ARTISTS: Francesco Arena / Jeremy Deller / Mike Kelley / Akram Zaatari / Gülsün Karamustafa / Alejandro Vidal / Extrastruggle | Extramücadele / Phelan Garrett and The Joy Division.
Belonging, sharing, tribe, community – key words that well describe the contemporary social spirit and that are strikingly in contrast with the sociological principles outlined by Gilles Lipovetsky in his essay Lère du vide, wherein he expounded that ours was a profoundly individualistic age.
The reality in which we exist is full of examples that demonstrate the propensity for preponderant and rhizomatic aggregation within different communities, particularly of a virtual kind where the web functions as a binding element in which the contemporary technocratic lifestyle appears to utterly dominate recreational social networks such as MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Yaari or Plaxo, to name just a few, in which the exchange is chiefly of a ludic nature. At the same time there is also an abundance of sites for sharing knowledge or projects – Indymedia, Wikipedia or aNubi, for example – which exist alongside cultural and political networks where connective intelligence is transformed into “collective intelligence”, the latter being a form of spontaneous social exchange whose members cooperate and come together in the production of value that is external to any form of institutional mediation. This becomes a project area and a practice for multiplying intelligence from the moment there is an exchange of ideas, utopias and real life experiences.
In short, the dominant trend is towards building specific communities that express a sense of belonging for their members. In fact our subjectivity functions intermittently, following a pattern that is apparently contradictory – increasing global and virtual knowledge on the one hand whilst practising an elective form of selection on the other.
EMOTIONAL COMMUNITY aims to be a space of tentacular reflection on the processes of interaction, selection and sharing affiliations, a tribal perimeter space and affiliation zone that expresses itself both within the galaxy of immateriality and locations of culture – those places where the multiple belonging of individuals is regulated directly by the individuals themselves (music, art, literature, sport, publishing, events and student revolts, etc.).
The connective research of the artists that have been selected follows a projective sensitivity through which the individual questions his or her subjectivity in relational terms with others, with those empathic tribes each individual refers to.
