Talk Show | Venezia

TALK SHOW

October 25 - November 19, 2006 | video projection | Fond. Bevilacqua La Masa, Palazzo Tito, Venezia

Conceived for DIS-ORDER exhibition project

Curated by Marco Baravalle

Andrea Morucchio’s TALK SHOW is a video work that brings together footage from a charged discussion among activists and artists inside the Municipal Greenhouse of the Giardini in Castello. Only hours earlier, this abandoned 19th-century greenhouse had been occupied and transformed into the MARS PAVILION — an “artistic resistance workshop” conceived and curated by Andrea Morucchio together with Manuel Frara and Marco Baravalle.

The MARS PAVILION was launched in 2005, coinciding with the opening of the Venice Biennale, as an act of symbolic occupation and critical intervention. The central dispute documented in TALK SHOW was sparked by The Sweetest Dream by Nemanja Cvijanović: a European Union flag whose stars were rearranged into the shape of a swastika. The work provoked an intense confrontation between activists and artists on the political meaning and symbolic weight of contemporary art.

Seen nearly twenty years later, The Sweetest Dream acquires an almost prophetic resonance. The EU’s increasing role in restricting individual freedoms, its drive toward military escalation against Russia, and the growing regulation and censorship of media and social platforms make Cvijanović’s flag-sculpture a stark foreshadowing of the contradictions of European democracy. The piece can also be read as a plastic embodiment of the “divide et impera” principle: the subtle but effective strategies of power to fragment society, to pit communities and factions against each other, and to maintain consensus through manipulation of public opinion.

Within this framework, TALK SHOW functions both as a record and as a dramatization. It stages a clandestine, authentic, passionate debate — “real but not reality” — in a setting that is at once gothic and spectral. Filmed with infrared cameras, the footage is washed in a desaturated “Martian green” a chromatic filter that underscores the alienating tension of the moment.

Beyond the particular conflict,TALK SHOW embodies the founding principle of the Mars Pavilion: the creation of a genuinely public space, understood not as a neutral arena but as a place of alterity, of encounter and confrontation with the other. By making visible the clash between two modes of interpretation — the activist’s immediate political stance and the artist’s symbolic one — the video underlines the two axes that defined DIS-ORDER: art and political activism.

What the work reveals is an apparent breaking point, where coexistence and collaboration between activists and artists seemed impossible. Yet the installation suggests otherwise: in one corner of the darkened projection space, a small monitor presents documentation of the many initiatives later carried out by the Mars Pavilion. This quiet counterpoint testifies to a synthesis that did, in fact, emerge — demonstrating that when activism and art converge, they can generate not only conflict but also powerful forms of collective imagination, social engagement, and critical awareness.

The artists of DIS-ORDER, although through updated strategies, continue to not resign themselves to the pacification of the gallery and the museum space (GLR), to the predominantly ontological mission of the work of art (Nemanja Cvijianovic), to the alleged satellite objectivity of cartography (Hackitectura, Indymedia Estrecho, Fadaiat), the patina of the cultural industry (Serpica Naro), the self-reference of the art world (Andrea Morucchio), the tourist routine of an art city (Trash Band), the decline in university research in Italy (Uninomade), the pro-government attitude of the media (GlobalProject) and the apparent technical neutrality of an English-language textbook (Giuliana Racco).

Exhibiting artists:GLR (Spagna) Nemanja Cvijanovic (Croazia) Serpica Naro (Italia) Uninomade (Italia) GlobalProject (Italia) Javier Toret Medina (Indymedia Estrecho, Fadiaiat) (Spagna) Jose Perez de Lama (Hackitectura, Fadiaiat) (Spagna) Santiago Barber (Fiambrera Barrica) (Spagna) Andrea Morucchio (Italia) Trash Band (Stati Uniti) Giuliana Racco (Canada) Gaston Ramirez Feltrin ( Messico)