Italia Docet | Laboratorium – Artists, Participants, Testimonials and Activated Spectators

Italia Docet | Laboratorium – Artists, Participants, Testimonials and Activated Spectators is an official collateral event of the 56th Venice Biennale organised by the i-AM Foundation and curated by Leonardo Rotatori.

The i-AM Foundation aims to promote an awareness of Renaissance art in the contemporary political and social context and in the media, and to seek methods that can provide new interpretations through the direct experience of artists from different cultures.
The core of the Italia Docet |Laboratorium programme is the free circulation of ideas of the Participants, in relationship with a humanistic common base, which become osmotic in relation to the subjective viewpoints and interchange the dialogue with the spectators.
Created through the interaction of many different individuals in a Open Structures model – work in progress-, the work has a social and global identity, where the individual poetic is made available to the programme, in a sort of modern-day agora through a collective manner.

The selected artwork and source of inspiration is Raffaello Sanzio’s cartoon of the School of Athens. Interpreted as a base – motherboard- it lends itself to a variety of interpretations, capable of creating multiple new narratives -spin-off – by allowing contemporary artists to add to and provide a modern-day interpretation of distinctive elements: the same elements, different artists, other audiences. Italia Docet|Laboratorium has an immersive style of presentation, designed to emphasise the visual and audio elements of the work by placing the audience at the centre of a continuous choral performance. The voices of the main characters speak individually or blend into a choral magma, depending on the viewer’s position within a space. Each work will be derived from the same base, which is present in the background and will provide a common field of philosophical and architectural work; each artist will give a fragment of culture as part of a complex whole corpus.

An initial group of Participants, Italian and foreign artists, will present their own personal form of expression, demonstrating versatility, openness, the capacity for dialogue and a dialectical approach, which is then able to generate a great movement of ideas gathered from different environments – ideas that today, as in the past, are able to meet and be exchanged, in this way encouraging comparisons and dialogues relevant to civil society.
The direction of the project, led by Leonardo Rotatori, has developed a method capable of presenting the transmission of experiences from one system to another in a cosmopolitan environment. The substance the project wants to show, through this choral work, is the hidden contents that the humanist message conceals as its ontological basis.

The source materials are being organised and collected by the artist Federico Guida, and the study has generated cultural spaces for gathering and sharing the ‘narrated’ experiences, according to the principles of generosity and ecumenism.  With the protocol “e-Laboratorium” the project will open to artists from sixty countries, who will show their projects (1:14 scale) via the platform www.laboratorium-venice2015.org and in assigned areas within the body of the work.