ART, WHATEVER IT TAKES
Since the early pandemic in 2020, Rome Art Program has conducted a series of interviews, “Art, Whatever It Takes.”
Artists, Art Critics, and Art Historians living in Italy, the U.S., and U.K., share their insights during these powerful times.
Interview with Camilla Boemio
Camilla Boemio is an art writer and curator. She is a member of AICA (International Association of Arts Critics). Her recent curatorial projects include the solo show: Peter Ydeen: Easton Nights at AOC F58 Galleria Bruno Lisi, in Roma. In 2016, she was the curator of Diminished Capacity the first Nigerian Pavilion at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia; and in 2013 she was the co-deputy curator of Portable Nation. Disappearance as work in Progress – Approaches to Ecological Romanticism the Maldives Pavilion at 55th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia. In 2018, she took part in the VVM at Tate Liverpool. She lives between Roma and Collevario.
RAP: What is your definition of “art” today?
Camilla Boemio: We are living in an apocalyptic post société du spectacle. The social distancing as a cure-all to the COVID-19 pandemic proves that capitalism has created an insurmountable distance in the very notion of society itself. The pandemic situation has crystallized a new physiological need for society. It weaves a dialogue of many voices, rather than make a fixed statement, offering a wider picture of art communities, low impact ways of living, that address these issues and dilemmas. Art is a way of perceiving reality that allows us to observe and analyze in order to create a different way of showing the needs and the issues of the world. The artists are radical thinkers who use tools to intercept the microclimate, social morphology, and the aesthetical language of our time.
RAP: Art is dynamic and regenerates itself… how does it change, and how did it change us?
Camilla: Power; belief and the perception of reality are being shaped and shared in the society at large and for me this is a such a key aspect to understand how society and art are evolving.
RAP: When (and how) did you understand that art was becoming very important in your life?
Camilla: I understood that art was becoming very important in my life when I was a teenager. My best afternoon of the week was dedicated to realizing drawings in the museums of Roma, to discover the permanent collections. When I discovered Land Art; I was completely absorbed by these artists creating artworks in and with the landscape made with natural materials, including soil, rock, boulders, and trees, sometimes along with man-made materials such as concrete, metal, and asphalt. The Pilgrims Way 1971; by Hamish Fulton was fundamental for my imaginary.
RAP: What role does art play today? What are the “great figures” who have recently changed it? Do you feel close to any of these figures?
Camilla: We are living interesting time. How do we grasp the new artistic language constellations arising today? That reality is so complex is the next platform contemporary art can critically embrace. We need to imagine alternative futures. The role of art is a key figure in the culture debate. There are many great figures who have recently changed the aesthetical language, and who constantly took an active position within the society, and the community in pandemic period. For example, American artist Trevor Paglen using the archives of vernacular photography. I invited him to my After the Crash group show, at Botanical Garden of Rome, in 2011. Two artworks of The Other Night Sky were shown, a series in which the limits of vision are explored through the histories of landscape photography, abstraction, Romanticism, and technology.
Another artist is Hito Steyerl who, with the video work SocialSim created a dense commentary on the frenetic state of media consumption, the complicity of art’s privileged internationalism in the policing of national borders and gross income disparities, and the ways that machine learning interprets. Artists Catherine Opie, Todd Gray and Spencer Tunick (I presented the latter at La Festa dell’Architettura at Auditorium Parco della Musica, in Roma in 2010); emerging Alba Zari with her introspective sensibility for photography exploring social themes; the Roman artist Fabio Lattanzi Antinori working across of mediums including sculpture and interactive installations; Kara Walker is best known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes which explore race, gender, sexuality, violence, and identity; Olafur Eliasson; the Turner Price artists Abu Hamdan / Cammock / Murillo / Shani; Arthur Jafa; Isaac Julien; Tania Bruguera, a politically motivated performance artist involved in the ongoing cultural revolution in Cuba; charismatic Oliver Ressler, whom I invited into contribute to The Edge of Equilibrium volume, focuses on the importance of eco-communities in the pandemic edge.
RAP: Are there still traditional figures such as collectors, muses, mecenate and patrons, in today’s art and society interaction model?
Camilla: There are still traditional figures projected in a new world which is changing. A new international figure is the art consultant, an advisor who is like an influencer for the fashion system or for brands.
RAP: How have the new technologies and media culture changed art today, improving or worsening it…? What do you feel are your biggest challenges?
Camilla: New technologies are democratic, but their use could be despotic. Media culture engages in a sort of gossip about art, a blockbuster kingdom in which visibility is an order of Pantagruelian appetite. In this scenario it is fundamental to analyze the real change of art, the research that engages constellations of good practices, talents that are making a difference and there are signs that we are getting there.
RAP: Art as a mirror of man, in this moment of emergency seems to be shattered …what do these fragments reflect now?… Shadow or light of the moment?
Camilla: A constant drift in which light and dark alternate in a discontinuous way.
RAP: Understanding, interpreting, and then possibly judging the work of art; which is the right path when we are in front of a piece of art?
Camilla: As conceptions of art have changed, so have modes of selection. The modus agendi explores some of the constraints, tensions and hopes for the aesthetical language of a piece of art.
RAP: Which is the real role of Academies and Art schools today? What can artists learn from these institutions today?
Camilla: Today the role of Academies and Art schools are fundamental to activate political imagination, aesthetic practice, collaborative processes set out to explore the evolving professional development.
RAP: Art too has undergone a complex process of globalization; can having an authentic and genuine style be an advantage or a drag for an artist?
Camilla: Having an authentic style is very important; the capacity of transporting the viewer into their unique perception. She/he aims to inspire viewers to ask their own questions about life, time, mortality, emotions, conflicts, tensions, diaspora, political and social issues.
RAP: How do Art Galleries and Museums position themselves today, and, in your opinion, how should they?
Camilla: Museums need to display a mixture of artworks, and projects, really inclusive. A broad cross-section of art proposals developed in the program could be indigenous tribal communities, not mainstream artists, disabilities rights activists, curators, and artists involved in ecology and environmental studies.
RAP: “Figuration” vs “Abstraction”. Which of the two is better descriptive of the period we live in? Which one will have a better future?
Camilla: Forging complexity is the key. So the artist engages in this challenge of perceiving through artworks following hybrid narratives that combine different mediums and texts in mixed media installations; a combination of genres and use of technologies, and/or interaction with public spaces. Another asset is the ability to generate strategies of emancipation from temporary dictat and the fashionability of art.
RAP: Today we often speak of “emerging artists”; what advice based on your experience do you feel you can give to young artists?
Camilla: Studying through iconography and mythologies. Open dynamic prospective floating as a complementary exercise, through reality and your imaginary. Forget marketing artists and expand the sacred of art.
RAP: Art as a lens for reading the present, can it modify the space and time we pass through? …will art save us?
Camilla: Art is an acta as an amplifier for energies and intensities of resistance. Art expands pioneering practices and inclusive theories. We have, through art, the possibility to know more and better, to think in the right way in a complex scenario, to use meditation, to use the light for our heritage.
@camillaboemio