The basic question on how to think historically in the present has explicitly inspired Okwui Enwezor, curator of the Biennale of Seville (2006) intitled The Unhomely – Phantom Scenes in Global Society, which investigated the new cultural intersections between the end of modernity, the post-colonial condition and the new uncertainty state of art. The term Unhomely – as an English translation of the Freudian Unheimlich - described the social and psychological condition of uprootedness and dislocation generated by wars, migrations, flows of persons, goods and information in the globalized era. In a context of modified idea of home and nation, some significant changes on arts, artistic identity and artistic practice are produced. The end of the modern univocal relationship between territory and identity has deeply redesigned the cultural meaning of local and/or cosmopolitan condition, the sense of belonging and the sense of places, shaping the figure of nomadic artist as a post-modern migrant. The paper will analyze and discuss the new figure of the nomadic artist in his/her post-modern uprooted condition, as a contemporary witness of thinking historically in the present. It will present and comment on some significant works of ‘nomadic art’ as a new form of cultural or anthropological investigation. Nomadic artists as Marina Abramovic, Mona Hatoum, Maya Bajevic, Adrian Paci, Shirin Neshat, Huma Milji, will be considered. The nomadic art will be analysed as a practice often politically engaged, accounting of ‘places’ as a texture of social relations and as a practice using typical ethnographical instruments as video, photos, interviews, or objects of the material culture as transitional objects. Producing new ways of seeing, the nomadic artists return into the places they come from or they had to leave; they interrogate their native countries and cultures, often transformed by wars or changes of regimes. The nomadic art doesn’t bridge cultures but becomes a reflective instrument of political and ethnographical analysis, by which the artist moves from his/her own hybrid identity - the gender is very relevant because women are numerous - to produce a kind of re-territorialisation of the culture, or a re-culturalisation of the territory. In a new relationship between culture and place, a new field of public sphere is shaped, and a new mixture between high and low culture is produced. The paper will finally discuss the practices of contemporary art as rituals of liminal passages to cope with the experience of change (according to Canclini and Papastergiadis), defining the nomadic artists as liminal people looking for new meanings in the crossroads of cultures.
The nomadic artist. How to think historically in the present
TRASFORINI, Maria Antonietta
2008
Abstract
The basic question on how to think historically in the present has explicitly inspired Okwui Enwezor, curator of the Biennale of Seville (2006) intitled The Unhomely – Phantom Scenes in Global Society, which investigated the new cultural intersections between the end of modernity, the post-colonial condition and the new uncertainty state of art. The term Unhomely – as an English translation of the Freudian Unheimlich - described the social and psychological condition of uprootedness and dislocation generated by wars, migrations, flows of persons, goods and information in the globalized era. In a context of modified idea of home and nation, some significant changes on arts, artistic identity and artistic practice are produced. The end of the modern univocal relationship between territory and identity has deeply redesigned the cultural meaning of local and/or cosmopolitan condition, the sense of belonging and the sense of places, shaping the figure of nomadic artist as a post-modern migrant. The paper will analyze and discuss the new figure of the nomadic artist in his/her post-modern uprooted condition, as a contemporary witness of thinking historically in the present. It will present and comment on some significant works of ‘nomadic art’ as a new form of cultural or anthropological investigation. Nomadic artists as Marina Abramovic, Mona Hatoum, Maya Bajevic, Adrian Paci, Shirin Neshat, Huma Milji, will be considered. The nomadic art will be analysed as a practice often politically engaged, accounting of ‘places’ as a texture of social relations and as a practice using typical ethnographical instruments as video, photos, interviews, or objects of the material culture as transitional objects. Producing new ways of seeing, the nomadic artists return into the places they come from or they had to leave; they interrogate their native countries and cultures, often transformed by wars or changes of regimes. The nomadic art doesn’t bridge cultures but becomes a reflective instrument of political and ethnographical analysis, by which the artist moves from his/her own hybrid identity - the gender is very relevant because women are numerous - to produce a kind of re-territorialisation of the culture, or a re-culturalisation of the territory. In a new relationship between culture and place, a new field of public sphere is shaped, and a new mixture between high and low culture is produced. The paper will finally discuss the practices of contemporary art as rituals of liminal passages to cope with the experience of change (according to Canclini and Papastergiadis), defining the nomadic artists as liminal people looking for new meanings in the crossroads of cultures.I documenti in SFERA sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
