The theory of "collective communication is still the starting point for many artists, who want to develop a reflection about the role and functions of the public sphere in modern society. It can be defined as a theory of media, because of its analysis, interpretation and evaluation of the concept of common information and dissemination of knowledge. To a first approximation, we can say that the public sphere, as we know it today is a product essentially modern, and the basic idea is that it was born and grew with the strengthening of representative institutions and the evolution of the concept of public.
This issue has completely collapsed in recent years, thanks to the emerging process of globalization. In fact, on these points, there is general agreement! According to the present political and cultural situation, we believe that is perhaps the case of going back - without nostalgia - to the history of the Greek polis. The Polis was organized in a way that structural inequalities were not evident at the level of political participation and it was based on a clear separation between the political and private sphere. There was an almost total absence of individual rights: the citizen could participate and discuss common problems, but only to the extent which did not problematize the polis as the only model of community and not put into question the supremacy of the same. To do this we need a democratic institution occurring only with the advent of modernity, the right of individual freedom (Arendt). The Polis has certainly teached with valuable authority on current conceptions of democracy, especially because of the normative core that characterizes it, that is equality as reciprocity (Arendt, Habermas). From these considerations, we might hazard a guess, therefore, less rigid: that one considering the public sphere not as a modern product but rather as the result of a slow process begun in the Greek city-states, a model that had its maximum expressions in modern times.
The concept of public sphere linked to artistic action is therefore complex. As Hannah Arendt points out, the public sphere is based on the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives and aspects in which the common world is offered, and it can not be found nor a common measure nor a common denominator (Arendt). But in the face of public art intervention " Interrupted landscapes " - what good is an analysis of the "common good" and his current political situation? It is good for connecting the current contradictions of the polis with the conflicts of political ecology. The work of Voyagerlab, developed five years ago against the API refinery makes use of 6x3 mt advertising posters bearing an image and a traditional proverb that build an interactive setting.
Let's say that, although with great difficulty, nowdays Italian and Europian experiences of public art are those which had inherited a greater degree of the investigations, labeled as art politically engaged and in action against the environmental capitalist ideology. Public art has left a mark that has now swept into a kind of experience and post-conceptual art as social participation.
And then, in the policies of the polis, where are our Voyagerlab? They are among those who, coming from cultural practices more properly "medial" (in the true sense of the public and easy to communicate), believe that the easily communicative is a sort of self-management more spontaneous and direct.
Looking to take the work out of any domestic space, and having to act beyond the lib / lab or Republican ideology of the polis, Voyagerlab assembled three stuctrures coated on all sides by panels: along the long sides they put up posters sized 6 x 3 mt, while the shorter sides of the panels exposed explanatory texts of the project. This system receives a very precise design logic. This installation encourages direct interaction with the public, following an indication that tends to settle in a rather unlinear way the objects of communication. "Interrupted landscapes", with its type of placement, equals to a billboard advertising in urban space.
By twelve posters, in the fullest sense of the word, Voyagerlab try to tell the Esino river as an important landmark of the natural environment, no longer integrated into the life of those living there. The project started in the suburb of Villanova Falconara, a discontinuous and uneven urban area, with the intention of trying to mend a speech on environmental qualities of the original places. Voyagerlab searched Esino river memories that the progressive industrial actions have cleared, making it dumb. Voyagerlab remain fascinated in history and resources of the river and acted a valuable environmental reconnaissance, bending the instrument of public art into a medium of civil dispute.
Voyagerlab components have formed that opposition using, as a communication tool splinters and fragments of local proverbs. The proverb is the voice of tradition and returns the word, if not the river, at least to his old relationship with humanity that has gone through. The artists intent, probably putting pressure on a trend in recent years occurred between cultural studies, is challenging the ideological proposal of the capitalist who wants to affirm that after the globalization is no longer possible any anthropology or folklore reconsideration. Whereas conversely considering Arjun Appadurai's analysis of diasporic communities ( and so against the the banal concept of "multitude" ) Voyagerlab switchs from the effects of relocation to the reconfiguration of public space. Accordin to Voyagerlab the proverb is a common place, "significant extention" where people find themselves rediscovering the sense of belonging and the ability to inhabit an environment. Even the posters go beyond the graphics and advertising experience, yet considering it as a necessary tool of communication, they become the inner landscape on which the figures are supported, policies and forms that evoke new interpretations. Voyagerlab basic premise is that the artistic experience, not just as a purely decorative intervention designed for entertainment, may prove to be a useful aid to the "modification" of the shared territory, a first step towards the enhancement of 'identity of place and sense of belonging. Personal involvement, relationship and contents delivery trough a true process, not based on the idea of fictional (how true is the plight of the river Esino) need to go beyond the instrument of denunciation. The two artists from Marche have chosen a river, that river to its real value, that becomes social and metaphorical, and the ratio of choice with their own region and country.
In a country where, especially in the attention to the environment, the "progressive project" has been subjected to speculation and ideological disasters of all kinds, the role of public art goes beyond the experience resulted from Beuys' die Grun, here, the need to continue the ecological discourse is celebrated by a poetic "water road" that runs through the city and connects it to the villages surrounding hills. Voyagerlab chose processuality implicit in the production of the Nature itself as to build self-management and autonomy of their own time.
Turning to another famous local intellectual resource, Giacomo Leopardi in The calm after the storm, we could almost say that the Esino and his life are waiting for that "... the peaceful / breaks from the west to the mountains; / clearing the campaign, / and clear in valley the river appears. / (Canti, 1-7).
installazion view. Jesi august 2009