CAPITAL CULTURE

Critical text by Marco Scotini

The group show Capital Culture, presented at Prometeogallery in Milan is part of a long-term project developed in various stages, which aims to construct an atlas of images and situations on the notion of “capital” in this moment of transition and globalization.

In 1927, after releasing his film October, Sergei Eisenstein, presented a cinematographic version of Karl Marx’s The Capital. In 1967, in his work “Society of the Spectacle”, Guy Debord used the practice of détournement, replacing the word “capital” with “spectacle”. Where Karl Marx wrote: “The capital is not a thing but a social relationship between individuals, mediated by things” Guy Debord put instead “The spectacle is not a relationship of images, but a social relationship between individuals, mediated by images”. In 1973, Guy Debord himself realized a cinematographic adaptation of his most radical book “Society of the Spectacle”.

What is the meaning of questioning the direct relation between the social production and the production of images, between material production and linguistic communication? Is it possible to check simultaneously the crisis of the representational paradigm and that of representation? Which are the current possible relationships between aesthetic territory and the political sphere? Which is the contribution of today’s artists to the general growing demand for democracy? The twelve artists participating in this exhibition, coming from different latitudes – from South America to the Eastern Europe- and with different experiences on the globalization’s phenomenon were invited to present works that are trying to answer these questions.

Schizophrenia, economy, work, information, culture, history and democracy are some of the themes that articulate the exhibition’s discourse. The relationship between political imagination and collective memory is another common issue addressed, from diverse cultural backgrounds, by the different interventions. While the global capitalist model is a common ground for different experiences, the different approaches to this phenomenon open a way to the critical confrontation and to the production of prospective practical activities.

While Ernesto Salmerón, examines the recent Nicaraguan history through a series of short movies and questions the American intervention in the country, Maxim Karakulov’s photographs analyze the end of Russian communitarian idea. In a similar way, the relation between memory and desire in the psychiatric patients of Javier Téllez’s work, the cancellation of historical memory caused by informational overload in the Salvador’s urban masses in Ronald Morán’s, and the archive on the American military strategies in Ian Tweedy’s work, are some further examinations on the transformation of the industrial capitalism in the actual transnational and global
The group show Capital Culture, presented at Prometeogallery in Milan is part of a long-term project developed in various stages, which aims to construct an atlas of images and situations on the notion of “capital” in this moment of transition and globalization.