Events
17 Apr 2015
Book launch
Against Unhappiness.
Situationist International and its current relevance.
The subject will be discussed by the curator Stefano Taccone, together with Pino Bertelli, PhD in nothing, journalist, street photographer, filmmaker, photography and film critic, Ubaldo Fadini, Professor of Ethics at the University of Florence, and Francesco Galluzzi, Professor of Aesthetics, Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara.
There is little doubt that Situationist International constitutes one of the most relevant and significant, as well as complex and controversial, chapters in the history of the avant-garde movement. Its parabola strikes for its desire for absolute profoundness and coherence, for the unwavering determination of its protagonists in their procedure, convinced that they represent the "highest degree of international revolutionary consciousness", for the refusal of any form of mediation or adaptation, and the tendency to break any form of separation, beginning with the separation between art and life. Concepts such as "the construction of situations", "dérive", "détournement", "psychogeography", "unitary urbanism", and the centrality of themes such as the overcoming of art, criticism of the society of the spectacle, and the reinvention of the revolution, all bear witness to the fascination and richness of the reflections and intuitions of the movement, as well as constructing the foundations of critical acclaim that survived well beyond its official termination. In 2013, between January and May, the BAD Museum of Casandrino (Naples) created the project Far retrocedere dappertutto l'infelicità, (reverse unhappiness everywhere) curated by Stefano Taccone. Composed of a documentary exhibition and a series of conferences, the project involved some of the major international scholars of the Situationist movement. Their interventions, now collected in a book published by Ombre Corte (Verona, 2014), not only bring back the dynamism and variety of the methods and interpretations, but also its extraordinary relevance, not just in the theory of art, but also in political analysis.
The authors: Pino Bertelli, Enea Bianchi, Martina Corgnati, Sergio Ghirardi, Anselm Jappe, Gianfranco Marelli, Enrico Mascelloni und Pasquale Stanziale.
The curator: Stefano Taccone (Naples 1981) teaches History of Contemporary Art at RUFA - Rome University of Fine Arts and is studying for his PhD in Methods and Methodologies of Archaeological and Historical-Artistic Research at the University of Salerno. He has published the following monographs: Hans Haacke. Il contesto politico come materiale (Plectica, Salerno, 2010); La contestazione dell'arte (Phoebus, Casalnuovo di Napoli, 2013). He writes for the art magazine Segno.
