Making Worlds -
53rd Venice
Biennale
Making Words - Moscow Poetry Club
Common Cause - Igor Makarevich, Elena Elagina
Poets Machine - Yioula Chatzigeorgiou
53rd Venice Biennale: June - August 2009
2nd Thessaloniki Biennale, Greece: September 2009
“Making Words” is a collaborative project
bringing together poets and visual artists, which has been specially
created for “Making Worlds”, the 53rd International Exhibition of the
Venice Biennale, under the Artistic direction of Daniel Birnbaum.
For this project, Daniel Birnbaum has invited the Moscow Poetry Club.
Poets from around the world, among which the Greek poet Vassilis
Amanatidis and the Cypriot poet Daphne Nikita, participate in the
project.
The starting point for “Making Words” was a poetry performance that
first took place in September 2008, during the annual visual arts
festival “Action Field” in Thessaloniki (Greece). This event was the
result of a collaboration between the Moscow Poetry Club and ArtBOX.gr |
Creative Arts Management with poets Vassilis Amanatidis and Evgeny
Nikitin.
“…The most productive collision is that of a poem being transformed
from one langue to the next”, Birnbaum comments, “…with every
translation of a poem into another language, our collective imaginary
universe is enhanced to a new level… a truly polyphonic contribution to
the Biennial, will let the languages collide, and thus adds an entirely
new dimension, many new dimensions, to the exhibition ‘Making Worlds’…”
The two main visual art contributions to “Making Words” are those of
Yioula Hatzigeorgiou (Architectural design by Giannis Epaminondas), entitled “Poets Machine”, and of Igor
Makarevich / Elena Elagina, entitled “Common Cause”. Both,
presented in the Giardini – in the open space between the Brazilian and
the Greek pavilions.
Yioula Hatzigeorgiou’s “Poets Machine” is a work-in-progress that
engages with poetry. The project unfolds on multiple levels: it is a
wooden cube that can be transformed into a platform for the presentation
of video projections and poetry performances; folded, it serves as a
crate for the transportation of the project and its props to various
destinations; it is also designed to generate a series of interactive
projections that transform the poets’ readings into water surges through
a mechanism designed by the artist; finally, the project also unfolds
virtually as an interactive website – which doubles as an archive
documenting the project’s evolution.
In her text, Maria Marangou describes Hatzigeorgiou’s
contribution as “A participatory work, humble by nature, inducing
references to the spectator it addresses, free from narrative
connotations. In a way, the piece remains open to host another work on
its surface, preserving the autonomy of a semiology of poetry, that is
entirely its own”.
After Venice, the project presented in Thessaloniki, within the framework of the 2nd Thessaloniki Biennale of
Contemporary Art (September 2009).
CREDITS “MAKING WORDS”:
Co-curators:
Daniel Birnbaum, Artistic Director of the 53rd Venice Biennale
Evgeny Bunimovich, President of the Moscow Poetry Biennale
Evgeny Nikitin, Moscow Poetry Club
Alexander Rytov, Stella Art Foundation
Christos Savvidis, ArtBOX.gr | Creative Arts Management
Lydia Chatziiakovou, ArtBOX.gr | Creative Arts Management.
Organised by: Moscow Poetry Cub, Stella Art Foundation, Moscow
International Poetry Biennale and ArtBOX.gr | Creative Arts Management.
Supported by:
Stella Art Foundation (Moscow, Russia), Moscow Government, Federal
Agency of Press and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation, 2nd
Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art and
Ministry of Education and Culture of Cyprus.
Participating poets:
Vassilis Amanatidis, Juri Arabov, Alfred Goubran, Riccardo Held, John
High, Gennady Kanevsky, Andrea Libin, Vadim Mesyats, Alessandro Niero,
Daphne Nikita, Alexey Parschikov, Massimo Rizzante, Andrey Rodionov, Lev
Rubinstein, Anna Russ, Mark Shatunovsky, Andrey Tavrov, Igor
Vishnevetsky, Svetlana Zaharova.
Participating Visual artists:
Igor Makarevich, Yioula Hatzigeorgiou, Alexander Djikia, Elena Elagina,
Anja Zhelud, Katja Margolis.
