Call for Aplications: EPIGENETIC LA(nd)ZAROPOLE. Instructions for a conceptual artwork.

In the year 1966, Robert Morris wrote his famous essay Notes on Sculpture in Artforum magazine. In his essay, which can be considered one of the intellectual precedents of Conceptual Art, Morris invokes two dialogical and seemingly oppositional ideas. That of the autonomy of form, which is identified through conceptual processes, thus internal to compositional logics, and that of the environment, that is, of externalities that determine the project, which must therefore respond to logics and forms not yet known.

Morris’ famous essay deeply contributed to the debate, involving artists such as Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Jaroslaw Kozlowsky, etc. on the one hand, and Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, etc. on the other.

We may identify his text as generative of Conceptual Art and Land Art: the former of a humanistic and abstract order, the latter empirical and responsive.

Both embrace an anti-formalism and seek new aesthetics.

From both, there also seems to arise the need to define new languages, new taxonomies and forms of the project.

The contemporary world seems to pose the same issue again: while architecture is losing its role as an autonomous discipline, the ecological and landscape issues still remain confused and in need of new design codes.

The workshop aims to experiment with how seemingly opposing principles can instead be absorbed – even without necessarily finding a resolved synthesis – into a single design process, capable of generating forms with different cognitive, logical, syntactic origins.

In light of the project site – i.e., an apparently weak site in a positive and propositional sense – the students will then be called upon to design an object – or a system/series of objects – considering the artistic, environmental and disciplinary contexts (also in the form of precedents: previous works). This process can be considered within an archaeology of knowledge that – as Foucault argues in his introduction to Les Mots et les Choses – makes clear how, even from heterogeneous elements, a new epistemology of the contemporary world can arise.

Important information:

• Official language of the workshop is English;

• Accepted students pay participation fee of 6000 den;

• Apply with CV and Portfolio (pdf file, max 5 projects, A4 format) not later than 20 June at ssarch@arh.ukim.edu.mk;

• The selected students will be informed no later than June 23.

Link:www.arh.ukim.edu.mk