Droste Effect magazine launch in New York City

Droste Effect is pleased to present its magazine for the first time in New York.

The Bolognese-based magazine founded in 2013 in Italy focuses its research on independent and original artistic practices. The magazine features site-specific artworks – unpublished projects, expressly thought for the paper format.

For each presentation Droste Effect Magazine is accompanied by an artist presenting their work and their own art practices. For New York, Droste Effect Magazine presents Nico Angiuli’s video series “The Tools’ Dance.”

Droste Effect magazine launch
+The Tools’ Dance by Nico Angiuli
+Matilde Soligno‘s photography artist book presentation

Come for drinks and more on
Fri, September 27, 2013 from 7 to 9 pm

NOoSPHERE Arts
251 East Houston St.
New York, NYC 10002
no-in-nyc.org

Facebook event: Droste Effect magazine launch in New York City

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CLICK HERE TO SEE THE EVENT’S PHOTO GALLERY

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THE TOOLS’ DANCE by Nico Angiuli
Towards an agricultural gestures video-archive

The tools’ dance is a project dating back in 2009 thanks to the support of Venice’s Fondazione Claudio Buziol, which was the first to believe in the validity of this research.
The video-archive form has been conceived to give back – as a poor dance – the major crops’ agricultural gestures in Western Society: starting from salt to grain, tobacco, rice, grapes, etc.
The approach to these cultures – retracing the technical and technological development of rural, industrial and post-industrial societies – wants to define which tools or machines have been so important for the work in the fields to sign some kind of profound turning point.
Abandoning the hoe for the tractor is not just a posture modification in the human body: the machine – in its innovative meaning – implies a morphological change of the territory that affects new social dynamics. For example, the Piedmont’s rice-keepers have been replaced by Chinese women and by combine harvesters.
It is necessary though to observe the mechanization outside of the technical approach and inside some wider brackets.
For these reasons, The tools’ dance is slowly enclosing some questions not exquisitely bonded to the body in movement.
In 2011, during public art festival “Par coii bsogna semnà,” the project investigated the work in rice fields; including the “local” agricultural community, from farmers to experts and machine producers for the mechanization process of production.
Furthermore, Angiuli imagined a first sagra – a typical Italian folkloristic festival – for Chinese rice-keepers working and living in Piedmont.

In 2012, the project arrived in Spain, at La Fragua artist residency, in order to activate a new laboratory on the olives’ gestuality in Andalusia.
Later on, Angiuli went to Murcia region, hosted by Centro Negra AADK, to work on the video-archivation of the grapes’ gestures.
Angiuli will operate on a land characterized by a strong immigration with a productivist matrix, very well resumed in the expression ‘deseados però no bienvenidos,’ which synthesizes the relationship between the migrant community and the locals: a minimal relationship, expressed exclusively inside the fields of work, beyond which their presence becomes ephemeral for different reasons.
In Murcia, Angiuli wanted to include the Maghreb community that works and lives in Blanca.
Together they have performed the grapes’ gestures and sublimed their presence beyond working reasons.

The tools’ dance will continue in Italy – in Foggia’s hamlets – to investigate the tomatoes’ land in collaboration with Vessel.
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Nico Angiuli was born in Italy in 1981. His education included laboratories and workshops with Francesco Vezzoli, Olaf Nicolai, Antoni Muntadas, Tania Bruguera.He has developed projects with Cesare Pietroiusti, Stalker / ON, Apulia Film Commission.
He’s one of the founders of multidisciplinary collective Ilmotorediricerca, which has developed projects between Italy, Albania, and Greece.
In 2012 he finished the year as artist in residence at the ateliers of Venice’s Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, chaired by Angela Vettese. In 2011, he was selected as a finalist in Italian prize Premio Lum.In 2010 he received an award from Venice’s Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa for his artwork Incarnatio duabus rotis rotatis #2, a project about the unfinished artworks of Italian artist Pino Pascali.
“Starting from personal needs, I am getting interested in how labor is collectively affirmed. The labor definition that I know is not even the Marxist one – the single’s contribution for a collective purpose – but the possibility to combine one’s own needs and wishes with the need to survive and to self-determinate. The labor division principle cancels every creative relationship between thought and action; the insane fruit of this practice has the sour flavor of the few free hours one has left for one’s own hobbies. Today, more than ever, it is fair and necessary for the common good to think about how to find balance, based on the relationship between ourselves and the community, in order to avoid to look like a primitive homo sapiens with an axe in their hand, going hunting and killing for survival.”