ARC Projects

19 July - 2 November 2008, Rovereto, Trentino, Italy

Kamen Stoyanov has created new artworks for Manifesta 7, taking place in Trentino, Italy. Stoyanov's work is showing within the context of 'ManifeSTATION' curated by The Office for Cognitive Urbanism.

Migration is a central topic for Stoyanov, whether based on economical, political or personal reasons. If one‘s attempts at assimilation fail, there remains nothing but a life at the margins of society, excluded and isolated amidst everyday cultural life – something well known but still foreign. For Manifesta 7, Stoyanov addresses the topic of urban events and art biennials themselves, since they characterize entire cities as cultural territory and thus contain implicit mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. The cultural homogenization of urban spaces divides the people into those that consume these places and those that have to live in them. The Disneylend Express connects both.

Click on the image below to see a slide show of Kamen Stoyanov's artwork for Manifesta 7.

The Office for Cognitive Urbanism has conceptualized a project for Manifesta 7 that searches out the incongruities of claims to local and also regional identity, as well as exploring trans-national problems. As an intermediary space in the center of the city, the train station of Rovereto has been chosen as an exemplary place for the project. Train stations function as a kind of interface between arrival and departure, an area that is not yet completely realized, but also not really vanished. This ambivalent and precarious form of localization is symptomatic not only for travelers but also for any subject that experiences itself as incongruent to regional local color, due to its cultural, national and economical situation: migrants, refugees, adherents of different creeds, foreign language speakers etc. The Office for Cognitive Urbanism thus proposes to accentuate the role of the train station in its significance as a place of refuge and contact for all of these precarious presences, and has therefore invited seven artists to develop their own contributions on the theme. The modification of the train station in this way represents a spectrum of claims that will address precisely those people whose presence in the city and the region they were prepared for only in part. For now, in this intersection between arrival and departure, the city exists only as a name. What significance this name holds for those people who arrive and depart depends on how the city will react to their manifold and diverse needs. The manifeSTATION project represents this nexus as an urban and regional symptom, a fusion of a city planning-artistic statement and an imaginary station.

The Office for Cognitive Urbanism works with city planning topics in the context of the discourses that arise from theories of media, space and subject. Its projects rotate around the political and cultural constructions of meanings of space and their alteration. For Manifesta 7, it has designed an “imaginary train station” that will temporarily inscribe itself into the current spatial configurations of the Rovereto train station, and which will present the projects of seven invited artists. An essential point of the intervention is to designate the point of transition between the private and public requirements of space. Thereby the manifeSTATION project focuses on those who arrive at a city and region only to a certain extent and are, therefore forced to face the common mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion pertaining to territorial conceptions of identity.

www.manifesta7.it