Francesco Urbano Ragazzi. Making Re-Reality Manifest

A conversation with curators Francesco Urbano Ragazzi

Hillary Clinton’s visit to Kenneth Goldsmith’s HILLARY: The Hillary Clinton Emails, curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, exhibition view, © Giorgio De Vecchi. Gerda Studio 2019

Francesco Urbano Ragazzi is a curatorial duo formed in 2005, whose research focuses on redefining the commission and the theoretical foundation of the work of art in the age of Internet and connectivity. In 2015, during the Venice Biennale, they curated The Internet Saga, an exhibition of work by Jonas Mekas. The same project evolved into a platform for research and exhibitions. Francesco Urbano Ragazzi curated exhibitions and research programs for institutions such as MMCA – Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Korea (Seoul), ISCP – International Studio and Curatorial Program (New York), CRRI – Castello di Rivoli (Turin), Institut Français, Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris), Ruya Foundation (Baghdad), Emirates Foundation (Abu Dhabi), Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation (Venice), Boston University (US).

For the exhibition HILLARY: The Hillary Clinton Emails at Despar Teatro Italia in Venice – open in conjunction with the 58th Venice Biennale – Francesco Urbano Ragazzi collaborated with award-winning artist and poet Kenneth Goldsmith to show the famous 60,000 Hillary Clinton emails that resulted in the scandal that helped Donald Trump win the 2016 US presidential election. These emails were never shown publicly before, even though they were available on WikiLeaks and the US State Department website. For the exhibition, the Despar Teatro Italia – a Despar supermarket located inside an early twentieth-century theater – changed its face to host different showcases: a cinema screen with daily projections of UbuWeb content; a low-fi replica of the Oval Office, where the public can meet the mountain made of print-outs of the 60,000 Hillary Clinton emails; an archive where the same documents can be consulted; a selection of 200 Hillary Clinton emails edited for the occasion and printed in a publication by Nero Editions.

Kenneth Goldsmith, HILLARY: The Hillary Clinton Emails, curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, exhibition view, © Giorgio De Vecchi. Gerda Studio 2019

MARCO ANTELMI: It seems like you wanted to focus on a theme of public interest that had been lying beneath the surface since 2016 in order to reveal it, to make it manifest and monumental at once. Can you tell us more about this triggering process?

FRANCESCO URBANO RAGAZZI: Regarding Kenneth Goldsmith’s HILLARY, back in 2016 the starting materials had a media coverage that produced a huge mass of rumors and opinions, but the real content remained unknown and phantasmagoric in its informational component. In this way, the event was overloaded with opinions and under-representative of facts. What we did with Kenneth Goldsmith was to bring the scandal back to the documents that originated it and to reopen the discourse to new forms of narration. But this process of “making manifest” is something that can be applied to a lot of things. We already faced other taboo exhibitions, because the materials we wanted to show were frightening, since they contained elements of self-censorship that had communicative potential, but we decided to overturn this self-censorship status. For instance, we did the same with the III Internet Pavilion for the 55th Venice Biennale, when Mother Longhitano celebrated mass for the “unconnected” – all the people who never used emails or social network accounts – while Miltos Manetas was VJing. We wanted to recreate a field of interest around something that had reason for being.

Kenneth Goldsmith, HILLARY: The Hillary Clinton Emails, curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, exhibition view, © Giorgio De Vecchi. Gerda Studio 2019

MA: Before HILLARY, you had already invaded other Normal People Places (as Jonas Mekas would define them), for instance, The Internet Saga exhibition at a Burger King restaurant during the 56th Venice Biennale. On that occasion, Jonas Mekas’ videos about public and private life were played on screens that usually show advertisement. How do you manage to use those places in a brutal way and, at the same time, avoid being corporatist?

FFUR: We neither want to brutalize these places nor we want to be corporatist. What we want is to activate a system of thought: if Despar produces videos about the exhibition – and this actually happened – we are only happy, because our aim is not to determine the narration of a project, but that others produce their own narratives, whether or not they’re similar to ours. For this reason, we seek a collective dimension where alterity can reach extreme levels. When Fox News aired a news broadcast about Hillary Clinton’s visit to the HILLARY exhibition, they managed the event, channeling it into a right-wing American discourse – but this is totally fine, since our aim is to generate narratives and cast attention on their grammar. The same happened with Jonas Mekas at Burger King, when – in line with the artist’s idea of poetry – we showed the video diary he had been editing online since 2007.

MA: So we could say that, more than brutalizing places, you instrumentalize exhibitions.

FFUR: Yes, instrumentalizing exhibitions means that we shouldn’t protect the integrity of an artwork at all costs, rather we should shake it and push it to a limit it hasn’t reached yet. The artwork doesn’t have to be a taboo, as well as its relationship with reality: for instance, the low-res videos taken from UbuWeb and screened in the Despar supermarket cannot be considered as brutalization, but as a new and unseen development that resonates with the characteristics of that peculiar exhibition space. In the same way, Jonas Mekas’ The Internet Saga at Burger King was inspired by some central scenes of the cyberpunk cult movie Decoder. In that case, the violent aspect of the movie was overtaken by the poetical nature of Mekas’ artworks: the windows of the fast-food restaurant were covered with stills from Mekas’ films that gave the place a cathedral atmosphere – the artwork was, in this way, dirtied by reality, and yet potentiated by this juxtaposition.

Kenneth Goldsmith, HILLARY: The Hillary Clinton Emails, curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, exhibition view, © Giorgio De Vecchi. Gerda Studio 2019

MA: Hillary Clinton’s visit to the exhibition, reading her own emails and sitting at a replica of the Oval Office desk in front of international TV broadcasts, has been accused of propaganda and of making fun of the United States. But how would you define this event, which I consider more as a media short-circuit?

FFUR: We may name this kind of event, and all the consequences that it carries within, as Re-Reality. Re-Reality can be described as reality that becomes surreal by repeating itself; it’s a sort of lucid dream. We wouldn’t like to determine this concept a priori, but as an applied one. The repetition of reality is like a stutter, it makes itself vaguely surreal, but without mystification: it is what it is. Our aim is to produce the realness of the real, to build traps for reality. We don’t give a value judgement on operations and on consumers. If in a supermarket or in a fast-food restaurant or in a church someone stumbles in the real and feels even a little vertigo, then this means the project is working.

Hillary Clinton and Francesco Urbano Ragazzi at Kenneth Goldsmith’s HILLARY: The Hillary Clinton Emails, curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, exhibition view, © Giorgio De Vecchi. Gerda Studio 2019

MA: It is also true that you collaborated for two times with Miltos Manetas for the Internet Pavilion during the Venice Biennale, and that you try to give the Internet a different dimension, passing from the virtual vs. physical one to a temporal one. Do you think that the Internet can be considered a field of human knowledge, and not only a media environment? Why?

FFUR: The separation between humans and the Internet is no more conceivable. I will answer you with a story that happened during the second Internet Pavilion project in 2011, the BYOB edition. We were with Miltos on a small island of the Venice lagoon, where there was a basketball court. Miltos told us that the court was the old Internet: you go inside, you play and then you come out. While the new Internet is ubiquitous, it’s our form of life. Another important concept is that of co-reality, as we constantly move in environments driven by the frames that communication enterprises design. We live in an embedded era and this has to be scaled up when we talk about public spaces, where brands, thoughts and policies coexist.

Kenneth Goldsmith, HILLARY: The Hillary Clinton Emails, curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, exhibition view, © Giorgio De Vecchi. Gerda Studio 2019

MA: You are vice-president and archive director of The Church of Chiara Fumai; furthermore, you are going to show the first retrospective of this artist at the Contemporary Art Center in Geneve, at the Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato, at La Casa Encendida in Madrid, and at Kiosk Gallery in Ghent. How do you consider the archive in general, and the act of archiving?

FFUR: The archive is one of the foundational spaces of re-reality. It is a starting point where we live: the Internet itself is an archive, we are constantly inside of it – being it a library or a hypertext, it changes little. What we try to do is to set the data that we transmit each other. For instance, it is easy to notice that, in the supermarket of the HILLARY project, even the food products are arranged as books in a library. What we do as curators is to reify the archival dimension that already exists in our minds and in our pockets. As humans, we don’t want to remember anymore, memories are delegated to machines, for when they are needed. This is why we consider the archive foundational of how we live reality.

HILLARY: The Hillary Clinton Emails by Kenneth Goldsmith, curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, is at Despar Teatro Italia, Venice through November 24th, 2019.

Kenneth Goldsmith, HILLARY: The Hillary Clinton Emails, curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, exhibition view, © Giorgio De Vecchi. Gerda Studio 2019