Inanimate objects to which we turn as though they were alive, opaque interfaces that demand our kowtowing transparency in return, algorithms that know us in our deepest intimacy, even better than those who love us: how can we test total freedom in the absence of free will? Automation is colonising the world of dreams, technology is part and parcel of the organic sphere and we accept simulation pending our being replaced for good, or: we trust in the emancipating potential of art and we invent a subjective technology, calling it a work of art. Through in-house presentations, group exercises and the in-depth analysis of Riccardo Benassi’s most recent works, the theoretical/practical workshop will play out around the role, function and position of the body in the face of imitative technological systems in an effort to envisage and cultivate installation environments, media-sculptures and performance spaces devised to allow the event – ‘that which is unpredictable’ – to continue happening.
Riccardo Benassi (Cremona, 1982) lives and works in Cremona, Berlin and On line. Benassi is a poet with a multidisciplinary approach whose practice is based chiefly on the media of language, he reflects on the impact of technologies on our everyday relationship with space and with people and on how they have radically altered our living structures and our organisation of reality from architecture to politics, as well as the way we produce and consume culture. His work has recently been shown at the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement (2021), MoCA Taipei (2021), Museion Bolzano (2021), ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medien Karlsruhe (2020), Santarcangelo dei Teatri Festival (2020), Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (2019), Fondazione ICA, Milan (2019), Galleria ZERO... (2019) and the Künstlerhaus Bethanien Berlin (2016). He has been lecturing in Sound Design at the Accademia di Belle Arti Carrara in Bergamo since 2013, from 2014 to 2016 he lectured in Creative Practices at the dBs College in Berlin and since 2019 he has been Guest Lecturer at the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti - NABA in Milan. He has published Lettere dal sedile del passeggero quando nessuno è al volante (Mousse Publishing 2010), Briefly, Ballare (Danilo Montanari 2012), Attimi Fondamentali (Mousse Publishing 2012), Techno Casa (Errant Bodies 2015), Sicilia Bambaataa (NERO Publishing 2015) and Morestalgia (NERO Editions 2020).
www.riccardobenassi.info