LACRIME (Tears)

An Exhibition Project in the City

A workshop as an exhibition. It will be distinguished by an approach that goes against a museum or decorative approach to the works, placed arbitrarily in green spaces, in squares or in front of famous or celebrated buildings. Instead of using existing sculptures, students are asked to design a new artifact, produced in immediate interaction with site-specific data. In doing so, they will first have to familiarize themselves with a selection of sites characterized by relationships with the "spectacular" in the sense of the exhibition and whose nature of the space is public. These places will be the basilica-sanctuary Madonna delle Lacrime, the Greek theater, the Roman Amphitheater, ... For the rest the participants will be subject to the precariousness of their means to produce their pieces: space, performance, sculpture, furniture, ...

The question of duration or sustainability is raised immediately. The approach defended here responds to emerging trends from the end of the 1960s: the notions of in situ or site specifity, which ultimately became a sine qua non condition of public art from the 1990s. This project thus offers the opportunity to question the shift in the role of the arts to questioning the structures of space and other public domains. Participants will formally and conceptually question history, culture, architecture, urban and social structures. Reveal the footprints of the past left on the urban plan and engage in a dialogue with (historic) monuments. It is also a question of making accessible little used places. The boundaries between art, design and architecture are blurring. The artifacts may involve both artistic and functional value. The practice of in situ becoming a "cliché", it will be a question of revising this notion. The specific sculpture site is replaced here by action and spectacle, ephemeral and temporary. To invest in abandoned places to create new situations and unexpected uses. To intensifiy what’s there, as Pierre Huyghe would say.