Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - INCOMMON (In praise of community: shared creativity in arts and politics in Italy (1959-1979))

Teaser

INCOMMON project is the first research to systematically analyse the field of performance art as derived from a common effort made by artists, thinkers and activists in order to create forms of being together and producing together, as a direct consequence of the practice of...

Summary

INCOMMON project is the first research to systematically analyse the field of performance art as derived from a common effort made by artists, thinkers and activists in order to create forms of being together and producing together, as a direct consequence of the practice of ‘commonality’ both theorized and experienced over the 1960s and the 1970s. In particular, the project is aimed to analyse the history of the ‘laboratory Italy’ as the place where artistic ‘counterculture’ expressed by performing arts arose in a milieu characterized by a profound relation between Critical theory and politics; and where the network dynamics between artists, thinkers and activists took central stage. Italy is therefore assumed as the investigation field of a much broader phenomenon. INCOMMON is meant to show how the idea of community, the willingness of collaboration and the experimentation of new forms of radical democracy that animated political movements were at the core of Italian performing arts’ growth, and have deeply influenced the International scene. Whereas political thinking of the 1960s and 1970s has been widely investigated, a systematic research into how some performances and theatre events in particular collaborated into the shaping of the so called ‘Italian thought’ and the revolutionary wave of the counterculture has not yet been developed, while the research into the performing arts movement of the period remains either discontinuous or split into separate disciplines (theatre, visual arts, music, cinema etc).
INCOMMON starts from the assumption that in Italy performing arts originated from the need of refunding the field of theatre through a multidisciplinary approach and a new way of collaborating among artists. By illustrating this, INCOMMON proposes a pioneering idea of artistic community as the crucial driver of creativity in the period analyzed. In this perspective the network becomes the main mode of investigating and writing a new narrative of performing arts in general under the perspective of commonality and through the relationships between artists, connected by the instances of their mutual collaboration. In so doing, the project connects historical, philosophical and artistic events and debates to those in other sciences, sociology and in particular the methodology of Social Network Analysis (SNA), in order to reveal significant structures of meanings in the artistic community and to highlight the peculiar characteristics of shared creative processes.
The purpose is to answer to some fundamental questions of criticism and art history: how do the multidisciplinary artistic networks work? How do they are connected to social and political ones? What degree of independence do they have from institutions and traditional production methods? INCOMMON analyzes the dynamism, the geographical opening, the historical perspective and social and political composition of this set of movements, creating an innovative digital atlas as medium for promoting a renewed awareness and a new methodology of analysis, preservation and dissemination not only of cutting-edge subject of research, but also of performing arts in general terms.
The project will make available its results to a broad community of scholars, students, artists and curators, contributing to the creation of a new consciousness around the issues analyzed. At the same time, it will challenge the mono-disciplinary approach as well as those analysis concentrated on a single artist in favor to an approach oriented to collaboration and community among artists.
Beside, INCOMMON recognizes that the claims for community and shared creativity experienced by performing arts over the 1960s and 1970s should be considered as precursors of the social media revolution. Therefore, it is not until now that we are able to imagine the formats of an archive for performing art practices. With the emergence of Web 2.0, we are facing a process of continuity: network

Work performed

\"The INCOMMON research group has conceived and applied an up-to-date theoretical framework and a multi-disciplinary methodology that addresses archival, historical and sociological problems connected with time-based arts.
The team has created an overview of the most significant performing arts phenomena over the two decades considered, selecting those performances created as collaborations between individual artists. The team involved in this phase has produced an archival survey monitoring institutional and private holders of collections and archives, in order to guide the selection of documents and their further digitization.
The reviewed materials come from major collections (Archivio Centro Teatro Ateneo, Archivio Leo De Berardinis University of Bologna, Archivio Luigi Nono, Cineteca di Bologna) as well as from independent archives and private collections (Piero Marsili, Maurizio Spatola, Nico Garrone, Carla Tatò, Carlo Quartucci, Gianni Manzella).
After the initial screening, the team selected the most valuable documents, especially video documentation, photos, posters, reviews, scripts, diaries, interviews, radio and TV materials, then started the description and classification phase. In this phase (still ongoing) metadata sheets, specifically designed to suit the project\'s objectives, are being compiled for each object. More specifically, the metadata layout follows both the necessity to be compared with other major performing arts archives and the necessity to retrieve the relations between artists from the document. So far, around 450 items have been collected, digitized, described and upload on the project\'s cloud repository.
Alongside the archival activity and the collection of relevant documents, proceeded the theoretical and empirical work on the artist network construction. After an extensive literature review on artistic networks, on cooperative relations in the artistic field and the sociological approaches to theatre, started the data collection on all the known collaborations between the Italian New Theatre artists.
A relevant portion of the project\'s work has been dedicated to the dissemination and public engagement actions. Most notably the INCOMMON website has been launched within the project\'s first year, and it is regularly updated with articles and news on the project activities. Moreover, a major conference, “La lotta per il teatro #01 OTTOBRE”, along with several workshops and seminars have been organized in order to gather some of the more representative artists of the period analysed, along with scholars, curators, activists, and artists working within the topic.\"

Final results

INCOMMON unravels the complex relationships between the political and philosophical context of counterculture, the emergence of performing arts in Italy, and the role played by the social networking among artists from different disciplines. Bringing these three elements together in a single analytical framework contributes to a truly interdisciplinary re-foundation of the understanding of performing arts in the 1960s and the 1970s, overcoming inadequacies and problems as shown below:
CURRENT STATE OF THE ART: Political scientists and Critical theorists have made extensive studies on action and theory developed by Italian extra parliamentary Left, independent of and more radical than the Italian Communist Party. Especially in 1970s this movement did constitute an anomaly with respect to other European countries in terms of its size, intensity, creativity, and long duration. The contemporary debate underlines in particular the rising of a significant radical, non-violent political thinking that dealt with the emerging autonomy of the working class with respect to capital, more precisely, its power to generate and sustain social forms and structures of values and creativity independent from institutional relations of production. Parallel to this, the debate on the art movement of the time has underlined the importance of performance-based productions as a direct consequence of the resistance against the circulation of capital. Indeed, one of the strategies to oppose the capitalistic form of the artistic production was the creation of time-based performances instead of objects, as ephemerality escapes the logic of ownership and the rule of copyright. Yet, the immediate consequence is the difficulty to preserve or document them. Closely related to this, the international debate on art and activism is witnessing a new emphasis on communication and networks of exchanges between artists, and a restored interest in participative practices.
However the concepts of ‘community?, ‘network’, ‘Art/activism’ are very timely today, no research has been conducted so far to put in relation the ‘will-to-the-common’ of the Italian thought of the 1970s and the rise of the concept and practice of commonality from which the first, most radical generation of performance artists originated. Moreover Works of performance-based arts represent the most compelling and significant artistic creation of the 1970s, yet because of their ephemeral, technical and collective natures, their memories present significant obstacles to accurate documentation, access, and diffusion.
The main issues related to their accessibility and diffusion today are: 1) current archival holdings, even when digitized, are split in separate archives according to a single-artist and single-discipline approach 2) historians and curators are often unable to access many of the archives and collections without on-site visitation; 3) students of time-based artworks lack accessible models of collective creative practices. Without strategies and projects for collection, accessibility and promotion, the very idea of community that was essential within the performative events of the 1970s will continue to be lost to future generations.
PROGRESS BEYOND THE STATE OF THE ART: INCOMMON demonstrates that, despite their differences in terms of background and poetics, Italian artists working with performance operated as a multidisciplinary community that created ‘models for cultural action’, which then spread through their networks to influence cultural practices in other spheres. In this way they made significant contributions to the changing patterns of cultural production, and to concepts such as immaterial labour, cognitive capitalism and biopolitics,
researches, collects, catalogues, imports, acquires, duplicates and when needed digitizes documents of the case studies selected, in order to gather them in its Digital Open Access Archive. The structure of the archive is meant

Website & more info

More info: http://www.in-common.org.