing, the temporal block that suspends all the promises of the past and opens up an uncertain future.
Blackout Book tries to come to terms with another suspension of time such as the one we are currently experiencing, and was also presented in an interview to Marco Scotini, NABA Visual Arts Department Head, available on Artribune since last April 26th.
The project involves curators and artists of the BA in Painting and Visual Arts and the MA in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies from the Milan and Rome campus, as well as representatives of the Academy’s Faculty. Together they will attempt to re-imagine the themes and research areas that have characterised the department over the years.
The four exhibition episodes will reconsider artistic production by means of a number of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural vectors: memory and archive, history, feminist and post-colonial narratives, ecology and the social dimension. The works of art will be selected by the international curators in the faculty such as Ana Dević (What, How & for Whom/WHW), Pierre Bal-Blanc, Carol Yinghua Lu and Liu Ding, together with Marco Scotini, and published on Artribune in a slideshow, twelve each week.
Discover each of the four exhibition episodes on May 5th, 12th, 19th, and 26th on Artribune.
NABA presents Blackout Sound, the closing podcast of the exhibition format Blackout Book, that involved the Academy’s Visual Arts Department, available on Artribune’s Spotify, Spreaker, Apple Music and Google Play Music channels, and on the Academy’s Spotify and Spreaker channels starting on June 3rd at 10.30 am.
A collective and collaborative sound pièce, curated by _"A-J!"radio. (Olivier Russo) and Paola Pietronave, that alternates Blackout excerpts with conversations between curators and artists layering of a multitude of voices to evoke the relevance of Nanni Balestrini's words, flashes in the darkness of the current historical moment.
Olivier Russo, Silvia Ontario, Riccardo Bernardi and Vittoria Mascellaro read the extracts from the text, and the selected artists took part in the meetings for the creation of the podcast, as the Critical Studies Department, an experimental research space, developed the curatorial coordination of the project.
Cover: “Io mi fermo qui”, Emanuele Cantò