Put an artist and a businessman in a room and throw away the key

Put an artist and a businessman in a room and throw away the key. Find N extraordinary ways to get out… or thoughts to go beyond the limits of each own’s language.

  1. Each language is a point of view from which to frame the world.
  2. Each language suggests solutions while setting some limits too.
  3. Each language is made to be understood, but also to be contradicted, contested or even rejected.
  4. Each language is a starting point for an internal dialogue that is also capable of going beyond its limits.
  5. Speeches, gestures and images become languages when they encounter something else which generates contrast and identifies them as such.
  6. Can different languages converse with each other?
  7. Can they live together on common ground reaching outside their parameters?
  8. Different languages can challenge each other.
  9. They can collide, bump into each other, combine and create new and unexpected meanings.
  10. Maybe they create a common language… or maybe simply a solution for getting out of a closed room.

In our globalised economy, where signs and meanings are spread worldwide, we need extraordinary solutions in order to overcome the feeling of redundancy and dead ends in language. As Sebastian Olma asserts in his article for the the Pespow Residency website (that we will publish tomorrow), we need “methods and infrastructures that make space for both accidents and sagacity, a creative economy based on the logic of serendipity.” With sagacity meaning “the ability to see what others don’t, namely to recognize the potential of the encounter and act on it.” Accidental discovery, or aberrations in speech, can generate innovative means of communication.

In other words, we need the space to change our rhythm and elaborate on the beaten path. A space where fortuitous poetic occurrences may burst into the communication process.

This is why we want our website and the residency project to become a space, both virtual and physical, where different languages and worlds can come together in the once-called “factory”, where we still live and work.

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Published on 25.7.2014

Bio
Francesca Coluzzi (1985) lives and works in Rome as a creative consultant in the field of communication. She is the manager of distribution at NERO, magazine and publishing house based in Rome specialized in artists’ book. She studied in the IUAV of Venice (MA in Visual Communication) and she has been collaborating with the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam. She writes about communication and visual culture with great pleasure and passion, and she also publishes online occasionally. She reads, observes, take notes. Her main interest is the image, in all its possible shapes and forms as well as its use, both as a tool of knowledge and as a cultural subject. In her free time she collects and stores kitsch images for research purposes.