Symposium: Global Tools
Salt Galata
March 15, 2014 14.30 – 18.30
Untitled (1974), Courtesy Archive U. La Pietra-A. Raffo
Organized as a part of the exhibition GLOBAL TOOLS 1973-1975: Towards an Ecology of Design. The talks will be held in English. Simultaneous translation to Turkish will be provided. The talk by Maurizio Lazzarato will be held in French. Simultaneous English and Turkish translations will be available.
14.30 Silvia Franceschini & Valerio Borgonuovo
“An introduction to Global Tools”
Silvia Franceschini and Valerio Borgonuovo will outline the basis for the research on the experience of Global Tools, a multidisciplinary experimental program of design education founded in 1973 by the members of the Italian Radical Architecture movement and Arte Povera. The curators will address the urgency of working on radical pedagogical projects nowadays and illustrate the fil-rouge which links the themes of the symposium, conceived as a tool to reconnect the predictive reflections of Global Tools, to critical issues of urgent relevance in the present.
15.00 Lapo Binazzi
“From object to survival”
Global Tools founding member and designer Lapo Binazzi will trace the ideas around the identification of alternative relationships between means of industrial production and tools for individual creativity that Global Tools aimed to activate. The need to move smoothly between the object and the behavior (and vice versa) urged the constitution of an advanced laboratory for the industry as well as a new school where teachers and students would meet on the same platform. Proposing simple techniques and basic actions to promote individual and group creativity, Global Tools seminars spawned enthusiasm and participation, and laid the foundations of an unconventional conceptual craft, which survived within the school itself.
15.30 Maurizio Lazzarato
“From the abolition of work to creative industries”
Sociologist and philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato will investigate the ambiguity of the concept of creativity. In an era marked by the hegemony of financial capital, labor and creativity lose their own identity to conflict, rupture and discontinuity - in complete contradiction to what the operaist theories had foreseen as the emergence of a labor refusal. What remains today of creativity is in fact its total subordination to the laws of the market. Lazzarato traces the grounds of the aesthetic construction of the contemporary man, as dictated by the cultural industry and advertisers, rather than by the artist.
16.00 Franco Raggi
“The body as a tool”
Global Tools former member and designer Franco Raggi will frame the expressive experimental research conducted by the radical avant-garde and Global Tools through an anti-rhetoric of the project and a collective “self-therapy”. The pursuit of Global Tools was highly attentive to the phenomenon of linguistic zeroing of Arte Povera in Italy, as well as to the provocative behavioral and “nihilistic” approach of German architecture groups such as Coop Himmelb(l)au or Haus Rucker & Co. The latter had strongly influenced an understanding of design as a metaphorical object of the condition of alienation, executed symbolically on the scale of the body.
16.30 Tea break
17.00 Ahmet Öğüt
“The Silent University”
Artist Ahmet Öğüt will present The Silent University, an autonomous knowledge exchange platform by and for refugees, asylum seekers and migrants. Based in Stockholm and Montreuil, The Silent University is an educational project that aims to challenge the idea of silence as a passive state, and explore its powerful potential through performance, writing, and group reflection. These explorations attempt to make apparent the systemic failure and the loss of skills and knowledge experienced through the process of silencing people who are seeking asylum.
17.30 Angelo Plessas
“The Eternal Internet Brotherhood”
Artist and curator Angelo Plessas will discuss the themes and concepts that form the basis of his project The Eternal Internet Brotherhood, a multidisciplinary residency/happening held every year in remote, mysterious or extremely complex locations. Next to the concepts of distribution, materiality, social interaction, mysticism, new technologies, and de-intellectualization, all addressed in the program, Plessas will touch upon issues related to physical and mental well-being. The contrast between real place, the oasis and the desert; as well as between the maintenance of well-being and that of a place of geopolitical complexity, will form opportunities to reflect on the edges of virtual experience.
18.00 Open discussion
“An introduction to Global Tools”
Silvia Franceschini and Valerio Borgonuovo will outline the basis for the research on the experience of Global Tools, a multidisciplinary experimental program of design education founded in 1973 by the members of the Italian Radical Architecture movement and Arte Povera. The curators will address the urgency of working on radical pedagogical projects nowadays and illustrate the fil-rouge which links the themes of the symposium, conceived as a tool to reconnect the predictive reflections of Global Tools, to critical issues of urgent relevance in the present.
15.00 Lapo Binazzi
“From object to survival”
Global Tools founding member and designer Lapo Binazzi will trace the ideas around the identification of alternative relationships between means of industrial production and tools for individual creativity that Global Tools aimed to activate. The need to move smoothly between the object and the behavior (and vice versa) urged the constitution of an advanced laboratory for the industry as well as a new school where teachers and students would meet on the same platform. Proposing simple techniques and basic actions to promote individual and group creativity, Global Tools seminars spawned enthusiasm and participation, and laid the foundations of an unconventional conceptual craft, which survived within the school itself.
15.30 Maurizio Lazzarato
“From the abolition of work to creative industries”
Sociologist and philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato will investigate the ambiguity of the concept of creativity. In an era marked by the hegemony of financial capital, labor and creativity lose their own identity to conflict, rupture and discontinuity - in complete contradiction to what the operaist theories had foreseen as the emergence of a labor refusal. What remains today of creativity is in fact its total subordination to the laws of the market. Lazzarato traces the grounds of the aesthetic construction of the contemporary man, as dictated by the cultural industry and advertisers, rather than by the artist.
16.00 Franco Raggi
“The body as a tool”
Global Tools former member and designer Franco Raggi will frame the expressive experimental research conducted by the radical avant-garde and Global Tools through an anti-rhetoric of the project and a collective “self-therapy”. The pursuit of Global Tools was highly attentive to the phenomenon of linguistic zeroing of Arte Povera in Italy, as well as to the provocative behavioral and “nihilistic” approach of German architecture groups such as Coop Himmelb(l)au or Haus Rucker & Co. The latter had strongly influenced an understanding of design as a metaphorical object of the condition of alienation, executed symbolically on the scale of the body.
16.30 Tea break
17.00 Ahmet Öğüt
“The Silent University”
Artist Ahmet Öğüt will present The Silent University, an autonomous knowledge exchange platform by and for refugees, asylum seekers and migrants. Based in Stockholm and Montreuil, The Silent University is an educational project that aims to challenge the idea of silence as a passive state, and explore its powerful potential through performance, writing, and group reflection. These explorations attempt to make apparent the systemic failure and the loss of skills and knowledge experienced through the process of silencing people who are seeking asylum.
17.30 Angelo Plessas
“The Eternal Internet Brotherhood”
Artist and curator Angelo Plessas will discuss the themes and concepts that form the basis of his project The Eternal Internet Brotherhood, a multidisciplinary residency/happening held every year in remote, mysterious or extremely complex locations. Next to the concepts of distribution, materiality, social interaction, mysticism, new technologies, and de-intellectualization, all addressed in the program, Plessas will touch upon issues related to physical and mental well-being. The contrast between real place, the oasis and the desert; as well as between the maintenance of well-being and that of a place of geopolitical complexity, will form opportunities to reflect on the edges of virtual experience.
18.00 Open discussion
BIOS
Lapo Binazzi
Designer Lapo Binnazi founded the Radical Architecture group UFO (together with Carlo Bachi, Patrizia Cammeo, Riccardo Foresi and Titti Maschietto) in 1967 and co-initiated Global Tools in 1973, taking part in the research group “Theory”. Considering design as a phenomenon of pure communication, Binnazi’s research focuses on matching artistic experience with experimental design.
Maurizio Lazzarato
Maurizio Lazzarato is a Paris-based, free-lance sociologist and philosopher, researching the areas of immaterial labor, cognitive capitalism, post-fordist movements and labor ontology. In his essay Immaterial Labour (1996), he discusses how immaterial labor produces commodities that are primarily intellectual, affective or communicative.
Franco Raggi
Designer and Global Tools former member, Franco Raggi was active in the research group “Body”. In 1973 he organized Design als Postulat am Beispiel Italiens, the first critical exhibition on Italian Radical Design (IDZ, Berlin). A well-published design critic since the 1970s, Franco Raggi was also former editor of Casabella magazine (1971-1975), former director of MODO magazine (1981-1983) and coordinator for the Venice Biennale in various capacities.
Ahmet Öğüt
Ahmet Öğüt is a socio-cultural initiator, mediator, artist, negotiator and lecturer, who lives and works in İstanbul and Amsterdam. He explores daily struggles against restricted freedoms and the absurd encounters where the political meets the personal. Through various media such as drawings, sculptures, installations, video and artist books, Öğüt produces works with a playful irony and subtle resistance.
Angelo Plessas
Angelo Plessas’s practice investigates the changing role of art and social practices in the age of internet and virtual experience. His works take the form of websites, installations, performances, workshops, and social manifesto gatherings, which always transpose internet behaviors and semiotics in actual space. In 2012 he initiated the project The Eternal Internet Brotherhood, a multidisciplinary residency/happening held every year in remote, mysterious or extremely complex locations.
In collaboration with
