From 8th to 17th September | from 18.00 to 23.30
LA PELANDA | ZONA ESTERNA

Saturday, 17th September | 22.15 | Assembly
LA PELANDA | SALA 2 | 2 h

Luigi Coppola e Christophe Meierhans

Fondo speculativo di provvidenza

thespeculativefund.org

The art project Fondo Speculativo di Provvidenza (FSP) creates and realises a collective political practice through the use of money-capital, directly involving viewers in its proceedings. The project puts to test habits and common democratic certainties, with the aim to create conditions that allow to participants to discuss and experiment collectively new models of living, thinking and acting.
In practice, the FSP is engaged in the planning of a larger artistic project, such as festivals, biennials, museums and theater seasons (the ” host event “will be shown later as” festival “), and lives thanks the involvement of the public participating in the demonstrations.
The fundamental operation of the FSP is to increase by a fixed amount of the price of each ticket festival. The increase is such that it does not interfere with the visitor’s decision – visitors are aware from the beginning whether or not to purchase the ticket.
The sum paid extra not re-flows within the festival economy itself, but it is set aside to constitute a capital that belongs to all visitors in equal measure.
Each ticket purchased grants to its owner the right of a FSP’s share and it becomes a member of it. The greatest number of tickets will be sold, will give the greater capital in terms of potential: all members are in fact encouraged to speculate about that could be achieved with this potential and they have an equal right to act on the fate that the FSP will know. The FSP is essentially open to any possible use, not having a defined purpose and not responding to special or existing needs. Everything has to be decided, nothing is guaranteed. This is the fate of a speculative fund.
The speculation is then done in two ways. On one side, it is a financial transaction of a capital oriented to its presentation in view of a possible realization: the transformation of the economic potential in the use value. To the other, it is a research, a collective inquiry that resides on an intellectual and cultural potential.
The FSP creates de facto a political community: the fund belongs to those who take part and its potential is such as it brings together a multiplicity of individual contributions otherwise marginal. The fact that suddenly there is an amount of money to spend, excites the imagination, creates interactions and invites the articulation of a common project. This is not to rely on the majority, but to the ability of each individual to take responsibility, in order to determine what can be achieved together with the other. A potential in terms of collective responsibility which then multiplies the economic potential of the fund.

BIOGRAPHY

Luigi Coppola (Lecce; Brussels) works in the field of performance, public art and relational. It focuses on politically motivated actions, such as the project Democrats Acts, On Social Metamorphosis and Build Your Leader. In 2011 he co-artistic director of the Urban Art Biennale in Bordeaux and researcher of Art and Society at the University of Tilburg (Netherlands). In 2015, by the encounter with Christophe Meierhans, starts the Speculative Fund Providence, experienced in Santarcangelo Festival in the same year and open to new perspectives, through the participation in two other Italian festival in Terni Festival and the Short Theatre in Rome, and dialogue with institutions active scope of sustainable finance.

Christophe Meierhans (Geneva; Brussels) works with and through the performance, the public space, installation, sound, music and video. His work consists mainly in developing intervention strategies in everyday life, through the manipulation of accepted conventions, social habits or simple uses. The fragments of reality become the setting for artistic operations for redirecting the banality in order to make it reappear in unexpected angles. His work raises questions about the rules and conventions, confusing a random environment with several others, and by comparing the viewer with something else, with the strangeness of being placed in the “wrong”, or the possibility that the site could become something of different.
In 2015, the project presents a Santarcangelo Some use for your broken clay pots.