VOGA Art Project / Bari, Italy 2021
Part of VOGA's mission is to build connections across the Mediterranean and to facilitate creative exchange around urgent issues of our present. For our first initiative, we contacted independent institutions around the Mediterranean basin to host the works of an international group of selected artists in Bari.
The project is titled MINIMUM STANDARDS and featured artists from different Mediterranean countries in a collective display that took place in the city center of Bari. Developed in partnership with the local council, MINIMUM STANDARDS proposes a reflection on what constitutes the publicness of a public space. The pandemic brought upon a radical alteration of our daily lives, somehow overshadowing the inequalities, conflicts, and alienation inherent to the spaces we call “public”.
Striving for the possibility of public space as and accessible and inclusive site for individual expression and for collective reflection, we invited artists from different Mediterranean countries to provide insights into the diverse modalities, arrangements and possibilities to rethink what a public space may be. Each participant artist is asked to design a banner engaging with the topic from their own perspective and under any of its possible conjugations: from urban topography to economic inequality, from gender discrimination to human fragility, national politics and issues of accessibility.
