CLOG Projects
Via Giulia di Barolo, 13 Torino
2015 – 2018
CLOG was a research-driven independent space with a focus on contemporary art and culture, autonomous education experiments and self-production projects. It was located in an inhabited house in Torino and was co-founded by Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti and Cosimo Piga.
Programme: CLOG doesn’t have a daily programming and doesn’t have a fixed-term planning. It is activated and hibernated on the basis of impelling speculative urgencies, fruitful encounters and healthy boredom. Its projects use the advantages of being formally performed in a private house, where copyright legislation becomes opaque and the hurried pace of production and consumption of contemporary culture can take some rest. CLOG aims to be a safe place, where the politics of hospitality are the favourable shape taken by the 24/7 pressure to perform, in a zona franca that tries to withdraw from contemporary attention economy and from the institutional logics of professional reputation.
Mission: This is why CLOG is usually the right place for suicidal projects and anarchic experiments, where self-education, sub-cultures and ambiguous epistemologies are welcome to flourish. Artists, curators and cultural workers are mostly considered as critical thinkers, researchers and knowledge producers, and the outcomes presented at CLOG are mostly time-based or discursive practices, dealing with wider political and cultural narratives. CLOG believes that the misinterpretation of an artwork can produce a non-artistic experience of comparabile value (Triple Candie), and follows the mantra of never taking ourselves too seriously, in the belief of the radical importance of having a place where to allow ourselves to be and act in an enthusiastically naif way.
Name: “Clog” indicates the agglomeration of undistinguished material that causes the obstruction of the drains. The materials carried by the current settle in heterogeneous structures, whose externally dirty and anarchist logic implies their exclusion from organised channels.
Funding: CLOG is a self-sustained reality, financed through occasional hosting through Airbnb and thanks to the unorganised solidarity with the neighbourhood. Barter of technological equipment, recycling of pre-existing materials and the gift of time by friends and colleagues are fundamental strategies for the production of CLOG’s projects.
Space: In its previous lives, the space hosting CLOG used to host a GTT furnace for the shoeing of horses, subsequently a car garage and lastly a print laboratory. CLOG was built by its founders thanks to “labour of love” and McGyver capabilities, recycling the residual waste of the art world of Torino (walls coming from art fairs’ booths and construction materials coming from dismantled exhibitions, installations and artworks).
Searching for Comfort in an Uncomfortable Chair, 2015
Searching for comfort in an uncomfortable chair is a pseudo-exhibition in a home-like environment. Its theoretical assumptions lay in the ambivalence of architecture as cruel design, i.e. production of structures which impose, seduce and replicate power devices and intangible hierarchies, and architecture as embodied habitus, i.e. the objectification of social habits, informal identities and rhizomatic practices – more or less spontaneous and more or less marked by anarchoid tendencies.
Searching for comfort in an uncomfortable chair involves a cluster of works and projects by contemporary artists, forced to live with unsolicited, unnecessary and often abusive art reproductions; dusty relics of personal stories; borrowed and never returned objects and an interior decor undoubtedly index of undisguised bad taste. As in the worst histories of art collectors, the whole is legitimised by the randomness of an officially private dimension, and is pandered by the omnipresent justificatory power of the caption.
with Riccardo Benassi, Bestué y Vives, Lia Cecchin, Cristian Chironi, Matteo Ferrari, Funambulist, Bruno Munari, Antonio Piga, Cosimo Piga, Valentina Roselli and Marco Scarcella, Kimitake Sato, Mattia Solari, Superstudio, Spela Volcic
Photographs by Spela Volcic
Starting Conditions (por favor no recojan y tiren las piedras!), 2015
Starting Conditions (por favor no recover y tirar las piedras!) was supposed to be the first event of a collaborative, experimental and long-term project, that was planned to be developed in the following months between Dave Hullfish Bailey, Martino Genchi and CLOG. The collaboration was meant to start from a pre-defined space-time structure, describable as the concatenation of three moments (Firstness Secondness and Thirdness), loosely based on the theory of "Threeing" by Paul Ryan and pursued in a number of different speculative and physical contexts. The conditions of exchange for each moment were supposed to be redefined collectively every time, triggering the development, success or failure of the project.
The event Starting Conditions (por favor no recover y tirar las piedras!) was the outcome of a residency of Martino Genchi at CLOG and experimented with the format of the party. The soundtrack of the party consisted in a curated selection of Naepolitan minimal techno music, while the rooms of CLOG hosted various elements and entities, meant to act as a scenography of the party and as stimuli working on the guests at a subliminal level. Amongst them: the photograph of a sea of rocks coming from an unspecified place in Latin America, sent over by Dave Hullfish Bailey; the trailer of the movie La Guerre du Feu (1981), introducing a big fire in the underground space of CLOG; and a cospicuous number of engraved bananas featuring the inscription ‘Do not build.’
Despite the success of the first event, the project was deemed a failure by the organisers and never continued. Some key words of the project were: input / output / information / ecosystem / quantum entanglement / open source philosophy / anarchist epistemology / wormholes / TechGnosis / rocks / singularity / divination / no-how / threeing / semiotics / pre-linguistic / linguistic / do it yourself / electromagnetism / to build / object / saturation / self-ecology / cohabitation /
Photographs by Nadia Pugliesi
