ATTI DEMOCRATICI / DEMOCRATIC ACTS

After stops at the Democracy Biennial in Turin and the Festival Fabbrica Europa in Florence, from 15th to 30th October 2009 Lungomare and LOSS will present the third edition of the Atti Democratici project in Bolzano. The project will unfold in a series of performances, workshops, screenings, urban interventions, meetings and lectures, and a free press journal on the basic principles of the Italian Constitution.

16 – 30 October 2009 Ex Magazzini doganali – Stazione di Bozen-Bolzano, via Renon

curated by Angelika Burtscher, Luigi Coppola, Daniele Lupo, Judith Wielander

with: Lauren Alexander (designer, South Africa), Marco Angelucci (journalist, Bolzano), Franco Arminio (writer/townologist, Irpinia), Ei Arakawa & Nikolas Gambaroff (performer, New York), Carlo Bachschmidt (Genoa Social Forum), Brave New Alps (Designer, London), Tania Bruguera (performer, Cuba), Yael Davids (performer, Israel), Cornelia Durka (designer, Berlin), Ghalia Elsrakbi (designer, Damascus/Amsterdam), Jack Henrie Fisher & Popahna Brandes (designer/writer, Brussels), Shilpa Gupta (performer, Mumbai), Thomas Kager (political scientist, Bolzano), Merijn Oudenampsen (sociologist, Amsterdam), Cesare Pietroiusti (artist, Rom), Andrea Segre (director, Rom), Maria Rosa Sossai (curator, Roma), Ziga Testen (designer, Ljubljana), Daniel van der Velden (designer, Amsterdam).

http://www.lungomare.org/attidemocratici

Info: Lungomare +39 0471 053636, info@lungomare.org

BREATHE IN BREATHE OUT

Performance with Yingmei Duan
(40') 2009
Cavallerizza Reale, 1st Democracy Biennale Torino; Fabbrica Europa Firenze
Photo: Christian Fusco"Breathe In Breathe Out" is the third collaborative performance project between Luigi Coppola and Yingmei Duan.
The stage is installed with a large pulley system of ropes. The ropes connect the audience to different objects: a microphone, a book of the law, a bucket of water, a chair, a table, a knife, and some rubbish bags. These ropes also hold the artists, and the audience can interact with these ropes and pull the performers and the objects as they wish. It is almost as if they have a remote control to command the performance.
One cage with a living white rabbit is free among the other tied objects. On the stage there is also a stopwatch on stage timing the performance.
Within the pulley system/spider web the artists represent symbols of moral, social, religious constriction and denial of freedom, in which the audience has an active role and a possibility to move and transform the performance.

ATTI DEMOCRATICI / DEMOCRATIC ACTS

Ricerca applicata sul rapporto tra arte e democrazia sviluppata da un network di artisti, curatori e teorici
Applied research on the relation between art and democracy developed by a network of artists, curators and theoriticians.

curata da / curated by Luigi Coppola and Marko Stamenkovic

24 - 25 april 2009 BIENNALE DEMOCRAZIA
05 - 23 may 2009 FESTIVAL FABBRICA EUROPA /

contributi artistici / artistic contributions
Angelika Burtscher & Daniele Lupo / Luigi Coppola / Yingmei Duan / Dariusz Fodczuk / Carlos Motta / Michelangelo Pistoletto / Juan Esteban Sandoval
contributi video film / video film contributions
Unmasked curato da Elise Youn and Carlos Motta, prod. New Museum di New York
Dario Azzellini and Oliver Ressler / Petra Bauer / François Bucher / Mary Billyou / Paul Chan / Jim Fetterley /Annelisse Fifi / Jim Finn / Ashley Hunt / Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen/ Lin + Lam / John Menick / Jenny Perlin / Dmitry Vilensky / Angie Waller / Susan Youssef
contributi teorici / theoretical contributions
Angelika Burtscher & Daniele Lupo / Branko Brezovec / Cesar Brie / Luigi Coppola /Yingmei Duan / Dariusz Fodczuk / Benoît Lachambre / Esteban Mihalik / Andrés Morte /
Carlos Motta / Andrés Neumann / Michelangelo Pistoletto / Juan Esteban Sandoval /Patricia Rivadeneira / Marko Stamenkovic / Marco Valerio Amico / Elvira Vannini
progetto sostenuto da / project in collaboration with
Prima Biennale Democrazia Torino / Fabbrica Europa Firenze /Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto / Casa della Creatività di Firenze /
Sistema Teatro Torino / Ambasciata di Colombia in Italia / Lungomare Bolzano.

AS WE WANT YOU

Performance with Yingmei Duan
(30') University of Applied Sciences Nijmegen, The Netherland, 2009
Photo: Rob GielingThe performance is a collaboration between Yingmei Duan and Luigi Coppola on the occasion of the festival “Beauty, Ugliness and the Sublime”. Their performance relates directly to this premise of the festival.
The performance is held in a space in which the walls are covered in mirrors. The audience sits in two rows. The two performers stand at different sides of the space, rather than looking at each other directly, they look at the reflections of their body in the mirrors. Slowly they begin to move towards each other and meet in the middle of the room.
Coppola starts to undress Duan. He concentrates his attention to her and actively tries to change and move her body according to his own wishes. He also encourages the audience to observe and touch her while she remains passive. This gesture gives the impression he wants the audience to support his idea of beauty.
Whilst this is happening Duan appears hesitant. Her face looks confused and full of questions. She occasionally smells Coppola and various people from the audience that approach her.

GHOST AND I

Performance with Yingmei Duan
(30') Lungomare Gallery Bolzano, Italy - 2008
showed in partecipanti, connessi e in-dipendenti, Parallel Events Manifesta 7
photo: Ivo Corrà
The attention is focused on the crisis of European culture and the schematic construction of new social models. It would be a continuous and futile attempt to define new scenarios of social relationships, based on the consolidated culture of the Old Continent. The ghost is the advancing of the indefinite, incarnated by cultures that we can hear are coming, but are not able to identify. It forces them to join in the game and seek in desperation for new models of social order.
Through the construction of simple and direct performative actions, the artistic duo, composed of the Chinese artist Yingmei Duan and the Italian Luigi Coppola, work on activation, shaking-up relational mechanisms that criticise passivity and encourage taking the stance of a conscious and direct social actor. The duo also work on distances, fears, and the political and cultural divides that separate European culture from that of Asia.

PARTECIPANTI, CONNESSI E IN-DIPENDENTI

THREE DAYS OF PERFORMANCE AND PRESENTATIONS 11., 12., 13. 09. 2008
partecipanti, connessi e in-dipendenti a project by Lungomare & Luigi Coppola Parallel Events Manifesta 7
with Ana Borraho & João Galante (Portogallo), Yingmei Duan (Cina/Germania), Luigi Coppola & Loss (Italia)

photo: Lü Nan, performance To add one meter to an anonymous mountain
The performance weekend at the Lungomare Gallery proposes territories of observation and analysis of the contemporary performing language. “Participants, connected and in-dependent” presents performances which have the shared interest in working on the "aesthetics of relations" and on audience participation, at times subtle and ironic, at times explicit and provocative.

AS CLOSE AS YOU CAN

PERFORMANCE FOR VIDEO (3' 45'') 2008
as part of the project "Untitled Portrait" in collaboration with Yuko Kaseki, Isak Immanuel.
Music by Phnonpenh MODEL, Tokyo.
Shinjuku subway station, Tokyo .

ACTS OF ORDINARY DEMOCRATIC EXERCISE

ACT N. 3 CITTADELLARTE, UNIDEE PROGRAMME 2008
WORKSHOP / PERFORMANCE Luigi Coppola & LOSS

The System accept the principle of majority.
The Members accept the rules decided for the functioning of the System and Symbols of Connection chosen for the representation of the community.
Through the election all the members have the possibility to become Delegate.
The election is coming out through an explicit vote.
All the mechanism is visible and transparent:
rules, condition of becoming part at the System, nomenclature, proposals made by the Members, outcomes of the votes, performance modality, consequences of transgressions concerning rules.

ACTS OF ORDINARY DEMOCRATIC EXERCISE

ACT n. 2 Prato - Fabbrica Europa Festival, 2008

PERFORMANCE Luigi Coppola & LOSS (40')

The project is a succession of artistic, political and sociological experiments in which the process as well as the mechanism of the Democratic Creation System, is clearly exposed.
Each community to reach the definition of a Democratic Creation System choose the System Rules.

ACTS OF ORDINARY DEMOCRATIC EXERCISE

ACT n. 1 Torino
PERFORMANCE Luigi Coppola & LOSS (40') 2008

DEMOCRATIC ACTS are experiments of creation in a system defined by rules and symbols stipulated by a community through a democratic process.
DEMOCRATIC ACT intended as a Exposed Primitive Democracy: each community defining their System, elect a Delegate with the potential of creating actions, relations, images through the body of the Represented in the space.

TO (untitled portrait and ocean)

Performance with Yuko Kaseki Isak Immanuel
With musical contributions from Kanoko Nishi, Theresa Wong, and Zachary Watkins
Farmlab, Los Angeles
New Langton Arts, San Francisco
june 2008

To (untitled portrait and ocean) is a meeting of performance art installation, videologue, and intimate dance theatre remapping anomie, travel, and the gravity of location. The work is pieced together by an international collaboration of artists from three different countries: Luigi Coppola, Yuko Kaseki (Japanese Butoh dancer and physical theatre artist based in Berlin working with cokaseki and inkBoat), and Isak Immanuel (interdisciplinary performance and visual artist and founder of the Floor of Sky series in San Francisco). With amplified bicycle/sound sculpture and musical contributions from Theresa Wong, Kanoko Nishi, Zachary Watkins, and Maruta/Phnonpenh MODEL.

As an ongoing site/city specific work, "To" creates a series of theatrical tableaux taking apart and re-piecing the quotidian, bizarre, and fragile ways in which people meet, miss, mirror, glimpse, erase, and trace one another. Following the dynamics and deviations of a fugue (in terms of the musical, psychological, and linguistic paths) the work is created from a multiple voice perspective. Just as the word fugue is traced back to the Latin “fuga” (flight, running away; especially: flight from one’s country, exile, banishment; escape; or to flee), the artists each develop a line framed in the real and imagined cityscapes of uproot. This layered motion is framed by an international dialogue highlighting the social opacities, mental baggage, and overall weight, wonder, and often desired amnesia of travel. The work rests in discursive space, questions of return and the personal carrier space of one’s everyday life that can fall open when parallel lives collide.

ACTS OF ORDINARY DEMOCRATIC EXERCISE, n. 1 Torino

UNTITLED PORTRAIT (bright transit)

PERFORMANCE FOR VIDEO Taipei - Taiwan, 2007.
Project by: Luigi Coppola, Isak Immanuel, Yuko Kaseki. Realized during the artistic residency at the Taipei Artist Village, Taiwan.

The video is part of the project Untitled Portrait an international collaboration between three performing artists from four different countries re-questioning a sense of anomie and the state of the outsider amidst travel, the city, and the non places.
The subtitle (Mario Rossi, John Doe, Erika Mustermann/Nanashi-Gonbee) is comprised of the names for unknown or unspecified persons in Italy, The United States, and Germany/Japan - the countries of the artists own nationality and domicile.
photos: still video of the Taipei project by Luigi Coppola, Isak Immanuel, Yuko Kaseki

UNTITLED PORTRAIT - Taipei -

Performance with Isak Immanuel, Yuko Kaseki.
Taipei Artist Village, Beiping St cross streets, (Taiwan) 2007

DON'T GO TOO FAR

PERFORMANCE -
Hualien Cultural Centre - Taiwan (30')-2007
“Don’t go too far” is an advice for caution. Don’t take risks. Don’t choose an unknown course. “Don’t go too far” is an attempt to restrain.
The performance is an act of resistency of this concept.
The Taiwanese artist Chou Meng Yeh collaborated in the performance with live written text on site.
Photos: Chang shu-man

DON'T GO TOO FAR

VIDEO OF THE PERFORMANCE

I'M HERE FOR YOU

PUBLICATION, 2006

realized by Luigi Coppola, Christian Fusco. Still video: Claudio Cavallari, Ruth Sergel

in: errors deceits mistakes n°1, Costractedworld, edited by cneai= France, 2006. Contributors included: Oreet Ashery, Jen Budney, Jota Castro, c.cred | collective creative dissent, Garry Gray, Institute for Modern Architecture,LOSS, Rodrigo Mallea Lire, Elizabeth Newman, Ylva Ogland, Camilla Pignatti, Lisa Radford, Kati Rule,Sislej Xhafa.

SOMETHING IS CHANGING

PERFORMANCE FOR VIDEO (5'35'')

directed by Claudio Calvallari, Luigi Coppola

Torino winter olimpic games. Prod. Loss 2006