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Title: Maurizio Bolognini. Raptus (Museophagia)
Date: 1999
64 pgs, cm. 24
Edited by: Piero Cavellini
Texts by: Derrick de Kerckhove, Paola Sega Serra Zanetti 
Language: English/Italian
Publisher: Nuovi Strumenti/Archivio Cavellini


Raptus
  [Lat. raptus: strappo, rapina, saccheggio (snatch, robbery, sack)] s. m. 1. Impulso a compiere un'azione. 2. Rapimento al culmine dell'ispirazione artistica, estasi artistica (artistic ecstasy).


"Museophagia, the name says it all, means the tendency or habit of eating museums. It is something that the Internet is beginning to do right now, or at least it is taking nibbles. The first evidence of museophagia, in fact a kind of digital bulimia, was the attempt of Bill Gates, through a company called Corbys, to gobble up by fact of digitization and scanning all the contents of museums and galleries that Corbys deemed fit, to regurgitate them on line, at a cost, of course, via proprietary channels. 
Museophagia, the website and the subject of this book, is more modest in its intentions than those of Bill Gates, it merely purports to consume via digitization objects (furniture, fixtures etc.) that Maurizio Bolognini took from art galleries of various cities, during a world tour starting from the Cavellini Foundation Gallery. Fair game..." 

(Derrick de Kerckhove, "Museophagia - The art gallery in the age of its digital reproduction", in Raptus, Nuovi Strumenti, 1999)

"Out-of-date commodities have to be recycled. Which better re-use than the creation of a travelling room of wonder, like that proposed by Bolognini, who has returned from pilgrimages to exotic lands, full of objects standardized by the global economy: fire-extinguishers, chairs, note-pads... We are waiting, full of expectation, for an event that perhaps could be defined as the breaking of the icon, that could lead us to confront painfully the perception of the negated objects, that only the intention of the artist can remove from their everyday 'con-fusion'". 

(Paola Sega Serra Zanetti, "Phenomenology of an aesthetic-artistic event", in Raptus, Nuovi Strumenti, 1999)
"Museophagia, lo dice il nome, significa tendenza o abitudine a consumare i musei. È qualcosa che Internet sta cominciando a fare proprio ora, o almeno si appresta ad assaggiarne alcuni bocconcini. La prima prova di museofagia, in effetti una specie di bulimia digitale, è stato il tentativo di Bill Gates, attraverso una società chiamata Corbys, di inghiottire, con la scansione e la digitalizzazione, tutto il contenuto dei musei e delle gallerie ritenuti adatti, per poi restituirlo in linea, a pagamento naturalmente, su reti private. 
Il progetto Museophagia, il website e l'argomento di questo libro, hanno ambizioni più modeste di quelle di Bill Gates. Essi pretendono di consumare, attraverso la digitalizzazione, soltanto gli oggetti (arredi, infissi ecc.) prelevati da Maurizio Bolognini in gallerie d'arte di diverse città, che egli ha raggiunto compiendo un giro del mondo, iniziato dalla galleria della Fondazione Cavellini. Gioco corretto..." 

(Derrick de Kerckhove, "Museophagia - La galleria d'arte nell'epoca della sua riproducibilità digitale", in Raptus, Nuovi Strumenti, 1999)

"Le merci inattuali vanno riciclate. Quale migliore ri-utilizzo che la creazione di una camera delle meraviglie itinerante come quella che ci propone Bolognini, reduce da pellegrinaggi in terre esotiche, ricco di oggetti omologati dal commercio globale: estintori, sedie, block-notes... Siamo in trepida e meravigliata attesa dell’evento, che forse potremmo definire di sfondamento dell’icona, che ci fa dolorosamente affrontare la percezione degli oggetti negati, che solo l’intenzionalità dell’artista strappa alla quotidiana 'con-fusione'."

(Paola Sega Serra Zanetti, "Fenomenologia di un evento estetico-artistico", in Raptus, Nuovi Strumenti, 1999)

"This work was not about the globalization of art but took it as its background, implying an overall satellite view of the exhibition system." 
(Maurizio Bolognini,
Art and globalization)

"When I stand before a work by Maurizio Bolognini I feel: [...] contrary to the conviction of what one would call the de-subjectivised, de-passionalised ambit of this post-electronic age, I feel. I see as in a flash the gesture carried out around that time of showing the unshowable, as in the exhibitions le vide and le plein held in Paris at the Gallerie Iris Clert by artists who still thought that the product and not the concept represented the great future challenge. [...]  Bolognini, on the other hand, who also thinks of the present world - techno-productive, hard and soft - works at a 'decisional' level. He is 'political'. He handles machines, software, contexts, constituting a paradoxical pattern of 'modes of use', and only at the end (at the end of the decision and once the action has been made) will he perhaps clarify or give a glimpse of the non-sense that belongs as much to the work as to the appointed place."
(Simonetta Lux,
Silently and blindly)




participating galleries/gallerie:

About Studio,, Bangkok; Archivio Cavellini,, Brescia; Archivio Gualco, Genova; CACTicino,, Bellinzona; Galerie Air de Paris, Paris; Galleria Neon, Bologna; Galleria Cortese,  Milano; Galleria Leonardi V-idea, Genova; Galleria Minini,,Brescia; Galleria Persano, Torino; Sandra Gering Gallery, New York; Gitte Weise Gallery, Sydney; Jennjoy Gallery, San Francisco; Musée Gauguin, Papeari, Tahiti; Bunkier Sztuki, Kracow; Studio Morra, Napoli; Telles Fine Arts, Los Angeles


 
 
 Galleria Cavellini, 1998                                   

 

shows/mostre:

Palazzo Ducale
, Genova, Genova 
Galleria Cavellini
, Brescia
Galleria Neon, Bolognaa

sponsored by:

Archivio Cavellini, Brescia

 




 

 

 

 

 

 

   


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