Trieste Lignano Portorož Piran Grado Graz Rovinj Poreč

Stories from the Edge

Once the Riviera of the Habsburg Empire, the Gulf of Trieste has long been famous in Austria for its coastline, a Sehnsuchtsort. Nowadays millions of holidaymakers visit each year, imposing on the original topos and culture their notions of how the area and its culture should be: an artificial hyper-identity that is then materialised by the tourist industry, often with very adverse consequences for the local population.

'Stories from the Edge' sets out to explore the interactions between the layers of hyper-identity and identity. Where does the boundary lie between reality and fabrication? How does this imagined 'concept of a place' travel there from somewhere else, sometimes even usurping its authentic identity? Is it possible to facilitate a transfer back in the reverse direction, to counter the flow and create an exchange?

Read the full project description

Stories from the Edge

Once the Riviera of the Habsburg Empire, the Gulf of Trieste has long been famous in Austria for its coastline, a Sehnsuchtsort. Nowadays millions of holidaymakers visit each year, imposing on the original topos and culture their notions of how the area and its culture should be: an artificial hyper-identity that is then materialised by the tourist industry, often with very adverse consequences for the local population.

'Stories from the Edge' sets out to explore the interactions between the layers of hyper-identity and identity. Where does the boundary lie between reality and fabrication? How does this imagined 'concept of a place' travel there from somewhere else, sometimes even usurping its authentic identity? Is it possible to facilitate a transfer back in the reverse direction, to counter the flow and create an exchange?

The interface of the project is a portable studio—a VW camper van—that acts as a site of art production for artists and local people, of social encounter, and hospitality in the form of a pop-up osmizza/buschenschank. Following the coastline around the Gulf of Trieste through Croatia, Slovenia and Italy, the camper will make a road trip that maps a diversity of topographies, natural resorts and seaside developments.

Along the way, the collective will be researching the themes of hyper-identity, travelling concepts and knowledge transfer with 8 invited local artists. They will also be working with local communities to examine the impact of tourism on their lives and the everyday culture that persists. In six resorts around the coastline, the camper van mobile studio will be used as an in-situ art laboratory to create 'postcards' to send to Graz from the inhabitants of the Gulf area—in the form of images, texts, videos, recordings and other artefacts—turning the tide of information. These items will be registered and archived carefully for two exhibitions, in Trieste and in Graz. Can authentic cultural identity re-assert itself through these souvenirs, these messages from the edge?

As a symbol of shared historic traditions and culture, the camper van will also act as a pop-up Triestine osmizza / Styrian buschenschank—a rustic inn serving simple cold foods and drinks like prosciutto, cheese and bread. Six osmizze around the Gulf of Trieste will be followed by two osmizze at the openings of the exhibitions.

Stories from the Edge is an international project initiated between the Daily Rhythms Collective in Graz and curators in Trieste, working together with guest artists from Croatia, Italy and Slovenia.

Initiating artists

Kate Howlett-Jones

Kate Howlett-Jones (b. London, UK) is a writer and text artist based in Graz, Austria. Master's in French and Russian literature, University of Oxford, Creative Writing at the Open University UK. Her work is a dialogue between writing and spatial installation, starting with her own text and language as the materiality, which interacts with space using found objects, self-made artefacts, projection and existing structures. She has participated in numerous exhibitions, installations and interventions in public space, sometimes working alone and sometimes in collaborations with visual artists.

www.katehowlettjones.com

Nayari Castillo

Nayari Castillo. Venezuela. Molecular Biologist and Artist. MFA in Public Art, Bauhaus University. Weimar.DE . She has participated in numerous collectives and solo exhibits around the world. Using video, text, objects and photography as tools of communication, her installation work relies on site-specific constructs firmly attached to concepts of migration and travelling. At present she lives in Graz, Austria

www.nayaricastillo.com

Marina Sartori

Marina has a background in design and fine arts with a degree in architecture from Cornell University, USA and studied printmaking, photography, and painting at the Centre des arts du Livre in Paris, Tyler School of Art in Rome, and the Hochschule für Bildende Kunst in Hamburg.

The themes of memory and perception explored through travel and landscape are important to Marina's work. By using the multiple images produced through printmaking and photography, Marina has made artist books, postcard series, and completed various mailing projects which reflect upon movement and displacement.

Curator

Curatorial perspective

Stories from the Edge is an itinerant and participatory project based on the dialogue between subjects who conceive art as a critical tool and as a mean to create new meanings and new ways of interpreting the world.

The theme of hyper-identity as projected by mass tourism on resorts along the Adriatic coastline ​of the Gulf of Trieste​ and surroundings is analysed here through a plural and comparative method, based on the participation of artists and local communities. ​The osmizza is taken as a model of conviviality and self-production.

The form and content of the ​final ​exhibitions closing the project in Italy (Trieste, April 2016)​ and​ Austria (Graz​, June 2016)​ are defined along the ​route, according to an approach that privilege​s​ the process instead of the output (in terms of production of objects)​. Nayari Castillo, Kate Howlett-​Jones and Marina Sartori play a key role in the project, ​driving the research - as well as the camper - on the edge of our intellectual curiosity, being the collector of all the suggestion and contributions they meet on the road and disseminating traces of friendship along the way.

 

Curatorial perspective 2

The second trip of Stories from the Edge should have taken place in September. We decided to postpone it because of the situation that was taking shape at the nearby borders during the summer. The refugee crisis was defined by OECD in those days as "a humanitarian crisis unprecedented, with an appalling and unacceptable human cost". It happened after a summer in which arrivals to the European Union, by sea and by land, increased steeply as well as the related shipwrecks, deaths, accidents and inhumane conditions. The image of Aylan Kurdi – who had escaped from Kobane with his family only to wash up, lifeless, on the shore of Bodrum – was one of the most horrific culmination of a horror that had a profound impact.

We decided to wait. For one thing, for practical reasons: to cross the borders between Croatia and Slovenia, as well as those with Austria, would have taken longer than we planned. The "Balkan route", once used for smuggling, became the way for thousands and thousands of women, men and children arriving mainly from Afghanistan and Syria. When Hungary closed its borders, a river of people flooded into Croatia to cross Slovenia, aiming for Austria and northern Europe. Furthermore, over those days in mid-September it was proving difficult to obtain permissions from the local authorities to occupy public space with our osmizza.

However, the decision to postpone the trip was mainly connected to the need to elaborate what was happening and to understand how our project should continue in light of this. In fact, it would be impossible for us to carry on with Stories from the Edge as we had conceived it at the beginning, because the refugee ​crisis was rising issues - shared also by the project - in a way and with an urgency impossible to ignore.

Firstly, the sea and the land themselves, where Stories from the Edge takes place, changed their appearance in our common imagination: from places of holiday, rest, amusement and travel (whose identities are more or less artificial - this is what we wanted to investigate) to places of safety or, conversely, of death for all of those people escaping war, persecution or impossible living conditions. What emerged was a mutation in the image of place, an identity displacement in the collective consciousness, which is what we had expected to observe but in another direction.

Secondly, the aim of the project to create "traces of friendship" between countries by a continuous exchange between international borders seems to collide with the position of those countries who reacted to the situation by erecting walls or expressing the will of closure in contrast with the principles of solidarity and "union" that Europe professes to have. For this reason, it seems important to highlight that knowledge does not sprout in abstract space but arises and grows through communication and cultural exchanges, by means of translation, diffusion and contamination of ideas. And also the ideas are less abstract, less immaterial than how one can imagine: these are embedded in the texts, objects, tools and images, and in all the things made and carried by people. Ideas and knowledge are thus also inextricably connected to people and only through movements, encounters and exchanges can cross-pollination take place.

​Thinking about knowledge and identity through the filter-concept of ‘migration’ raises many questions: What exactly is it that is transferred during the process of migration - ideas, objects, skills, problems? How do individual or collective identities mould the migration of knowledge? At what point does the transformation process end and something new or different emerge? How can we map the political and social implications of knowledge in motion?

​A few days after the attacks claimed by IS that shocked Paris and the rest of the world, exponents of an ignorant and racist propaganda started using the terms Muslim, migrant and terrorist interchangeably. Identity – both of people and of places - is the result of a social construction. Stories from the Edge intends to explore the relationship between identity and hyper-identity of places and the flow of information in both directions between Austria, Slovenia, Croatia and Italy. In the project statement asks: "Where does the boundary lie between reality and fabrication? How does this imagined 'concept of a place' travel there from somewhere else, sometimes even usurping its authentic identity? By replacing the word "place" with "people" you can find a further contact point between the current events and the project.

Francesca Lazzarini

Francesca Lazzarini (Luxemburg, 1976) lives and works in Italy. Having graduated in sociology, she began to work with photography in the late '90s, first as an artist, and since 2007 as a critic and curator. After working six years with Fondazione Fotografia Modena, she has since 2013 worked as an independent curator, collaborating with Italian and international artists and institutions. She is a lecturer and tutor at the Master di alta formazione sull'immagine contemporanea in Modena.
Considering artistic practices as a means of activating new processes of signification, her work focuses on their contribution to the act of re-imagining the world.

Manuel Fanni Canelles

Manuel Fanni Canelles (b. 1976) is a visual artist, trainer and theatrical director. He collaborates with private and public museums and theatres in Italy and abroad. In his work as a means of expression he mainly uses video, installations and performance. Along with Spazio5, he works as an independent curator of international exhibitions, playing an active role in the debate regarding contemporary art. Among the exhibitions he has organised are: ALTREMEMORIE: Park of contemporary art (2014); FRAME, International exhibition on experimental cinema (2013); CONTEMPORANEA, format for a public debate between cinema and market. (2013); IT'S ALL RIGHT, exhibition of new Slovenian video art (2012).
His work activates a constant reflection on the concept of the provisional and its representation, complicating the line between representation and reality.

Invited artists

Alessandro Sambini

Alessandro Sambini (Rovigo, 1982) BA in Design at the Free University of Bolzano and then MA in Research Architecture in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths' College, London. Through photography, video and the use of performance he reflects the need and methods of production of new images, their circulation and dissemination, the various areas of the relationship between the image and the public.

www.alessandrosambini.com

Nika Rukavina

Nika Rukavina (b. 1980) is a multimedia artist working predominantly in installation, but her practice includes performance, painting, drawing, sculpture and video.

Her primary interest is research and understanding of inner human psychology and philosophy, using space as a powerful instrument of expression because it integrates the public and the artwork.

https://nikarukavina.wordpress.com/

Pila Rusjan

Pila Rusjan (b. 1984 in Slovenia) is a freelance artist, working in the fields of video art, video film, performance and multimedia installation, both in Slovenia and abroad, on solo and group projects.

In 2004/05, she attended an 8-month course at the European Film College in Ebeltoft, Denmark. In 2010, she graduated from the Digital Arts and Practices at School of Arts, University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia where she is currently on the MA in Mediai Arts and Practices.

Travels and residencies include: Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Austria, United Kingdom, Kyrgyzstan, Brazil and Taiwan. Works at various international festivals of video and contemporary art. Collaboration on many group projects and exhibitions. Also work as an editor and assistant director on film productions, as well as author of videoscenographies for events and theatres. Currently leading a research unit of Galerija GT association for video art called famulVideoLab.

www.pilarusjan.si
www.vimeo.com/pilarusjan
http://vsu.ung.si/user/8
www.famulvideolab.wordpress.com

Ryts Monet

Ryts Monet (b. 1982) lives and works in Venice.

In 2012 he was artist in residence at Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice; 2013 artist in residence at the Institute of Contemporary Art and International Cultural Exchange in Tokyo, Tokyo Wonder Site. In 2013, his work Black Flag Revival won first prize of Premio Celeste, national art prize for Sculpture, Installation and Performance.

In 2014 he presented Sisters, his first solo show in Tokyo, at Gallery COEXIST-TOKYO.
 Ryts Monet is assistant to professor Agnes Kohlmeyer for the final workshop of BA Degree of Visual Arts, in the Faculty of Arts and Design, University IUAV of Venice.

www.rytsmonet.eu

Polonca Lovšin

Polonca Lovšin (b. 1970) is an architect and artist from Ljubljana. In her practice she focuses on self-organised initiatives and inventive individuals who practise alternative ways of living and working. She is a co-founder of the art association Kud Obrat, which together with neighbourhood residents is developing the community garden Beyond a Construction Site in Ljubljana (2010-present).

www.lovsin.org

Renata Poljak

Renata Poljak's (b. 1974, Split) work has been exhibited widely, in solo and group shows, biennales and film festivals. She received several awards and in the spring of 2010 her films were shown in Prospective Cinema (Prospectif Cinéma) in Centre Pompidou, Paris. In Palais de Tokyo, Poljak’s film and video works were screened during November 2012 and in 2013 her solo show at Stephan Stoyanov Gallery in NYC was selected as best in show for January in NYC by the Village Voice.

www.renatapoljak.com

Exhibition venues

Collaborators

Petra Počanić

Mirko Smerdel - Discipula

Paola Pasquaretta

Michele Bazzana

Dejan Štefančič - Štef

Sabina Damiani

Aleksander Velišček

Marta Cereda

Helene Thümmel

Partners

Gruppo Immagine

spazio5

Daily Rhythms Collective

The Daily Rhythms Collective uses art methodologies and sensitive cartographies to map the city of Graz (AT) and its surroundings fostering inclusion and comprehension of city dynamics. The citizen is understood not only as a site-specific soul, but also as the sum of all the possible and invisible relations and emotional ties to the world. The DRC evolves a better Graz through public art, exhibitions, installations in public space, workshops, talks and roundtables, collaborations, historical investigations and publications, among other activities. Over the past few years, the projects of DRC have expanded to the international level, by exploring the extensions of Graz identity.
dailyrhythmscollective.com

Support

Stadt Graz

http://www.graz.at

 

The Daily Rhythms Collective

Graz

02 - 05 - 15 / From Graz to Trieste

About Graz

The city of Graz sits in a basin in the mountainous region of Styria, Austria. For its inhabitants, the Gulf of Trieste has a long of history as the Austrian Riviera, a Sehnsuchtsort, or place of yearning. From 1857, through trains ran from Vienna to Trieste via Graz along the Südbahn, the spectacular railway designed by Carl Ritter von Ghega, bringing tourist development with it. Architectural traces of the Habsburgs’ influence on the coastline are still easy to find. Today tens of thousands of Styrians come by car and coach to holiday by the Adriatic, the road following much the same route as the railway did 150 years ago.

Trieste

03 - 05 - 15 / Meeting

Lignano

04 - 05 - 15 / Arrival

Lignano

05 -05 - 2015 / Exploring the place

About Lignano Sabbiadoro

Lignano lies on a spit of sand between the Tagliamento River and the Laguna of Marano. In the early 1900s, the sand dune peninsula was covered with pine forests and had few residents - farmers and fishermen on the lagoon. In 1903, however, tourism arrived with the first bathing resort - the Bagni di Porto Lignano. This led to the first road, then came the hotels and villas. In the 1930s it was declared an official resort - a Stazione di Soggiorno. In the 1950s Lignano experienced a boom. Having a holiday home here became a status symbol. Ernest Hemingway visited Lignano Pineta and was shown the spiral-shaped urban development plan for the area - la chiocciola. Nowadays Lignano attracts 4 million visitors every year. Yet at the same time the Laguna of Marano also remains an ornithological oasis and nature reserve, and home to the traditional thatch and reed casoni (huts) of the local fishermen.

Populations

Lignano lives from its summertime tourism ...

Empty town

On Sunday started officially the high season in Lignano...

Lignano

05 - 05 - 15 / OSMIZZA 17-19

The camper will be stationed at Terrazza Mare offering food and exchange of ideas. The local artist Ryts Monet will be present helping us interact with the community of Lignano.

Impressions

The osmizza in Lignano was very nice, with several people coming to talk with...

signs

Driving to the meeting point for the osmizza in Lignano, just after we had entered the centre we saw a very unusual road sign: the red circle of prohibition with a drawing of a rickshaw inside. This is not a homage to Chinese culture but instead a trace of the summer identity of the town.

Trieste

06 - 05 - 15 / Travel

The road to Portoroz

The way to Portoroz is full of strange encounters: dangerous cliffs, industry scenery, sea farms and some space objects....

Portoroz

06 - 05 - 2015/ The place

About Portoroz

Portoroz is on the Adriatic coast of Slovenia. It became a health resort in the late 19th century, using saltwater and salina mud from the local saltworks. Soon Portoroz became one of the grandest seaside resorts of the Austrian Littoral. Its Palace Hotel hosted the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and was considered the most beautiful hotel on the Adriatic Coast. After the Second World War, Portoroz went into a decline which then reversed in the late 1960s and 1970s with the building of an airport, auditorium, new hotels, a casino and a tourist marina. The local saltworks and salt trade, was important for trade in the Venetian Republic. One of these saltworks is now a nature reserve.

Portoroz

07 - 05 - 15 / OSMIZZA 17-19

The local artist Pila Rusjan will be present helping us interact with the community of Portoroz

Rovinj

08 - 05 - 15 / Arrival

Rovinj

09 - 05 - 2015 / Place impressions

About Rovijn

An upmarket holiday resort and active fishing port, Rovinj is on the Istrian peninsula in Croatia. 500 years of Venetian rule can still be seen in the architecture of the city walls, gates and tall, narrow houses. Later, the Habsburgs also left visible traces, especially the shipyards. They also brought the railway and the Austrian Lloyd line with regular sailings to Trieste, bringing holidaymakers and health tourists to the town. Around the town, the landscape is shaped by coastline, forests of holm oak and pine trees, and the Palud marsh.

Rovinj

09 - 05 - 15 / OSMIZZA 17-19

The local artist Nika Rukavina will be present helping us interact with the community of Rovinj.

Graz

02 - 09- 15 / Crisis in the region

After the summer

The sea changed appearance in our common imagination this summer: from a space of rest, amusement and holiday to a space of safety or, conversely, of death for all of those people escaping war, persecution or impossible living conditions.

Grado

26 - 01 - 16 / Arrival

First impressions Grado

Grado

27- 01 -16 / OSMIZZA 10.30-12.30

Encounter with the artist Alessandro Sambini

A winter mood

Today the first osmizza of our second trip took place. It was a misty day, even if it wasn't cold.

Casoni

A very interesting talk of the osmizza in Grado was the one with Mr. Cesare.

Piran

28 - 01 - 16 / Travel to Piran

Piran

29 - 01 - 16 / OSMIZZA 12-15

Encounter with Polonca Lovsin

Porec

30 - 01 - 16 / Porec in the rain

Porec

30 - 01- 2015 / Osmizza 12:00 -14:00

Encounter with Petra Pocanic / Renata Poljac via Telephone

Grado

31 - 01 - 16 / Return home

Back to headquarters

Story # 32: Totem

On 2012 I started a photographic project about the city of Lignano Sabbiadoro...

Story # 30: Vigipirate

The first version of my project called Vigipirate, took place on the studio's wall at the Cité International des Arts, few weeks after the Paris attacks on the evening of 13 November 2015...

Story # 19: About work

At the beginning of the 20th century, men from Croatian islands frequently migrated to South America...

Publication

We are working hard to deliver soon a catalog that will accompany the exhibitions of Stories From the Edge during this 2016

Exhibition Trieste

invitation

Stories from the Edge is an itinerant and participatory project investigating the relationship between the hyper- and hypo- identity of resorts in the upper Adriatic, a major tourist destination area. The project developed as two trips by camper van with six stops in the most renowned summer destinations in the area: Grado and Lignano in Italy; Portorož and Piran in Slovenia; Rovinj and Poreč in Croatia. Along the way, the originating artists Naya, Kate and Marina met up with local artists from each place.  Each artist was asked to create a work based on the concept of the project and to facilitate dialog with the local community during an event in the form of osmiza. Like the traditional osmize of the Carso region where wine and local specialties are served in producers' homes, the pop-up osmiza proposed itself as a place of conviviality and self-production, of dialog and exchange.
The exhibition shows works produced by the participating artists, along with research stories written during the journey and contributions made to the project by new collaborators encountered on the road. The works and the contributions analyze how the identity of the places are a result of a fluid process, are continually evolving, and are the product of the interaction of numerous variables. The exhibition offers reflections on a range of themes: from the shifts in local life between the high and low season; to the consequences of mass tourism. Finally, it touches on some very current issues: the refugee/migrant crisis and the consequences of terrorism on collective perception.