The Fifth Movement
About
The Fifth Movement

Editors: September Collective, English Translation: Gaia Kessler, Design: Tankboys, Print: Pixart Printing, Published by: Automatic Books First edition, September 2015, Printed in Venice

This book entitled “Symphony of Hunger; The Fifth Movement” is published on the occasion of the Symphony of Hunger: Digesting Fluxus in Four Movements exhibition at A Plus A Gallery, Venice, Italy, 24 September – 31 October 2015, during the Biennale di Venezia 56th International Art Exhibition. The exhibition is mounted under the auspices of the School for Curatorial Studies Venice as part of the Summer Course in Curatorial Practice

This is not an exhibition catalogue. What you hold in your hands is an alternate spatial treatment of the Symphony of Hunger project. Treat it as the undiscovered fifth movement of a riotous symphony created collaboratively by seventeen curators from around the globe. As you dive into its pages, imagine them and their artistic collaborators composing a polyphony of dynamic ideas about art from fifty years ago and from today. While this movement takes a fixed form – one page must naturally follow another – its contents take somewhat unpredictable paths. Enter it as you like. Ingest what will nourish you and spit out the rest. Or close the covers for a moment of quiet digestion. But don’t let this introductory text tell you how to act and engage with this supposed symphonic movement inspired by the act of digestion. Go with your gut reaction. Where might that lead you?

Symphony of Hunger: Digesting Fluxus in Four Movements is an exhibition and publication project inspired by a notable selection of works from the Fondazione Bonotto collection. The exhibition portion feeds an appetite for candid action and fosters a relation to bodily presence through a composition of pieces by both established and emerging artists. Considering themes of desire, taste, digestion, and waste, the exhibition takes an experimental curatorial model to orchestrate an organic exploration of corporal, sociopolitical, and aesthetic hungers. Symphony of Hunger is anchored by historical works from renowned artists, many of whom were active in the Fluxus movement. While the key efforts of the movement may have passed, major threads of its revolutionary intentions live on within the current creative sphere, with many artists today being inspired by the same hunger for expression of social, cultural, and political matters through physicality and interaction.

Symphony of Hunger also marks a pioneering collaboration between the SCSV and the Fondazione Bonotto based in Molvena, Italy. Established in June 2013, the foundation was created in order to preserve and expose the collection of Luigi Bonotto, an early supporter of the Fluxus movement who has collected numerous testimonies of associated actions and events beginning in the 1970s. The full collection, containing over 12,000 works, acts as an archive and also houses a rich documentation of works of Concrete, Visual & Sound Poetry. Through cultivating this archive, which is fully searchable online at www.fondazionebonotto.org, the Foundation aims to develop new ways of relating art with education, business, and contemporary culture on an international scale.