Attiva Cultural Projects is pleased to announce the sixth appointment of “Shop”, a project by the damp collective co-curated by Martina Campese, which also enjoys the patronage of the city of Portici. Until the April 14, 2024 inside the shop window in via Bellucci Sessa, 23, the project will be exhibited Calixto Ramirez, “Postering prohibited”.
Calixto Ramírez’s research takes shape in impromptu interventions in public space with which the artist plays, letting himself be inspired by what he sees. The resulting images can have a poetic, political, humorous charge, or simple formal solutions. In Vietata l’affissione, the artist is busy keeping himself attached to a wall where it is forbidden to place anything. Placed inside a showcase – a place designated for exhibition – the image creates a short circuit and a game of spatial and symbolic superimpositions. On the one hand, the artist’s body contravenes the rules imposed in the public space by self-promoting itself in a forbidden context, on the other, it cancels those of the shop window, claiming the space (and itself) as useless, unusable from the perspective of productivist economy.
The exhibition showcase in which the exhibition program comes to life interfaces directly with the market area of the city and – like the surrounding shops – will display the works of the artists involved during the annual exhibition project, to declare their absolute uselessness.
The different exhibitions are inserted in a context closely linked to the concept of profit without declaring their presence through inaugural events. The showcase, from time to time, is set up to interact naturally with an audience mainly of “non-professionals”.
“Neither an improving infrastructure nor a source of visual relief: we experience “the usefulness of the useless” by declaring ourselves as such in front of an audience, without however having the claim to be listened to.
Shop does not respond to a need, does not propose solutions, does not intend to innovate or build.
Shopping is a way like any other to fall into unsolvable contradictions and abandon yourself in a supine position” (collective damp)
Calixto Ramírez was born in Reynosa, Mexico, in 1980. He has developed a relationship with movement that influences his approach to reality and determines his production of images, spaces, objects and gestures that attempt to propose new narratives. He has exhibited at the Jumex Museum, Palazzo Collicola, Museo del Novecento of Naples, Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Museo de la Cd. De México, Museo de Arte Sonora, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Tamaulipas, Fondazione Memmo, National Art Gallery of Tirana. He works with several galleries in America and Europe.… read the rest of the article”
The damp collective was born as an unintentional project in 2017 from the meeting of Alessandro Armento, Luisa de Donato, Viviana Marchiò, Adriano Ponte. The group’s research revolves around the interest in the temporary nature of things – from forms of life to ideas – and the dialogue with the specificities of places, which often leads them to work in artistic residency contexts: The State of the City, Rotterdam, 2020; Imprints, Lercaro Collection, Bologna, 2020; Fabra i Coats – Fabrica de Creació de Barcelona, 2022; Kóinotes, Casa degli Artisti, Milan, 2023. In 2023 the collective launched Negozio, an artistic work in the form of a project space, in which it aims to dedicate, within the market area of Portici (NA), a space for the useless.
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