dorismaninger

‘Can’t avoid beauty 30×60’
my new project produced by ‘Giardino delle Esperidi, Festival’

CONCEPT

A carpet-collage by definition a work in progress, links together continuous changes and transformations. Colors, drawings, and motifs that each have strong “individual” characteristics and when added to each other create a new, formal and aesthetic entity.
Creation of beauty through beauty: It’s the union that which “forms” beauty through the harmonization of every single piece, at the same time irreplaceable (no one is the same) and  interchangeable. There are no protagonists, because everyone is a main player and there are no “stars” because “the star” is the unification.

In realities (places) that may have lost the sense of “being together”, solidarity (internal, not only towards the “other”), the common good of this project aims to indicate the possibility of new routes or strategies to recover the deep (not just altruistic) reasons of “social” living. It is a common work to link communities, groups, and associations. In numerical terms, the expected result can be condensed into a formula:

1 + 1 = 3    1,000 + 1,000 = ∞ (Basics of fantastic math).

THE MISSION

In short, the work, participatory art and collective aesthetic emotions, seeks to get one or more communities, stable or temporary (or a mix of the two), to gain awareness of the magnificence deriving from collective work.
A”collaboration”, among other things, realized with the simplest and poorest means one can imagine (30 * 60 cm cotton fabrics, fabric colors, and potatoes).

A “whole” that needs the participation of everyone to change scale and acquire a higher sense, conceptual and formal, which shows and contains the contribution of each individual participant, but in which individuality disappears and blends together to form a new essence.

Very simply but, hopefully, powerfully something beautiful, where everyone is present within a process and a “frame” of basic rules (size of the cloth, choice of colors, sewing mode).

The result of this operation, which will be beautiful almost by force, should show everyone that collective creation without competition assures beauty, at the same time emphasizing diversity without exalting individual contribution.

It is not metaphor, but the actualization of what is often considered only utopia. The collective work becomes an object, which remains and can be easily preserved, being “displayed” and expanded in different places, acquiring a new form and new meaning each and every time.

In detail, the goals that will be achieved through “Can’t avoid beauty 30×60 “are:

– To stimulate a collective and manual work involving people and cooperation, “variable composition sets”, also geographically distant.

– To remember / recall the traditions of belonging (the use of fabrics, sewing, etc.), enabling them in a simple and collaborative work.

– To realize a creative work that will at the same time be “provisional” as performance and permanent by what is accomplished will remain and can be expanded.

– To create a “bridge” between different territories to read reality and its possible developments also from an outside view (in this sense, the use of textiles from Prato, which were and are still to a large extent the symbol of the most “historical” “of the district economies.  This assumes a strong symbolic value, also in function of the recent constitution of the rural district of the Middle Ionian.

– To see the need for a link between people, between each other, and urban scenarios – places, houses, or whatever constitutes the identity of a community, referring it not only to the past, but also to the present and the future.

Last but not least, the use an iconic product like the potato also a symbol of migration, adaptation and transformation…

PERFORMANCE

The project is divided into three phases:

1. On site and “itinerant” workshops will take place in schools/ institutions, with associations, festivals or cultural events, where all the materials needed for the creation of individual panels (30 * 60 cm in size) will be provided by the organizers.
2. Subsequently the panels will be assembled and sewn to form one single sheet. It will always be possible to extend the sheet, replicating the action (in new contexts and occasions in physical terms and “sense”).

3) The work will be “shown” and performed in particular locations and events.

The project will soon get its own blog, telling the stories of each encounter and the making of the cloth