Interviewing STEFANO PASQUINI

SA: Have you ever participated in any public art project in the past? In your opinion, what is the importance of making artistic interventions in specific places? What interests you in these kind of situations?
SP: I guess the first “public art” project I participated in was an exhibition in Leeds in 1996 titled Artists challenge the Armouries, where I put microphones in the cafe of a church, then broadcast the people’s conversations over the signal of BBC2 radio within a two miles radius.
The idea came from one of my Unrealizeable Projects, although I got to realize it. I wanted people to hear themselves, and broadcast themselves freely.
At this time internet was just starting, so making a pirate radio was the thing to do if you needed an underground communication channel. I was very curious to see if the police would seize the equipment and jail me and the vicar, but nothing happened.
In this kind of situation the public’s reaction is what interests me the most. Especially from people who are not familiar with contemporary art. Their reaction is truly exciting. And to me this is the most important factor about public art.
A lot of people live without art throughout their lives, or without music. If you hate music you can’t avoid it, you hear it practically everywhere, but if you hate art, or don’t care about it, all you have to do is avoid galleries and museums and you’re fine.
Of course things are slowly changing, if you live in New York you can’t avoid contemporary art, but if you live in Rome you barely notice there is contemporary art around, you’re surrounded by ruins all over the places, you walk through art history. But if you live, let’s say, in Zola Predosa, or any little suburban town, you can lead a life without art and not even notice it. This said I love it when complete strangers stop and stare at contemporary art. Recently I participated in a group show called Accidental//Coincidental where Robin Press and Carina Grossman presented work that was specifically created in order to be “accidentally” found by everyday people and not necessarily understood as art. I found this idea extremely interesting, and the idea of looking at art without knowing it’s art really excites me.

SA: I read in your web site that your art “has always been strongly influenced by what happens politically in the world”, This is the intersection point of your research with Event Horizon.
How would you describe your working process for this work?
SP: I wanted to make something that could be confused with a photocopy of a newspaper, or something like that, again in order to slightly confuse people, push them off balance a little. As I stated above, the idea that people could be looking at my work without thinking of it as art excites me. When this happens I think your mind wonders more freely.
A lot of people’s attitude towards contemporary art is “I don’t understand it” and shut off completely. But when they don’t know it’s contemporary art they may try and actually get something off it. It could just be nothing, but the idea of making someone’s thought wonder off for a second is very interesting for me.
For this particular piece, which was supposed to be representative of the press somehow, I decided to take a phrase that was very “un-press-like” and use it as a paper headline. Terror, death and fear are the most common headlines in papers and magazines, so I thought having a title like Filmic perfection, musical happiness would move the spectator to a curious approach towards the newspaper. Which of course turns out to me in Italian, thus unreadable. The original newspaper story was about 3000 protesters heading to Genoa from Bologna before the 2001 G8 summit. Reading about this now is almost surreal, there’s so much hope in the future in the article, demonstrating against globalization seemed like a normal thing to do at the time. Although fear of violence is mentioned many times in the article, no-one (apart from some policemen, maybe) could guess that the right to protest would be denied to so many people at once, that so many people would be beaten so recklessly, that one would be shot in the head and killed.

SA: A project still not realized Portrait of New York as a human being, aims to “portray the feelings of ambition, despair, solitude and hope New Yorkers experience in their daily lives” don’t you consider artistic performances in urban contexts as kind of portrait? I am thinking, for example, of Gillian Wearing.
SP: In a sense every artwork is the portrait of its author, and one could consider most of Gillian Wearing’s works to be self-portraits. I like her work, and I am quite excited about her project in Trento, where she organized a sort of competition to find the perfect Trentino family, and soon a bronze statue of the winning family will be erected in a town park. I don’t consider all artistic performance in urban contexts as portraits, but some of them are.

SA: Do you have a particular kind of public in mind while producing your works?
SP: I strive to make my artwork to be experienceable by all, regardless of age, disability, family responsibility, marital status, race, colour, ethnicity, nationality, religion or belief, gender, sexual orientation, trade union activity, unrelated criminal convictions, or any other relevant criteria. Most of the time I fail to reach them, but that’s part of the deal of being an artist.

SA: How do different media interact for you as an artist? I am thinking about the installation The Cave at the Torre Civica Santo Stefano in Molinella.
Which is the difference between that form of interaction and the public art experience?
SP: I forgot to mention that I don’t particularly like the label “public art”, as I would like all art to be publicly available. And I actually thought of The Cave as public art.
I was asked to make something interactive for the non-specialized public, so I did a sort of sound piece. Children loved it, they kept pressing all the different color buttons all the time. When they realized that for each color corresponded only one song they would play their favorite one more time, then leave. It was like a little game, and I’m sure a lot of the public didn’t think of it as art at all. Saying that, Molinella is quite a small town, so probably everyone knew it was the artwork of the wacko that kept going back and forth with the blue car.

SA: In your Eclectic Discount solo exhibition (2005), you criticize the same structure of the art market system, analyzing its form and organization from an inner point of view.
Do you think Event Horizon aims to do the same with communication and information fields?
SP: I like questioning things and yes, I think Event Horizon was questioning communication forms as much as Eclectic Discount was questioning the art market. Both events were slightly off-track from traditional exhibiting methods, thus even this is being questioned by this sort of shows. I must mention that a couple got married in the surroundings of my Eclectic Discount installation, and this, apart from instantly gratifying me, furthermore questioned the role of the gallery as a mere display case. With all this questioning going on, one wonders what is left to appreciate.

Thank you very much Stefano!