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Set Up at Punta della Dogana. A multidisciplinary experience, a curatorial perspective
On the occasion of its fourth edition, curator Enrico Bettinello proposes an analysis of the curatorial approach in the design and presentation of the site-specific event Set Up.

Abstract

The article proposes an analysis of the curatorial approach in the design and presentation of Set Up, a biennial event promoted and hosted by the Fondazione François Pinault Palazzo Grassi - Punta della Dogana, which aims to build a participatory dramaturgy and a relationship with a museum space temporarily devoid of tangible artworks. The survey reveals the curatorial strategies that substantiate this activity from aesthetic, conceptual and productive points of view, putting them in dialogue with the current curating trends in performing and live arts, which in recent years have meet the new needs of museums and art galleries and are giving rise to an increasingly rich theoretical corpus. The essay highlights how the selected and commissioned performances at each edition of Set Up build a dimension in which hierarchies and distances between performers and spectators are continually negotiated to generate a "redistribution of attention", encouraging the creation of a sense of belonging in a community of spectators rather than conforming to an exhibition space.


The Punta della Dogana Museum is located in the premises of the seventeenth-century Dogana da Mar of the Serenissima Republic, wedged into St. Mark’s Basin at the confluence of the Grand Canal and the Giudecca Canal. Reinvented by architect Tadao Ando in 2008-2009 through a daring encounter of old and new, the Museum area was obtained by crafting a space - delimited by reinforced concrete walls - inside the pre-existing ancient structure.

Punta della Dogana © Palazzo Grassi, ph: Andrea Jemolo

In recent years, the curatorship of both the performing and live arts has been rapidly transformed and increasingly oriented towards a dynamic theoretical reference framework, which is finding its place within the offer of specialisation and higher education. Moreover, the process of art-world globalisation and the professional dynamics of the 21st century clearly render the strategic complexity of this activity, in which theory and criticism, analysis and training, staging and reflection on public spaces overlap and merge.

It is in this perspective that the experience of Set Up is framed, a biennial event of which I am co-curator alongside a team from the François Pinault Palazzo Grassi - Punta della Dogana Foundation. The discourse will be developed not only from an aesthetic and conceptual point of view, but also from a productive one, focusing in particular on events of choreographic and performative nature, on the role of the audience and on the relationship between the different performances. I will highlight how a design action of this kind succeeds, by acting on a continuous reinvention of the sense of space and time, in redefining the very idea of the relationship between performer and observer, creating a renewed sense of opportunity of fruition and redistribution of attention, instead of imposing a performative mode in space.

Since the 1970s, by shifting the focus from collections to visitors, the museum world began a significant transformation.

Since the 1970s, by shifting the focus from collections to visitors, the museum world began a significant transformation. With the intention of putting an end to the museum’s traditional elitism (perceived or real) in favour of a broader accessibility to what continue to be public spaces, a theoretical and design reflection known as the “new museology”1 was initiated. Nowadays, this is a stimulating basis for rethinking both the experience within exhibitions and the programming proposals that consider the centrality of the visitor.

As Claire Bishop underlines:

“The migration of the performing arts to the museum and gallery should therefore be read not (just) as a cynical attempt on the part of museums to attract audiences, but as a direct consequence of the white cube and the black box changing under the pressure of new technology and eventually converging to produce a hybrid apparatus.”2

Intervening in a museum that does not necessarily need to contain artworks to take on its full meaning - given the scale of Ando’s intervention, even in its essentiality -, the artists and choreographers were offered the opportunity for a layered, site-specific reflection. Thus, the dynamic balance between exhibition and architectural space was further enhanced and presented to the public in a sort of multidimensional potential. Victoria Hunter points out:

“[...] considering the relationship or interface between site and choreographer as one which combines a socially constructed space with a personally constructed one, we can begin to see how the dance performance can serve to ‘re-inscribe’ the space, thus challenging the context, dominant ideology and perception of a particular space or site.”3

In this regard, the overall experience of a multiform flux capable of igniting expected and unexpected relationships has led to placing each “event” - including the apparently secondary moments of the evening - on the same level in order to stimulate everyone’s sensitivity towards the different directions of movement and perceptions of the passage of time. Even the socialising dynamics at the bar - set up for the occasion - delineated an additional time in which the perception of distance and participation of what was happening in the adjacent space was grafted.

The dynamic balance between exhibition and architectural space was further enhanced and presented to the public in a sort of multidimensional potential.

Since the beginning, we have chosen not to place seats inside the rooms in which the performances take place in order to favour not only the relationship between performance and spectators, but also between performer and architectural space, between performance and performance, and between spectators and architectural space. These opportunities created a series of dynamics that soon revealed themselves as the “core” of the project. They allowed the audience to move and position themselves freely in the various rooms, and thus to take “responsibility”of their gaze and relationship with the performative moment. This freedom also enabled them to consider all performances on the same hierarchical level. This element was highlighted starting from the communication campaign, which included in the promotional materials the name of all the artists, both known and less known, in fonts of the same size.

From a curatorial perspective, the choice of spaces in relation to the needs and possible flows of visitors/spectators was also particularly interesting.

From a curatorial perspective, the choice of spaces in relation to the needs and possible flows of visitors/spectators was also particularly interesting. The museum, as conceived by Ando on the basis of the original building and thus with its gradual narrowing towards the “tip”, consists of a series of spaces of significantly different sizes. It is characterised by two large “halls” and other smaller ones distributed on two floors around a central cubic space. The need to limit the project to a part of the museum space was essential not only to allow the Foundation to use the other rooms for the storage of artworks, but also to use them as artists’ dressing rooms, catering, technical equipment storage, as well as to avoid the inevitable dispersion of the flow of spectators even where there was no possibility of activating a performative sign.

Punta della Dogana © Palazzo Grassi, ph: Andrea Jemolo

Pedestrians define urban space by transiting through it, and so did the visitors when they entered the venues of Punta della Dogana without respecting their pre-existing order and their implicit interdictions as exhibition spaces.

The two large initial naves (henceforth Nave 1 and Nave 2) and the central Cube were therefore identified as performance spaces. The latter was created by Ando as a striking geometric gesture in the middle of the building’s triangular plan, representing a sort of crossroads of all the passages leading to the renovated spaces. Thanks to its proximity to the space of the bar, the Cube offered both a meeting and a performance space, as if to replicate the very nature of the Venetian urban fabric. More than elsewhere, in Venice it is easy to observe how the transits and movements of people activate and shape occupied space.4 Pedestrians define urban space by transiting through it, and so did the visitors when they entered the venues of Punta della Dogana without respecting their pre-existing order and their implicit interdictions as exhibition spaces. Visitors were enabled to explore the museum by taking different directions, opening up an unpredictable and transformative experience. By unravelling the legible surfaces of an architecture that is so linear yet still complex (precisely because it is in dialogue with the historical stratifications of the building and the city in which it is inserted), the visitor roamed the space and at the same time opened it up to an unexpected discontinuity, making it possible for multiple spaces to exist within it because of their subjectivity.5

The visitor roamed the space and at the same time opened it up to an unexpected discontinuity, making it possible for multiple spaces to exist within it because of their subjectivity.

In this new experience of the architectural and exhibition space, which constitutes both the framework and the backbone of the entire Set Up programme, the logic of site-specific performances is embedded. By further redefining both the physical and perceptual limits of the context, this logic generates a system in which performance, setting, and creative and production processes coexist.6 The shift of attention from architecture to setting and event implies the construction of a new dimension in which space and people, walls and bodies, movement and dance, architecture and choreography become reciprocal constituent elements.7

Set Up 2018 © Palazzo Grassi, ph: Matteo De Fina

Evan Parker (soprano sax solo), Navaridas & Deutinger (performance), Balletto di Roma (dance), Alva Noto (electronics), Amuleto (music), DJ Spiller and Mount Kimbie (DJ-set) were the guests of the first edition on February 19 & 20, 2016.8 The performances by Navaridas & Deutinger - two performances, one per evening, the second under the name of Deutinger & Gottfarb, which required a theatrical type of frontality - as well as Alva Noto’s audio/video performance were placed in Nave 2, providing the audience with an experience more similar to that of a traditional “concert”, with a performance space on the floor (no stage) and a large auditorium.

By placing the two performers in the centre of the cube, the audience - who had already experienced the Cube as an informal meeting space - could arrange themselves freely.

The Cube space, which became increasingly important in subsequent editions, was the location of the performance by the Amuleto9 duo - Riccardo Wanke and Francesco Dillon -, characterised by music with a strong evocative value - thanks to the combination of cello and electronics - and a need for a greater intimacy of fruition.By placing the two performers in the centre of the cube, the audience - who had already experienced the Cube as an informal meeting space - could arrange themselves freely. They could choose either to be extremely close to the two musicians or to position themselves behind one of the large columns, thus deliberately taking away the visual aspect of the performance.

Evan Parker10 and four dancers of Balletto di Roma were instead given total freedom of movement within the space. In the absence of a clear delimitation of the performance space, of a shared proxemics in real time, this established an ever-moving, negotiated relationship with the spectators. Real time is not the only performative temporality that is activated by the project. From the moment they enter the museum, at the beginning of the evening or even in the middle of a performance, the spectators can explore a series of temporal possibilities: the time of the performance created by the artists, the downtime between a performance and the subsequent one, the time of sociability, the time of transitions from one place to another, the time of the exhibition space loaded with the traces of the works that inhabited it, the time perceived by the performers and the audience as a spatial dimension to be crossed.

Set Up 2018 © Palazzo Grassi, ph: Matteo De Fina

The performance brought bodies, styles of movement, memories, histories and gendered identities that still struggle to find space and recognition within museums and institutions together into the exhibition space.

In the 2018 edition,11 held on February 23 & 24,12 -with guests including Laibach, Collettivo Cinetico, Alessandro Sciarroni and Ernst Reijseger, among others -, while maintaining its already established “narrative” framework, we decided to develop the project in a direction that would allow us to experiment both with the different reaction capacities of spaces and to give artists the opportunity to shape the site-specific approach inherent to existing works.

By hosting three different musical performances, Ooopopoiooo,13 the Sequoyah Tiger duo14 and the German drummer and singer Chris Imler, the Cube space turned out to be a sort of area of total emotional sharing. The lack of a stage and the close contact between the performer and the spectators, who often “invaded” his ideal space while dancing around him, constituted in fact a sort of introductory “ritual” to the final DJ sets - Mouse on Mars, Herbert - hosted in the more ‘traditional’ space of Nave 2.

In the third edition,15 held onFebruary 7 & 8, 2020,16 a few weeks before the Coronavirus pandemic lockdown, while maintaining the basic structure of the spaces (also because of technical/performance requirements), we focused on strengthening possible connections - of theme, meaning, sign - between the performances. From the very beginning of the evening, the voice/electronic duo WOWAWIWA17 - a project by the Swedish choreographer Alma Söderberg - provided the audience with an element of unexpected performativity and physical involvement in the Cube. This “temperature” and sharing of physicality remained virtually unchanged during the subsequent #PUNK performance by Zimbabwean choreographer Nora Chipaumire. The performance brought bodies, styles of movement, memories, histories and gendered identities that still struggle to find space and recognition within museums and institutions together into the exhibition space. In terms of themes and gestures, Chipaumire’s performance resonated with that of the dark-rap Afrofuturist Moor Mother18 who took place the following evening in the Cube, with a strong involvement - sometimes theatrically and deliberately provocative - of spectators. It also echoed the DJ-set of only original African tapes by Awesome Tapes From Africa19 (also in the Cube), the concert by the Syrian artist Omar Souleyman, characterised by an iconic theatricality reminiscent of Middle Eastern wedding parties, and the final DJ-set by the Palestinian performer Sama’.

Set Up 2020 © Palazzo Grassi, ph: Matteo De Fina

The idea of traversal and repetition of the choreographic gesture had already been presented in Nave 1 in previous editions and was later outlined by the performance Bermudas by the MK Group. In this case, the choreographic structure of the show suggested an interpretation of the transitions and movements of the dancers that also fits perfectly with those of the spectators.

Choreography is a highly effective tool for making complex concepts tangible and visible, to stimulate a perception of space as a dimension in which anyone can feel welcome and participate.

The idea that choreography is a highly effective tool for making complex concepts tangible and visible and thus, articulating new and unexplored uses of space and time, underlied the decision to place Bermudas at the heart of the first evening. Its quality as a “project of encounter and mediation between individuals that can be the most disparate”20 and the ability of its choreographic structure to stimulate a perception of space as a dimension in which anyone can feel welcome and participate, played a pivotal role in conveying the sense of the entire event. By generating a dance that continually allows someone else’s dance to find space, thanks to the performers’ repeated entrances and exits from the stage area, Bermudas acts as an inclusive and permeable system that introduces “different points of view on the use of space”21 and that produces, as Michele Di Stefano specifies, a proxemics between bodies and a way of perceiving dance as a collective ritual.22 In this case, choreography becomes a project of encounter and mediation between individuals who can be “the most disparate and the farthest apart in terms of attitude, gestural organisation and expressive intensity”.23 At Punta della Dogana, individuals were thus free to arrange themselves in order to build their own relationship with the performers and to articulate the space with their moving bodies.

Individuals were thus free to arrange themselves in order to build their own relationship with the performers and to articulate the space with their moving bodies.

The idea of the Cube as a place for a “sheltered” ritual that preludes to the large-scale sharing experience of the concerts and DJ-sets at the end of the evening - along with the aforementioned performances of Souleyman and Sama’ and the one by Kelly Lee Owens - was immediately confirmed in this edition. In both evenings, the kinetic-emotional tension instantly reached a very high level compared to the previous editions, remaining substantially unchanged for the entire duration of the event. This trend partly contradicted the curatorial dramaturgy, which envisaged a more gradual increase in the “temperature”.

Set Up 2020 © Palazzo Grassi, ph: Matteo De Fina

The creation of “democratic spaces somehow removed from the patriarchy of the theatrical separation of audience and event",24 as Thomas F. DeFrantz effectively defines them, finds in the Set Up experience at Punta della Dogana a declination that aims to activate new dynamics of attention and fruition of both museum space and performance. The multidisciplinary approach makes it possible to construct a participatory dramaturgy for the evenings, during which the community of spectators is granted not only an awareness of the centrality of their own perspective, but a certain degree of intimacy. Reconnecting to the relational aesthetics theorised by Nicolas Borriaud, who encourages museum visitors to perceive their own presence of the artistic object and to consider their own presence as essential to the possibilities of art, the spectators of Set Up were invited to place themselves in a situation of total openness towards the sign - choreographic, sonorous, verbal, visual - with which they came into contact, autonomously regulating the degree of intensity of their participation and proximity to the artists and the other spectators. The typology of the selected performances and the space-time arrangement of the events throughout the evening were in fact intended to reduce the sense of inadequacy - by thematising it under track - that can arise when confronted with complex performance languages in a more codified framework. In the spaces of the British gallery The Hepworth Wakfield, during an interview with Sara Wookey on the project YARD 1961/2014 (revival of a work by Allan Kaprow), curator Andrew Bonacina states in this regard:

"It is taken for granted that when you take something off the stage of a theatre you release it from the codes that govern that space. However, I would like to point out that a gallery also has codes, to an equal and perhaps even greater extent than a theatre space.”25

Set Up 2020 © Palazzo Grassi, ph: Matteo De Fina

As Erin Joelle McCurdy notes, while in modern and contemporary art museums performances have often been fruitfully used “to mediate exhibitions, enhance the visitor experience and provide opportunities for participation (and in some cases co-creation)”,26 being in a museum space without artworks puts the visitors/spectators in an “ideal” rather than real relationship with the museum experience. They move through spaces that, depending on their previous direct experiences, they know or imagine as inhabited by material works of art and performances, presences-absences stratified in time. Thanks to the participation of the audience, these presences-absences remain immersed in a continuum in which an emotional - and always subjective - stratification of signs is inscribed.

Set Up’s performances construct a dimension in which hierarchies and distances between performers and spectators are continually negotiated.

In their study on the behaviour of the public in the presence of a performance as compared to a material work of art, Peter Tolmie and Gabriella Giannachi underline that it is at the moment in which visitors encounter the dance that they “reconstitute themselves as spectators.” Only when they have understood that they have become spectators “a whole series of different behaviours come into play.”27

The audience’s experience at Punta della Dogana - immersed in a flow of events, of full and empty times and spaces - is mediated by this plurality of exhibition and representation, museum and theatre codes, more or less evident and more or less perceived in different situations. On the whole, Set Up’s performances construct a dimension in which hierarchies and distances between performers and spectators are continually negotiated in order to generate a “redistribution of attention” and favour the creation of a sense of belonging to a community of spectators rather than conformity to an exhibition space.



Excerpted and adapted from Bettinello, E. (2020). Set Up a Punta della Dogana. Un’esperienza multidisciplinare, una prospettiva curatoriale. Danza E Ricerca. Laboratorio Di Studi, Scritture, Visioni12(12), 297–308. English translation by Isabella Favero.

Set Up is realised by François Pinault Palazzo Grassi - Punta della Dogana Foundation with the independent curator Enrico Bettinello and, for the first time this year, in collaboration with Terraforma Festival. The fourth edition will take place within the spaces of Punta della Dogana on February 3 & 4, 2023. For further information on the event, please check Palazzo Grassi official website.

Bio

Enrico Bettinello (Venice, 1971) is a music and performing arts curator, professor, writer and cultural manager. After having directed Teatro Fondamenta Nuove and the European Institute of Design in Venice, he currently teaches Elements of Theatre and Live Art Production at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, Music Production at the Master in Arts Management of Università Cattolica in Milano and History of Jazz at Venice Conservatory. He is part of the board of directors of Europe Jazz Network and project manager and scientific board member for I-Jazz (the Italian National Jazz Festivals Association). He is a board member of Santa Marta Theatre at Ca’ Foscari University. Enrico also works as a curator for NovaraJazz (we-start production center, residencies and interdisciplinary projects), Pro-Helvetia, Centro Santa Chiara in Trento (as creator and director of New Echoes project), Palazzo Grassi/Punta della Dogana in Venice and TBA21 Academy/Ocean Space (as co-curator and host of podcast Nowtilus).

Notes
1 Max Ross, Interpreting the ‘New Museology’, in "Museum and Society", n. 2, 2004, pp. 84–103.
2 Claire Bishop, Black Box, White Cube, Gray Zone: Dance Exhibitions and Audience Attention, in "TDR/The Drama Review", n. 2, 2018, 2018, p. 31.
3 Victoria Hunter, Experiencing Space. The Implications for Site-specific Dance Performance, in Contemporary Choreography: A Critical Reader, edited by Jo Butterworth e Liesbeth Wildschut, Routledge, London, pp. 399-415.
4 Henry Lefevre, The Production of Space, Blackwell, Oxford, 1991 (ed. or. La Production de l'espace, Anthropos, Paris, 1974).
5 Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley, University of California Press 1984 (ed. or. L’invention du quotidien. I., Arts de faire, Paris, UGE, 1980).
6 For site-specific, see in particular Nick Kaye, Site Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation, Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2000; Mike Pearson in Site-Specific Performance, Macmillan Education UK, 2010; Victoria Hunter, Moving Sites. Investigating Site-Specific Dance Performance, Routledge, London, 2015.
7 Rachel Sara and Alice Sara, Between Dance and Architecture, in Victoria Hunter, Moving Sites, cit., p. 64.
8 To get an overview of the event: https://youtu.be/5MVnH1VUK00
9 http://www.amuleto.in/home.html
10 http://evanparker.com/
11 https://www.palazzograssi.it/it/eventi/tutti/set-up-second-edition/
12 You can find a video summary here: https://youtu.be/5CTLBtGgz_M
13 https://ooopopoiooo.bandcamp.com/.
14 https://sequoyahtiger.bandcamp.com/.
15 https://www.palazzograssi.it/it/eventi/tutti/set-up-1/.
16 To get an overview of the event: [link]
17 https://almasoderberg.se/work/wowawiwa.
18 https://moormother.bandcamp.com/
19 https://www.awesometapes.com/
20 https://www.mkonline.it/Bermudas.html
21 Ibidem.
22 Ibidem.
23 Ibidem.
24 Thomas F. DeFrantz, Dancing the Museum, in Curating Live Arts, Critical Perspectives, Essays, and Conversations on Theory and Practice, edited by Dena Davida, Marc Pronovost, Véronique Hudon, Jane Gabriels, Berghahn, New York 2019, p. 90.
25 Sara Wookey (edited by), Who Cares? Dance in the Gallery & Museum, Siobhan Davies Dance, Londra 2015, p. 11.
26 Erin Joelle McCurdy, Exhibiting Dance, Performing Objects: Cultural Mediation In The Museum, in Curating Live Arts, Berghahn, New York 2019, p. 252.
27 Gabriella Giannachi and P. Tolmie, On Becoming an Audience: If Tate Modern was Musée de la danse?, in Boris Charmatz, MoMa, New York 2017, p. 101.

Published
03 Feb 2023
Reading time
20 minutes
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