ROSSOCUBO project

 “I LIVE TO REALIZE” –  travelling action of variable impact – various places, since 2002

I mean grow a personal modus vivendi deduced from social and economic commanding. I use ROSSOCUBO as an invitation to think over and as a formula useful to pass the obstacle towards a personal realisation state. ROSSOCUBO is an open concept of art, it asks to participate to make sense, its happens by means of shared actions involved of a time and mindfulness swap. Recognisable objects, complementary  to the host environment, are here used as like as thought’s motivator throght questions on pay attention to the ideas “in light of the sun”. The object linked to the project is temporary and transferable,  meaning the concept of idea that’s interacting, she go on.

EN | “The artist is a manipulator of signs instead of a producer of art objects and the viewer an active reader of messages rather than a passive contemplator of aesthetics or a consumer of the spectacular” (Hal Foster, 1985)

Stefano Venezia: “it is not the product but the action that interests me. The work is only a witness of actions which occurred.” Stefano is a creator of circumstances, aesthetic devices that, in their most recent form, involve the audience, inviting them to take time, or rather, to take the time to understand in order to shape it. Rossocubo is a project, a system of signs whose meaning is modified time after time, adapting to its contingent. A work in progress that, in transforming, accumulates and preserves the traces of its proliferation. It stems from performances that over the years have disappeared, transforming into artistic interventions in public spaces. Far from complete in themselves, these actions need to be shared to produce meaning. The installations are carried out through the sensory and emotional involvement of the public, conveyed through shared activities.

Therefore it is a process in continuous movement, through the repetition of a particular form, it is part of the context in which it chooses to operate. Its shape is a cube, the volumetric development of the square, always connected to the earth in a symbolic way, to the four cardinal points, the four elements, in short, the organization of our planet as developed by man. In a state of maximum openness, the cube shows itself as an organism in constant proliferation. Its process, contains and moves from one medium to another, from one time to another, and so from one place to another, like a freely moving apparatus. The sense of Rossocubo is connected to a dialogue with nature and with our production of time and memory.

Born in 2002 as a modular installation in a natural environment, consisting of red cubes arranged regularly on the grass, it gradually became a collective gatherer of marks and paths left between mountain trails. In its current form, it has further expanded, taking the form of a container for shared activities and situations. It arrived in the urban space, bringing with it traces of its dialogue with nature, a pretext to engage people to share time and perform common actions. Within the artistic research which has developed the latest version of Rossocubo, the perception and representation of the relationship between man and the natural environment is used, as a valued exchange with an audience which is asked to be moved, in the dynamic sense of the word. This research is a lens through which Stefano observes and calls for the analysis of the relationship that each person has with their time.

The tools of implementation invite people to devote themselves to the pleasing praxis of producing their own temporality, extrapolated from socio-economic imperatives. The artist’s significant proposal is to implement an exchange of time. To agree to make time for oneself, receiving in the experience an exchange and the availability of the space in which to share it, which bears the imprint and will of the artist and the people involved. The value of time spent and the pleasure taken from it is proportional to the investment that each person can and intends to make, within the logic of an economy of solidarity.

The person is asked to provide minutes and moments to devote to a gesture, a memory, a feeling, an action in which nature becomes the vehicle through which they reconsider the quality of their experiences. Significant gestures which participate in challenging the time-trading systems of present society. In the era of consumerism and the spectacular, time, mainly that of economic output, is perceived as an external factor, fast-paced and impersonal. Deprived of history, as denounced by Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle, it throws people into an “abstract present”, where they sell consumable, “equipped blocks of time”.

The artistic practice of Stefano, projecting himself into the rhythm of daily life, discreetly attempts to nurture the awareness of such distortions of time, personally and collectively. Instead, he proposes to assign a value and a sense that everyone is free to determine, with gestures and actions that can be freely contributed to. Gestures and actions that allow the public to enjoy moments of authentic dedication to the production and enjoyment of time for themselves. Moving away from a logic of diffusing a finished product, a process the artist promotes, this develops an intrinsic critique not only of the time of economic production but also the system of sales of artworks.

Rossocubo, shifts from being a contained form to the container of an environment, given as a simple context, in which the work exists as a shared situation. The materiality of the finished product abandoned, it is time used as a constructive element in a work in progress. The formal condition of the work: it may be developed and modified by anyone. Stefano renounces the privilege of being the unique author, to suggest the need to create environments and situations where we are free to cultivate our own time and enhance it through shared action.

By stripping away the artistic gesture of exclusivity and appropriating the affirmation of Joseph Beuys: “We are all artists,” he promotes an open and participatory concept of art, understood as the expansion and sharing of creative action. An art form which is committed to satisfy essential needs, such as the pleasure to take time.

Michela Sacchetto

 

Michela Sacchetto, born in 1983 in Cuneo, lives and works between Cuneo and Brussels. Art historian and independent curator, she graduated in History of contemporary art at the La Sapienza University of Rome, after obtaining a three-year diploma in Cultural Heritage Sciences at the University of Turin. She collaborated in the past with the Volume Foundation! in Rome, with the Musée d’art Moderne de Saint Etienne, France, with the Erna Hècey gallery in Brussels and with the Isola Art Center artistic platform in Milan. She has written regularly for the contemporary art magazine Art.Key of Turin. She currently works in Brussels with the curator and artistic producer Gregory Lang, works as an assistant to the artists Angel Vergara and Sophie Whettnall and as curator of the exhibitions organized by the Art.ur association of Cuneo. Since 2009 it has been part of the collective project “MuseoAeroSolar”, started by the Argentine artist Tomas Saraceno.

 

[the origin]

Feasibility study of the ROSSOCUBO project. Every single blade never developed in the same shape in a dilated time. Meanwhile, in the center was a void, or the thought that was looking for form and color. It was the meeting and the passion. From the visible expression I passed to the tangible to go to test externally, confirming that inspiration was outlined through the space, the movement and the relationship, going beyond the purely realization in the studio.