Carlos Garaicoa at the Venice Biennale

Presented by Art Apart, a freelance curatorial agency based in Milan and Zurich, Balconism offers a virtual tour around Venice from 10 balconies that have been picked by a group of international artists, including Cuba’s Carlos Garaicoa.

Alongside the 55^th Venice Biennale, ten international personalities, including artists, architects, designers and writers –Tadao Ando, Francesco Bonami, Jota Castro, Francesco Dal Co, Gabriele Di Matteo, Barnaba Fornasetti and V.Manzi, Carlos Garaicoa, Marc Kalinka, Steve Piccolo, Christoph Radl– have contributed to this narrative, visual and audio project –Gak Sato is the sound designer- made up of ten balconies, handpicked from the Dorsoduro area in Venice, in a bid to create a possible virtual tour of a part of the city.

The Balconism project, made up by Oxana Maleeva and Steve Piccolo, has an ironic and vaguely situational approach. It’s cut out for just about anybody, without time or space limitations, that makes the public stop in the threshold (the balcony) between the public and the private, the earth and the sky, reality and imagination.

Balconism’s free application is not about art, but rather an artwork in itself. The exhibit only exists at a virtual level, like an iPhone or iPad app, on a website and in a special printed issue of the E Il Topo magazine. People visiting Venice can use the Balconism map to pinpoint original balconies, watch ongoing transformations and listen to stories made up by the artist-authors. People from different parts of the world can also make a virtual tour through the application.

During the Venice Biennale, the artists try to cut a deal with the city’s one-and-only ambience by means of inserting objects that usually seem to vie with the burg rather than try to improve the history-laden context teeming with monuments and works. Balconism doesn’t intend to disturb the city, but rather try to reveal its beauty by providing an unusual filter to see Venice through. Balconism also discards the idea that art must be created by artists. The lack of materials in the exhibit opens the possibility of gathering writers, critics, musicians, designers and architects that deal with the city as if it were a genuine encyclopedia of possible narrations, from the perspective of their different disciplines.

Source: Press Release