Always Becoming: Malmö – Alessandro Carboni visiting artist

Alessandro Carboni is an interdisciplinary artist whose projects explore the relationships between body and space. From May to September, Carboni will explore the city of Malmö through performative practices of urban mapping.

Always Becoming #Malmo

– Tools for urban mapping and performance practice

Photo credit: Alessandro Carboni

Photo credit: Alessandro Carboni

Text: Alessandro Carboni, artist-in-residence in the Living Archives project, May to September 2015.

The Always Becoming project applies artistic practice to the research and development of the Em:toolkit – tools for urban mapping and performance practices. As a performance artist, I have always been interested in exploring the complex relationships between body and space. My performances are mappings that represent places that I reshape and weave according to the different stages stimulated by specific urban environments such as urban rivers, old villages and local communities. The materials and collected data, produced during the long periods of exploration in selected urban areas, are accumulated in an archive that is transformed into visual works and body performances.

The basis of this research refers on one hand to my experiences as an artist, on the other hand to theoretical studies and materials investigated during the development of this project. The intention is to combine both in a syncretic and extended theoretical and practical project.

In Malmö I will explore some areas of the city; mapping the urban space with my body by applying the Em:toolkit, a system that aims to encourage people to observe and interpret ’events’ that happen in real­-time in the urban space. The toolkit enables ‘map-­makers’ to reveal those ‘events’ that already exist in the urban space, but which we are not fully aware of because they are at the periphery of our attention. The toolkit suggests that these ‘events’ are just waiting to be discovered and, therefore, the work of the mapping process is to reveal them and activate what would otherwise be latent. The toolkit proposes a series of steps that include observation, analysis, and extraction to embody those events and perform them as body-­action. I consider it as map.

By collecting ‘events’ – that is, situations and rhythms of the city of Malmö – my body becomes a ‘sampler’ able to record and play my actions and experiences in the urban space. The aim of the mapping practice as an embodiment process is to create a series of body­-action, as urban interventions, and reenact them as performative scores. The performance, as cartography process, will be a display: a kind of embodied map – the subjective map of the urban space. The body-action are documented and presented in the form of video and live performance.

Activities

Research – May to September 2015
Urban mappings and research around Malmö.

Performance – 5 June 2015
‘Being in here, in what will no longer be’, at the From Soil to Structure event, Malmö.

Talk and discussion – 8 June 2015 (10–12 AM at K3)
An introduction to my recent investigations in urban mapping, the body, critical cartography and complexity. The presentation is an opportunity to meet practitioners, people and researchers to share ideas and open a discussion on the body, urban mapping practices, cartography and creative processes.

NB! Postponed until September, 2015
Workshop – 9–11 June 2015 (2–6 PM at K3)
Em:toolkit: tools for urban mapping and performance practices.
The aim of the workshop is to explore the city of Malmö with alternative performative practices of urban mapping. Learn more about this workshop.

Biography
Alessandro Carboni is an interdisciplinary artist whose projects explore relationships between body and space. His projects have been displayed, performed and situated in many countries across Asia, Europe and USA. He is currently a PhD candidate at the School of Creative Media, City University, Hong Kong. Carboni is an independent artist based in Hong Kong and Sardinia, Italy.

» Carboni’s website

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