SPAZI APERTI – THE VAGABOND CAN'T DRAW
curated by Mirela Pribac and Dina Dancu

The 10th of June at 19.00 the Romanian Academy in Rome presents the 8th edition of Spazi Aperti, the annual exhibition organized with the support of the Romanian Cultural Institute and in collaboration with the Assessorato alle Politiche Culturali del Comune di Roma. Media partner of this year’s edition are Art Daily the first art newspaper on the net, the Roman based publication Wanted in Rome and the radio station Roma The Radio to Contemporary Art.

34 international artists are exhibited in this year’s edition, along with special guests from Romania.

Spazi Aperti : THE VAGABOND CAN'T DRAW proposes a theme centered around the notion of the border, seen as a complicated platform where identities clash or mingle.

Territorial borders are symbolic sites of power. They mark the subtle division between inside and outside, consequently determining who is included and who is excluded. Borders, those meandering creases dividing the surface of the earth, are drawn by powers. People inside are manipulated by the same governing powers.

Borders are sometimes fluid sites where various identities merge. At the same time, borders are solid demarcations that can be imagined like walls, built by nations as supreme separation from one another. As walls are obstinately still being erected, they are also continuously being torn down. With or without walls, mobility has always been a problematic act. Some people can decide when, where and under what circumstances to move or travel. These people are tourists. Others have difficulties in the sense of being forced to move away because of wars or famine. Zygmunt Bauman calls them vagabonds. This duality is part of a discourse on power.
Tourists and vagabonds, two sides of the same coin, today in a constant danger of exchanging roles due to global imbalances, are structural elements of the discourse on power, viewed both from a historical as well as from a contemporary perspective. Power is the entity that manipulates and determines identities. While the work of power during modernism engaged in a centripetal motion in order to build fixed identities, today the intervention of power is centrifugal, aiming to create mobile identities, identities in a continuous transition.
All the artists in the exhibition investigate the discourse on power through various game strategies. They inhabit territories with specific rules for entry. The public should be manipulated by these rules in the same way powers determine freedom of movement in the world.
The public will be granted a visa upon entrance into the space of the Romanian Academy (representing actual Romanian land, the gate marks a physical border between extraterritorial space/Italian and the Romanian territory). The public will receive a green or a red visa/ticket for entry according to surprise principles, and will proceed for the trajectory of the exhibition accordingly.

The highlights of the opening, 10 June, are the contemporary dance show Quartet for a Microphone directed by Vava Stefanescu and the electronic-gipsy music concert by SHUKAR Collective.

Quartet for a microphone is more of a performance than a dance show. Lasting almost an hour, three dancers/performers encounter one another, wrestle and slip away in a breath-holding odyssey between the walls of a telephone box. A claustrophobic scenario-bringing into play the relationship between the sexes, physical strength and endurance - unfolds before the eyes of spectators who are relegated to the role of helplessness witnesses. Quartet for a microphone establishes a discourse on isolation, the lack of distance, our relationship with others and the idea that we are hostages of our own existence. A piece whose insidious persistence makes itself felt long after it is over.
The initial band SHUKAR founded by Napoleon, Tamango and Clasic played “ursari” music (ursar means ‘bear tamer’ or ‘bear handler’) using spoons, wooden barrels or darabouka to create a powerful and urgent sound that is emotional and soulful at the same time.
The SHUKAR Collective idea came up after celebrated Romanian DJs Lucian Stan (DJ Vasile) and Dan Handrabur (DJ Dreamdoktor) heard original Shukar tracks and saw the band perform in a Bucharest jazz club. The concept behind the project was to reorchestrate these fabulous folkloric pieces using modern technologies, while preserving and emphasizing their original sound.
The following important encounter is on 15 June, with American artist Terry Adkins and his mysterious collaborator Bruce Blanche. This will be a surprise evening of happenings, performance and music.
The finissage of the exhibition, 24 June, presents a bouquet of site-specific performance pieces. The first appointment of the evening is with FLORILEGIUM II : Fragility of Violence, the second chapter of a series of performance curated by Fabio Campagna and Gianluca Brogna.
The other pieces constructed and presented on site are by acclaimed Italian actress Mo nica Samassa, touching on the complication of a discourse on freedom, and by the well known Romanian actor and artist Eduard Gabia.