Flail:

the purifying of matter

Concept

The Flail (Frèl in Ladin language) and the ethnographic museums where this disused farm tool is preserved are taken as an opportunity to join artists and contemporary art centres working and performing in mountain contexts. The aim of the project is to experiment and to share ideas about a specific topic: coexistence between contemporary art and mass tourism in the mountain environment.

About the mountain: reasons for a choice.

The mountain is an environment whose natural and climatic features affect the living and the acting of people who spend their lives in close contact with it.

The mountain, compared to the cities, gives the opportunity of existing in a different way.

The mountain is a place seasonally invaded by lots of turists looking for fun; at the same time it is perceived as the place of a differing culture.

The mountain is a land that offers opportunities but also creates difficulties to the artists.

About the Flail: reasons for a choice.

The Flail is an ancient tool, mainly made of wood, used in former times in the Alps to purify matter (grains or leguminous plants) from its involucre (chaff and straw) through threshing. The Ladin term “Frelada”, the act of beating, litterally means hitting violently something and also somehow purifying it. The mountain cultural and ethnographic heritage is also subjected to a similar treatment, when offended in order to promote a turism whose needs comprehend living in a fairyland totally disconnetted from the real world.

LAD: Frèl

ITA: Correggiato

SLO: Cepec

FRA: Fléau

DEU: Dreschflegel

ENG: Flail

The concept of Flail as interpretation of the immediacy: why this project?

There is a lack of “mythology” in the mountain visual and contemporary art, mythology meant as telling something still and unmovable like a tool placed in a museum, or the most part of the works of art included in the mountain contexts, through a new interpretation that establishes a relationship with our time, and that makes that tool or work of art real and still meaningful.

The request for culture, frequently expressed by the mass turism, is simply fulfilled through a frame of events referred to the past and sometimes comprehend supposed usages and costums which give an unauthentic picture of a place. Everything is aimed to meet turistic requirements and not to know the own history and to mantain the own traditions.

A new cultural approach is needed, more realistic and authentic, which does not set aside or forget everything has been done, which on the contrary could sustain it. Experimentation and promotion of an art supported by research could be the medium to change the relationship between people who permanently live in the mountain areas and turists, the medium to succeed in finding a sincere outlook on mountain culture and art.

Interested areas.

The Dolomites and the Alps, from French to Slovenia, through Switzerland, Austria and small mountain environments.

The concrete project.

An artist who mangles the idea of Flail, the idea of purifying the unnecessary to give it “a new life”. The video will have a time limit of 3 minutes.

Who.

Ten artists or goups of artists, choosen on the base of the quality and specificity of their works.

Francia: Florian Vecchione -Thomas Bourdis – Caroline domergue - Martin de Coudenhove – Colin Laubry « Ascension team » (vidéo artiste\son artiste\3d artiste)
Fiè allo Sciliar, BZ, Südtirol : Kunigunde Weissenegger alias Puttega (traduttrice,giornalista, scrittrice, membro team GAP, codirettrice franzmagazine.com )
Primiero e Val di Fiemme: Zeni Gianluigi + Nicola Degiampietro (coppia di artisti inedita per il progetto ma collaudata nella realtà).
Austria (Tirol): Lois Hechenblaikner (fotografo)
Val di Fassa, TN, Trentino: Bruno Amplatz
Slovenia: Carniolus
Val Badia, Bz, Süd-Tirol : Fabian Feichter (videoartist\performer\fotografo)
Anpez (Cortina), BL, Veneto : Mauro Lampo Olivotto (artista, scrittore, curatore, fotografo, guida alpina, esploratore di profondità)
Svizzera: Nino Baumgartner Videoartist group\performers
Valtellina: Domenico Buzzetti (videoartista).

Munchen (*Bozen): Philipp Messner (artista)

Where: project collocation

“The soul of matter” is the project promoted by the Contemporary Art Centre Cavalese for the year 2016, specifically addressed to contemporary artists who perform in the mountain areas. It is thought as an artistic path made of exhibitions and events, and aimed to explore the use and the manipulation of different expressive media –from traditional materials like wood or stone and traditional techniques like the oil painting, to the use of industrial materials like resins or polymers and the employment of new technologies and digital techniques-. Unavoidable and varied contaminations involving artistic and cultural products will derive from this processes, and this territory will be perceived as featured by a constant dialectic between its traditional peculiarities and its fast innovation, a dualism also revealed by the specific choices made by the artists and by the adopted criteria. They will mantaina forms connected with the tradition or disregard it, opting for the contemporaneity. Still, they will find a “third interpenetrated way”.

The exhibition “Flail: the purifying of matter”, proposed and supervised by Treefisters (http://www.treefisting.blogspot.com), finds naturally its collocation inside this frame and will at first take place at the Contemporary Art Centre Cavalese, the institution which sustained and provided financial support for the project. Later on, it will be submitted to other institutions situated in the Alps, from Chamonix to Ptuj.

Why the videos?

Presenting the same exhibition in different places at the same time means creating new opportunities of collaboration both for institutions and for artists. The video has been chosen as a new, quick and economic medium to propose simultaneously the projection in different contexts.