Il Mondo Novo
film, 3'41", Bucuresti, 2016	film, 16', Innsbruck, 2004
"A collective staging of the eighteenth-century paintng by Giandomenico Tiepolo, Mondo Nuovo (The New World), first staged in 2004 and repeated here for the third time, in the setting of the defunct Dudesti armament factory, a ruin from the past, which coexists alongside the seeds of a less dystopian development of the urban periphery. In the current global context, contemplation of the future can represent an exercise that highlights disillusion and hopelessness, or contrariwise, it can reveal possibilities of counteracting the asperities of the present through solidarity, shared ideals and communality." Magda Radu
Ljubljana, 2005

Il Mondo Novo refers to the eponymous painting from 1791 by Giandomenico Tiepolo. Departing from the group of people represented in the painting we imagined a performance that is built on the idea of contemplation - imagining of a new world, a group of individuals witness and in the same time become part of history. In Tiepolo's painting, a group of wonderers from the Venetian settecento line up for a magic lantern show presenting views from the New World - The Americas, instead, one could think that the small crowd looks toward the fluid, distant horizons, as their Old World was collapsing. In our work we tried to talk about this invisible horizon, the crowd looking at and in the same time being the horizon. The first version of the performance, enacted in 2004 in Innsbruck, together with the local community of artists and architects, was referring to the absent building then (now located close to the train station) which was to be constructed there in the following months. The missing architecture was a metaphor of our world in which seemingly there were no more new territories to discover or ideology to defend and people were just re-processing their ideas and living space. The performance was remade one year later in Ljubljana, again involving individuals from the art and architecture local context, that time in an art exhibition space, where the group of people stood together in the gallery looking toward the empty space. The third version of the work was enacted in Bucuresti in 2016, on the location contaminated with toxic discharges from the former Dudesti powder and armament factories, later the Chimopar Chemical Enterprise. Il mondo novo, Giandomenico Tiepolo (1727-1804). index