CARBONART 2004

Memory lane

Period: 4-10 of August 2004

Project theme:
Artificial creator in possible reality. Innovation as an alternative to traditionalism. Remembering, mental action, linked to search, to restoring and recalling needed information from permanent memory. The memory lane. Remembering the present. The memory of walls. Simulating reality. Random access memory. Human memory and its textual, mechanical, electronic, or virtual analogies.
Project concept:
To create for artists an environment where an exchange between individual recall, historic (artistic) recall of the past and permanent memory will take place, all of these being under the influence of external factors-place/building. The artistic materialization of memory through textual, manual, mechanic, electronic or virtual means.
Organizer: Center for Contemporary Art, Chisinau [ksa:k]
in collaboration with the College of Plastic Arts "Al. Plamadeala"
Curator: Lilia DRAGNEVA
Idea of place: Igor SVERNEI

Financed by: Soros Foundation Moldova
Informational support: DNT Association
Partners:
German Embassy in Moldova
Ifa Institut fur Auslandsbeziehunden
Plastic Arts College "Al. Plamadeala"

General idea:
This year we decided once again to make some changes in how we organize the camp. As in the 1999 edition, Carbonart will take place in Chisinau (unlike all the other editions, when the camp was organized in the countryside), but this time the place will not be the city and its concrete urbanistics, but rather a concrete place/building/institution, chosen with precision, which, obviously, will be a component part of the urban space. This is the College of Plastic Arts "Al. Plamadeala"*, the first school of plastic arts which appeared in Moldova way back in late 19th century.
We decided to start cooperation between these two artistic institutions (the College and KSAK**, located in the same building), in order to organize the ninth edition of the first group event of Contemporary Art, Carbonart, launched by the first organization of this kind which appeared at the end of the 20th century-KSAK.
*The College of Plastic Arts "Al. Plamadeala", founded in 1887 as a private school of drawing and as part of the county school nr. 1, becomes in 1891 the Chisinau Communal School of Drawing; in 1918, the Chisinau Communal School of Drawing becomes the School of (Plastic) Fine Arts. For 21 years (from 1919 to 1940), the School of Plastic Arts, directed by A. Plamadeala, was a hub of culture. Theater artists, writers, architects, plastic artists and other creative personalities gathered here. The school hosted (1921-1922) the Society of Fine Arts of Basarabia. From 1944 to 1986 three different premises were changed. In 1991 the National School of Plastic Arts and Education "A. Plamadeala" was transformed into the National College of Plastic Arts "Alexandru Plamadeala". At present the "A. Plamadeala" College is a higher institution with a four-year curriculum.
**Created in 1996, as an institution to promote Contemporary Art, the Center for Contemporary Art, Chisinau, aims at destroying the monopoly of "tradition", the assertion of the artist's right to be different and educating the public to accept this difference. At the same time the Center offers to the art environment of Moldova an example of a new way to exist and function. One of the main issues taken up by the Center is the outdated strategy of state-run institutions in charge of the official cultural policy. KSAK was created to operate in the area of visual arts and filled in a gap that had existed for several decades, taking on a balancing role against the only body dominating this area. This body was the Union of Plastic Artists (UAP), which was authorized by the Soviet powers as far back as 1948 to represent and oversee the fine arts of Moldova. UAP operates as a body that grants "professional" status to painters, sculptors, and other artists. Thus, the Center came into play to offer moral and logistic support to the artists who were not UAP members and, therefore, had no access to certain benefits.
Through this new project, we intend to establish a link between the local cultural tradition and world contemporary art processes. This oppositional dichotomy and, at the same time, double pioneership in visual arts in our country separated by a century from each other, we hope will inspire participants with a "recall" of the experience and message of artistic generations spanning the last century, related to both a certain area as well as to the entire world; and relating these memories to the present day, to the situation of Contemporary Art and issue facing artists in Moldova and in other countries.
Art is not torn, schizoidally, from the complex of social life. It has always moved in the same direction in which society as a whole was moving. Sometimes its movement was projective, that is anticipated the direction of movement, at other times it was reactive, that is took place later, as a response. Many times it had borne influences from science and technology, but as many times art, science and technology were born together, incorporating the same spirit. It was not really technology that transformed decisively the art of the 20th century, but rather man's resizing in an uncertain world haunted by phantasms and tried by unprecedented historic disasters. Science and technology delivered to it tools, supports, materials and nothing more. The revolutionary transformations are inside.
Any social or political issue can be reduced to an issue of education, mentality development or change. Changing mentality is a difficult, but not impossible, task. It can be done through educational policies, which need a long time to be developed and implemented. An alternative way is that of Contemporary Art, which places the public into a completely new and unusual context. This is, in a sense, shock therapy, as it pulls humans out of their usual mold and makes them find interpretations for things that are not part of the daily routine, realize the fact that this routine does not explain everything, or at least question things that they used to accept for granted. Such an exercise develops in the public mind an independent manner of thought, which is not influenced by personal or political myths.
In spite of a certain degree of monotony and limited space, the four-story building of the College offers a wide range of choices to realize the artistic projects-classrooms and workshops, halls and corridors, the festivities room and the sports arena, the cafeteria, the backyard engulfed by greenery and the KSAK office in this building, which is fairly well equipped (computers, Internet access, editing table, photo and video cameras, etc.). Also, it is also in the School's building that the participants will receive room and board. In order to create appropriate conditions, the organizers will do all the necessary preparation. At the same time, artists will have access to additional materials they may need: video and photo equipment, video and media projectors, and transportation if needed. Any form of self-expression is welcome, whether it be performance, installation, land art, text work, drawing, painting, new media, video, photo, etc.
The project represents a continuation of the art in nature current, but this time inside an urban milieu, while the natural milieu (as this is the general topic of the project) will be recalled and materialized/recreated in real or virtual space. To support such recall, the backyard of the College, flooded by greenery, will be used. This time we are not going to plant "virtual generators" into the bosom of nature (as we have done in the previous edition), but on the contrary-nature as seen and recorded in one's memory in the past, and then recreated artificially through texts and ready made objects, as well as through the use of computers, video and photo cameras, TV sets, video and media projectors, and some special devices.
The building of the College will be transformed for a while into a place of residence and work. Project participants will be asked to draw analogies between the specific aspect (place/building) and virtual reality, to go deeply into the maze and corridors of their own memory and to project themselves into the real space by means of artificial memory and its analogies using adjunct elements of memory (photographs, video, writing, computers, etc.), thus creating a simulacrum of memory. The creation of interdependence between the specific space/building and the memory (including the associative one) of an individual (the artist in this case), which will serve as generator of new artistic ideas in Contemporary Art, appearing as a result of confrontation of two polarly opposed systems/structures-conservative and contemporary, outdated and modern, real and virtual, human and mechanical/electronic. Thus a possibility will appear to analyze the maze of individual memory next to one's own position, through art, vis-a-vis the geo-socio-politico-cultural space of an area, region, country, etc.

Brief description
Launched in 1996 and being the first group event of Contemporary Art, the art camp Carbonart has always had one goal-to attract and increase the number of artists interested in new artistic forms, methods and ways of expression. This is just a huge workshop, a factory of creativity, where local and foreign artists exchange experiences, and highly-trained artists work together with beginner ones.
Every year, KSAK chooses a central idea to organize the artistic process for the following Carbonart edition. The idea is selected based on several criteria: topicality, multiplicity of aspects, artistic potential, and especially the timing which is to be attractive to artists.
This year we would like to dedicate the camp and exhibition to remembering, which, through the memory line, passes through several generations and becomes materialized in a possible space, changed by the artistic imagination.
Today, when the memory of the active man is equipped with an unprecedented technical potential, we once again have the impression that it is time to separate human memory from its mechanical, electronic or virtual analogy. Contemporary man is inclined to pass on the functions of memory to various gadgets (this new term includes not only electronic devices, such as notebooks, digital cameras, manual devices, manual scanners, etc., but also other nonmanual devices: guides, rule books, information repositories, electronic networks, search engines, etc.).
Now we find that the art of remembering has been lost. However, various elements of memory have witnessed an extraordinary evolution: thousands of people are trying to develop a general field of recall, to organize the place and forms of memory, to improve procedures of extracting mnemonic content from the most sophisticated places. Fabius Quintilianus identified memory with a building, in which man can visit all rooms in search for objects placed there artificially. Cicero spoke about the technique of recall, based on a mental image of a house with many rooms destroyed by fire and on recreating entire fragments of speech from images of words. Plato, as well, developed a theory of knowledge, whose base is the spirit which, living in the world of pure ideas, watches from all viewpoints the essence of the world. But when it descends from Plato's clouds on earth, the spirit "forgets" its earlier ideal life. The contradictions of the sensory world trigger certain thoughts, the remembering of the authentic pith of the world. The process of recall takes the form of an art of dialectics. Plato's theoretical speculations are accompanied by suggestive images, analogies, comparisons. Thus, he explains the theory of knowledge in a simple way by using the image of a cave. The person involved in the process of knowledge is a prisoner, immobilized by (sensorial) chains, with his back to the entrance. On the opposite wall of the cave he can see the shadows of things, animals and humans, whose images fly towards the entrance. The task of knowing is to discern in those confusing images and shadows the authentic world, to "remember" the real world.
When the philosophical or scientific issues are applied quickly, and when an art assimilates, without prior preparation, these new ideas, then the force of memory comes into play, although the previous process had been forgotten long ago; in this case, as Plato says, "recall" is complete.
Thus recall takes place as an expectation of a past experience, an experience of previous generations, which creates a certain memory line-an imaginary path through the past brought into the present by memory, as well as the conscious falsification of the past by means of one's own imagination and by creating a simulacrum for memory. In this case these are individual memories and self-identification with a certain process from the past, all of these being developed consciously based on the knowledge possessed and expectations, desires, as well as based on the interdependence between personal memory and the specific geographic location, materialized in the virtual reality.
By virtual reality (from Latin: virtualis means possible), which has become one of the main elements of the 21st century, humankind has come across a problem that has a difficult solution. That is, virtuality has imposed itself as an independent direction in the arts and psychology, having also an important role in computer science and human reflection. The last quarter of the 20th century was important through the fact that humankind entered a new stage of information development. The emergence of the society of information services and new technologies, the invasion of the information economy, mass computerization-all these are unprecedented phenomena in the history of humankind.
In this context we can draw an analogy with the chroot environment. That is, with Lincus's manual "chroot": Run a command with a different, specified root directory. Thereby a virtual space is created for the execution of a certain command. Upon the end of the command that virtual space is destroyed, with visible traces of activity in files from the real space in which the virtual space was created. It is like creating a world within a world, a process that we will try to simulate through art during the camp.
The bridge between these two worlds is the memory line, which traverses the levels of the building from the possible reality and those of human memories.

The baseline of CARBONART-2004:
Timeframe: camp: August 04-10, 2004, exhibition: August 10-30, 2004
Place: Plastic Arts College "Al. Plamadeala", Chisinau, Moldova.
The project's main idea
Organizing Carbonart in a defined place, which is part of the urban milieu. Turning an educational institution into a place for living and creation. Opposition of a concrete place/building and virtual reality. Artists to go deeply into the mazes and far along the lines of their own memory and their translation into the real space with the help of artificial analogies of memory, as well as with the help of additional elements and creating a simulacrum of memory.
The artistic essence of the project
The interaction between the concrete place/building and memory (including associative memory) of the individual. Generating new artistic ideas in the area of Contemporary Art based on the opposition of polarly different systems/structures-conservative and modern, real and virtual, human and mechanical/electronic, etc. New positions in the Contemporary Art of Moldova.
The social value
Our goal is determined by the need to create, at the artistic level, projects for such situations of coexistence, contacts and collaboration among artists from various countries and regions, among artists with different ages and training levels, thus stimulating the opposition and exchange between various forms of memory, of knowledge/experience and the personal identity of each artist, thus creating a simulacrum of general memory. At the same time, our project is an attempt to compare the two systems of education (traditional academism and new technologies). The promotion of Moldova's Contemporary Art at the national level, through direct contacts and collaboration with foreign participants in the camp, as well as publicizing the works made during Carbonart 2004 on the Internet.
Target groups
Professional artists, art theoreticians from Moldova and abroad. Art students. Beginning artists. Students and teachers from colleges and universities of any discipline. Teachers from Moldova's universities and high-schools. Potentially open environment for the reception of Contemporary Art.
Project tasks
The use of new mental possibilities of artists. The possibility offered to the artist to analyze, by means of art, the maze of one's own memory together with one's personal stance regarding a specific geo-socio-political-cultural space, regarding a certain zone, region, country. The interdependence between the real and imaginary space-expanding the possibilities of artistic expression in order to solve some of the issues of Contemporary Art. Exchange of experience among artists from various countries as well as among artists of varying ages and levels of training. Improving the general level of Contemporary Art in Moldova. Publicizing Carbonart 2004, stimulating the authority of Contemporary Art in Moldova.
Realization strategy
During seven days the participants will live and work together at the College of Plastic Arts "Al. Plamadeala", Chisinau, Moldova. During this period, we recommend the participants to search intuitively through their own stock of knowledge and their own memory, to examine the interdependence between the specific place, partially remembered through associations, and the imaginary participant, which will translate into a materialization of the idea through developing art works during the camp. After the 10 days, the participants will present in the exhibition their finalized works, which are expected to correspond to the topic and concept of Carbonart 2004 in accordance with the author projects presented before the camp.
Realization tactics
It is planned to select about 20 participants, of which 10 foreigners. The participants will be chosen based on a competition of applications and projects submitted, which are expected to meet the proposed topic and concept. Applications will be received till 25 June 2004. The Experts Committee of the Center will meet on June 30 to select the participants. The invitations will be sent out before 05 July 2004.
The project's curator and the Expert Committee of the Center, based on the projects and CV, submitted for Carbonart 2004, will select the participants competitively.
Main projects criteria of selection are:

• to meet the topic and concept of this year's edition
• projects should be in the field of contemporary art
• to enframe in the Carbonart budget and possibility
• idea and project concept to be explained clear enough

All information should be sent by e-mail or fax to the Center for Contemporary Art, Chisinau, as soon as possible, but not later than by June 25, 2004.