Out of the many outstanding proposal received the Gallery committee supported Michela Alessandrini‘s (Rome/Budapest) and Luminita Apostu‘s (Romania) proposal.
Michela Alessandrini (1987, Rome) is an italian curator, art critic and art historian. She graduated in Contemporary History of Art at Sapienza University of Rome in 2011 and, since 2008, started a collaboration with artists, contemporary art institutions and non-profit organizations in her own country and in Europe, for example in France and Czech Republic. She currently writes for important online art reviews and is interested in entering in touch with the ever changing dynamics of the art world, moving continuously from place to place to discover the invisible link between art and territory/ies. This research is, actually, the main focus and aim of her residency as curator in Guest Space 2012 at Labor: a path that started from the anthropological and social studies for her thesis on Mac/Val (Musée d’art contemporain du Val de Marne in Vitry-sur-Seine) and leads to wonder about people and nations, métissage, man and men, cultural involvement and contaminations, identity and identities. A platform to make art, people and territories communicate and interrogate: that is PLartFORM.
Luminita Apostu (1985, Romania) lives and works in Iasi, Romania. She did her MA in Interdisciplinary Visual Art at “George Enescu” University of Arts in Romania and from 2010 she initiated theartstudent.org (a platform for supporting initiatives designed by art students). Her practice has related so far to the educational system in art and has also questioned the status and potentiality of art schools in the formation of their students as artists, researchers or other kind of workers in the field. If we praise the need for action and we feel savvy being nostalgic about these currently “bad” times in which the art student is not an activist when he should be, we cannot do this in the conference room, but rather in the classroom. In this scenario educational power comes smoothly disguised in the shape of curatorial models, so if we are to play these roles disguised like this, we must play seriously. Throughout the residency she intends to work on compiling a relevant speech, in the form of a collage art manifesto, which would empower art students to be more aware and critical about their position in the educational system. The research proposed for Labor’s Guest Space aims at building a discursive project through which curatorial self-empowerment plays the role of assembling bits of art history as a cultural heritage to be shared in front of 1st year art students.