Strategy and Spell

Art as Infrastructural Change

Authors

  • Luiza Crosman Researcher at The Terraforming, Strelka Institut

Keywords:

Contemporary Art, Exhibition Spaces, Art Megastructure, Speculative Performativity, New Institutionalism

Abstract

The essay “Strategy and Spell: Art as Infrastructural Change” is an investigation of the performative force art spaces have on the field of art and on various infrastructures at large. It is also a strategic proposition on how to envision a position for action and from which to gain leverage within the current neoliberal global context. Drawing from contemporary art, design and media theory on systemic thinking, and the post-contemporary time complex, the essay reflects on two personal projects: the exhibition space casamata (2014–2017), and the project TRAMA, developed for the 33rd São Paulo Biennial – Affective Affinities (2018). Favoring a speculative approach that tackles large-scale problematics and collective organization, it demonstrates how there are many potentialities contained in exhibition spaces and how such potentialities could, through an understanding of a contemporary art megastructure and art practice as infrastructural change, operate new experiments for the art system.

Author Biography

Luiza Crosman, Researcher at The Terraforming, Strelka Institut

Luiza Crosman was born in 1987, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Luiza Crosman is an artist and cultural producer currently based in Brazil. Her work spans installations, speculative design, education and institutional dynamics with special interest in diagrammatic and infrastructural methodologies. She has a background education in graphic design, an MA in Arts and culture (UERJ, 2014, Rio de Janeiro) and a post-Master’s in Performativity Studies (apass, Brussels 2017). In 2020 she was a researcher at The Terraforming - Strelka Institute (Moscow). Crosman has exhibited and developed projects with Wiels (Brussels, 2019), F.eks (Aalborg, 2019), Iselp, Greylight Projects, Constant, (Brussels 2017, 2016), KW (Berlin, 2017), CAC (Vilnius, 2017), CCSP (São Paulo, 2017) and SFMOMA (San Francisco, 2014), amongst others. She was part of the directorial team of the exhibition space casamata in Rio de Janeiro, 2014–2017. Recent projects include TRAMA, commissioned by the 33rd São Paulo Biennial, (São Paulo, 2018) and the educational platform BLOCC – Building Leverage Over Creative Capitalism, developed during the SommerAkademie Paul Klee fellowship (Bern, 2019).

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Published

2020-12-10