DRAFTSMEN’S FEST #3 – I’M HOT by Dennis Tyfus vs Canedicoda – 03/05/2013, ISR_Milano
I’M HOT by DENNIS TYFUS vs CANEDICODA
Dennis Tyfus and Canedicoda present I’M HOT, an evening-event featuring a completely original display created by the two artists and musicians, whose alter egos – Vom Grill and Ottaven – enrich the visual composition with a raiment of sound.
Behind the collaboration between Tyfus and Canedicoda lies the idea of an encounter/clash that alternates with moments of improvisation. By improvisation, the artists mean a spontaneous action, the effect of a “creative impulse” and a factor of “productive instinct.” The presence of an element of conflict with pre-set limits is a fundamental condition, in their view, to achieve a given result in the course of such extemporaneous situations.
In the title I’M HOT there is a clear reference to the erotic lines of the 1990s, but this can also be interpreted as the process of identification with an impulse. In the imagery and sound performance of 3 May it is possible to see an approach to gesture and meaning based on a certain idea of the instant, of personal experiences of research, practice and work, concrete and at the same time improvised.
For Tyfus and Canedicoda visual art is closely connected to the musical sphere. For both, there is a strong component of doubling, in which different personalities coexist: Tyfus and Canedicoda cover the black acrylic wall; their alter egos Vom Grill and Ottaven provide the sound to accompany the visuals. Vom Grill uses vocals, tapes and minimal effects. Ottaven uses an analog drum machine and a digital device.
The live set includes moments of overlap and others of single source. It is not possible to set a precise time limit.
Starting with drawing, Giovanni Donadini (Treviso, 1979) alias Canedicoda mixes art, music, fashion and the creation of environments with interest in manual practices stemming from research on materials and products. Since 2003 he has worked with leading fashion companies and international brands. Under the pseudonym Ottaven, Canedicoda is also active in the field of music, conducting research on sound and the body as a medium of expression of actions and situations caused by music, through repetitive and performative gestures. He lives and works in Milan, where he co-manages the concept store Gabbianacci.
Dennis Tyfus (Antwerp, 1979) is an artist and musician. He works with drawing, wall painting and video. His sound works are inspired by noise and experimental precedents, the European art avant-gardes (Viennese Actionism, Fluxus) and, in particular, the Belgian sound avant-garde. Since 2004 his label Ultra Eczema Records has been a reference point for the European underground. With the pseudonym Vom Grill he will present a new music project in which he interacts with Ottaven, also including collaboration on the display. Tyfus also works with drawing, painting, photography and video. Besides producing records and CDs with Eczema Records, Tyfus produces books and magazines, and has a radio show on Belgium’s Radio Centraal.
DRAFTSMEN’S FEST
The Draftsmen’s Fest is a display in progress that associates drawing – seen as direct gestural expression – with the production of sound. During each of the 4 events of the program in Milan, projects will be presented by Swiss and international artists and musicians, specially developed for the Swiss Institute in Milan.
The Draftsmen’s Fest examines the syncretic relationship between drawn imagery and sound, with particular focus on the intimate, confidential rapport that happens when the spectator is engaged in a frontal way: in a literal sense, and as a metaphor of the immediate impact the sound/image pairing can bring about. The artists and musicians invited to participate return to a practice that puts sound and sign into direct relation, full of mutual exchanges and references. This practice comes from a shared source of inspiration, namely the so-called Providence school and the successive episodes in the late 1990s and early 2000s of what was to become the symbolic place of a transnational movement, from the East Coast to the West Coast, Canada and Europe, by way of Japan: Fort Thunder, an abandoned industrial complex in Providence (Rhode Island, USA), occupied until 2001 by avant-garde musicians and artists, including Brian Ralph, Jim Drain, Brian Gibson and Brian Chippendale of Lighting Bolt, and Hisham Akira Bharoocha of Black Dice.
Artists who straddle the settings, places, persons and project that, over time, have consolidated on the international cultural scene: starting with this scenario, Draftsmen’s Fest attempts to reveal a precise expressive hemisphere, occupying the spaces of the Swiss Institute in Milan with sound and signs.
Curators
Francesco de Figueiredo is the Art Director of Nero, a magazine of contemporary culture and a publishing house specializing in artists’ books, of which he is co-founder. With Valerio Mattioli, he is part of the music project “Heroin in Tahiti,” begun in Rome in 2010.
Massimiliano Bomba is an artist who works with video and installation. In 2006 he founded RAWRAW Edizioni, a publishing project for contemporary art. Since 2009, together with Francesco de Figueiredo and Valerio Mattioli, he has worked on the graphics and production of Rainforest, a music project and series of artists’ publications, which began in Rome in 2008. He lives and works in Milan and Rome.
Media partner
NERO
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DRAFTSMEN’S FEST #2 – Lorenzo Bernet feat. Jan Vorisek – 19/04/2013, ISR_Milano
LORENZO BERNET feat. JAN VORISEK
For the second appointment, Lorenzo Bernet and Jan Vorisek present a site-specific work at the Swiss Institute in Milan, the result of shared research conducted amidst cables, looped recordings, drawings and live sounds.
Starting with a shared practice that finds expression in the more specifically gestural aspects typical of drawing (Bernet) and musical improv (Vorisek), the two Swiss artists, here for the first time together, have worked on the concept of exchange. Getting beyond the mere figurative representation of a sound score in imagery, the collaboration at the Swiss Institute focuses on the ways of translating digital sound tools – sampling, remixing and field recordings – into visual forms, and vice versa.
The result is an open device: drawing, overlaid on the surface of the display, and soundscape produce a space in which distinct moments, like the phase of production and the phase of reception, can meet.
Lorenzo Bernet (Zurich, 1986) is completing a MA at ZHdK (Zürcher Hochschule der Künste). His work analyzes work methods in systems of creative economies through the use of different media. His most recent exhibitions include the project “Distrattenzione, Online Performance & Edition” for www.no-floor.com; the solo shows “Twenty Something in Europe”, Pleasant, Copenhagen; “Regiopark – Studiolo Furniture” (with Yannic Joray), Kunsthalle Palazzo, Liestal, Switzerland.
Jan Vorisek (Zurich, 1987) studied photography at ZHdK. He works with sound and image through the production of materials that start with the relationship with space, which the artist presents in different formats like exhibitions, performances and events. More recently, he has shown in alternative and institutional spaces, like the Kunsthalle Zürich (with Emanuel Rossetti and Flavio Merlo) and APNews in Zurich. He has participated in group shows at Kunsthalle Bern and Kunsthalle Charlottenborg, Denmark. Vorisek is one of the founders and DJ in residence of the club H.O.M.E. (House Of Mixed Emotions) in Zurich (with Mathis Altmann and Lhaga Khoondor).
DRAFTSMEN’S FEST
The Draftsmen’s Fest is a display in progress that associates drawing – seen as direct gestural expression – with the production of sound. During each of the 4 events of the program in Milan, projects will be presented by Swiss and international artists and musicians, specially developed for the Swiss Institute in Milan.
The Draftsmen’s Fest examines the syncretic relationship between drawn imagery and sound, with particular focus on the intimate, confidential rapport that happens when the spectator is engaged in a frontal way: in a literal sense, and as a metaphor of the immediate impact the sound/image pairing can bring about. The artists and musicians invited to participate return to a practice that puts sound and sign into direct relation, full of mutual exchanges and references. This practice comes from a shared source of inspiration, namely the so-called Providence school and the successive episodes in the late 1990s and early 2000s of what was to become the symbolic place of a transnational movement, from the East Coast to the West Coast, Canada and Europe, by way of Japan: Fort Thunder, an abandoned industrial complex in Providence (Rhode Island, USA), occupied until 2001 by avant-garde musicians and artists, including Brian Ralph, Jim Drain, Brian Gibson and Brian Chippendale of Lighting Bolt, and Hisham Akira Bharoocha of Black Dice.
Artists who straddle the settings, places, persons and project that, over time, have consolidated on the international cultural scene: starting with this scenario, Draftsmen’s Fest attempts to reveal a precise expressive hemisphere, occupying the spaces of the Swiss Institute in Milan with sound and signs.
Curators
Francesco de Figueiredo is the Art Director of Nero, a magazine of contemporary culture and a publishing house specializing in artists’ books, of which he is co-founder. With Valerio Mattioli, he is part of the music project “Heroin in Tahiti,” begun in Rome in 2010.
Massimiliano Bomba is an artist who works with video and installation. In 2006 he founded RAWRAW Edizioni, a publishing project for contemporary art. Since 2009, together with Francesco de Figueiredo and Valerio Mattioli, he has worked on the graphics and production of Rainforest, a music project and series of artists’ publications, which began in Rome in 2008. He lives and works in Milan and Rome.
Media partner
NERO
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DRAFTSMEN’S FEST #1 – Giorgio di Salvo feat. Primitive Art – 28/03/2013, ISR_Milano
GIORGIO DI SALVO feat. PRIMITIVE ART
For the collaboration with Jim C. Nedd and Matteo Pit – very young protagonists of the avant-garde music scene in Milan – Giorgio Di Salvo, illustrator, musician, graphic artist and fashion designer, has worked on a display (connected with research conducted during a trip to Nepal) on archaic and primitive forms of tribal imagery: from tattoos to pre-Columbian architecture. Temples is a graphic project from 2012 in which Di Salvo gathers graphic reworkings of primordial symbols with a tribal matrix.
In this first of the four live events of the Draftsmen’s Fest, the Romagna-Colombia duo Primitive Art with establish a relationship with the display and the imagery made by Giorgio Di Salvo, through sound contaminations based on sampling of folk music from Africa, Nepal, Colombia and Italy.
Giorgio Di Salvo (Milan, 1981) has worked on hip-hop, writing and graphics since the 1990s. In 2005 he did his first collection for VNGRD, the brand where he is the creative director and a founding member. This also led to collaboration with the American brands Snafu, Rockers NYC, Actual Pain, Stussy and Fuct, the Italian brands Slam Jam and Super, and False of Singapore. He has worked as a graphic artist and illustrator for Vice Magazine, Fantom and Hunter. He is art director of the magazine STUDIO, together with Tommaso Garner.
Jim C. Nedd (Brescia, 1991) comes from Colombia and Guyana. Together with Matteo Pit (Ravenna, 1991), since 2011 he is part of Primitive Art. The “primitivisms” in question do not allude to the historic avant-gardes, but to an instinctive, tribal approach that is paradoxically related to digital cultures. Primitive Art call themselves “an Afrofuturist identity in a state of becoming,” hypnotic, linked to techno and to a precise imaginary that puts the duo in the buffer zone between the typical modes of clubbing and the visual arts.
DRAFTSMEN’S FEST
The Draftsmen’s Fest is a display in progress that associates drawing – seen as direct gestural expression – with the production of sound. During each of the 4 events of the program in Milan, projects will be presented by Swiss and international artists and musicians, specially developed for the Swiss Institute in Milan.
The Draftsmen’s Fest examines the syncretic relationship between drawn imagery and sound, with particular focus on the intimate, confidential rapport that happens when the spectator is engaged in a frontal way: in a literal sense, and as a metaphor of the immediate impact the sound/image pairing can bring about. The artists and musicians invited to participate return to a practice that puts sound and sign into direct relation, full of mutual exchanges and references. This practice comes from a shared source of inspiration, namely the so-called Providence school and the successive episodes in the late 1990s and early 2000s of what was to become the symbolic place of a transnational movement, from the East Coast to the West Coast, Canada and Europe, by way of Japan: Fort Thunder, an abandoned industrial complex in Providence (Rhode Island, USA), occupied until 2001 by avant-garde musicians and artists, including Brian Ralph, Jim Drain, Brian Gibson and Brian Chippendale of Lighting Bolt, and Hisham Akira Bharoocha of Black Dice.
Artists who straddle the settings, places, persons and project that, over time, have consolidated on the international cultural scene: starting with this scenario, Draftsmen’s Fest attempts to reveal a precise expressive hemisphere, occupying the spaces of the Swiss Institute in Milan with sound and signs.
Curators
Francesco de Figueiredo is the Art Director of Nero, a magazine of contemporary culture and a publishing house specializing in artists’ books, of which he is co-founder. With Valerio Mattioli, he is part of the music project “Heroin in Tahiti,” begun in Rome in 2010.
Massimiliano Bomba is an artist who works with video and installation. In 2006 he founded RAWRAW Edizioni, a publishing project for contemporary art. Since 2009, together with Francesco de Figueiredo and Valerio Mattioli, he has worked on the graphics and production of Rainforest, a music project and series of artists’ publications, which began in Rome in 2008. He lives and works in Milan and Rome.
Media partner
NERO
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2012 edition video
From 4 June to 20 July, in the context of the Solidarity Action undertaken by Istituto Svizzero di Roma, the Draftsmen’s Congress has been presented. The Draftsmen’s Congress has happened in Rome in the inner courtyard and exhibition space of Istituto Svizzero di Roma at Via Liguria 20, and at ESC – Atelier Autogestito – Via dei Volsci 159. Both places have been set up to create a calm, relaxing atmosphere, to promote exchange of ideas, but at the same time to trigger lively discussion. The walls and floors of the two locations – covered with white surfaces – have become the backdrop on which the participants could freely draw. Many artists, illustrators, architects, designers, street artists and other professionals have accepted our invitation to participate in the Congress. Non-professional draftsmen have been also invited. In this project the status of the author, the hierarchy determined by expertise and all types of qualification have been challenged in the unfolding of a process that attempts to illustrate excess, which as such is free and open to all.
During the months of June and July workshops and concerts have been organized, as well as gatherings conceived to generate non-verbal relations and communication between different social and cultural groups with opposing or simply different interests, beliefs and viewpoints.
Go to Draftsmen’s Congress 2012 website
2012 edition videoMore