MILAN, ITALY.- The association Isola dell'Arte presents: Revolution Is On Hold - A project by Adrian Paci
in collaboration with Accademia Carrara di Belle Arti di Bergamo. Works by Tania Bruguera (Cuba), Johanna Billing (Sweden), Carey Young (England), Emma Ciceri (Italy), Mircea Cantor (Romania), Dan Perjovschi (Romania), Armand Lulja (Albania), on view March 4th-13th 2005.

"A spectre is haunting Europe"... and plenty of time has passed since Marx and Engels wrote the Manifesto of the Communist Party, starting with that now famous phrase. Enough time for the spectre introduced by the fathers of the theory of class struggle to become first an ideal to follow, a project to realize, an idea of power to be maintained, and then an evil requiring elimination. In any case the spectre isn't what it used to be. It has lost something of its charm, as well as its menacing air. Today Europe not appear to be the setting where the destinies of the near future will be determined, and the world itself, hurtling toward a definitive, inevitable globalization, seems to be threatened by other looming phantoms.
What has happened? Is it possible that the spectre evoked by Marx and Engels has vanished into thin air? Is revolution still a possible prospect, or has it become a tame idea, obeying the rules of power, a topic for discussion at cocktail parties (on the left), a utopian goal to soothe the critical conscience as one lives capitalist reality to the fullest? An art show cannot attempt to provide answers to these questions. But it can become a place for reflection, an encounter of works that establish a dialogue and stimulate cross-interpretations.

At the same time out, the Office for Urban Tranformation presents three facets of the Stecca degli Artigiani building: the surveying, the photographs by Alessandro di Giampietro and the drawings by Marco Colombaioni.
The laboratorio workshop presents a patchwork of small-format art works.

The works - Revolution is on hold, Tania Bruguera tells us in her work. The phrase simultaneously suggests the presence and the absence of revolution, its state of suspension in a situation of ambiguity and contradiction.

Johanna Billing presents a university classroom full of young people, in an atmosphere somewhere between tension and expectation that something will happen. There is no action, just exchanged glances. The only sounds come from a copy machine. The rest is silence, waiting, yet the title seems to offer a key of interpretation: Project for a Revolution.

I am a revolutionary: in this video the artist himself, Carey Young, pronounces this phrase, but instead of being in a public square for a demonstration, he is in an office, being coached by a communications expert on the most convincing way to make the "slogan" work. The takes are endless, once, twice, three, ten times...

A train full of young people is heading to Rome for a large antiwar demonstration. But the protesters are all sleeping, the compartments, the corridors, the passageways are packed with bodies, sleeping so soundly that it seems as if a bad fairy had cast an evil spell over them all. This is a work by the young Italian artist Emma Ciceri. The title reports the date of the event: 23 Marzo 2004.

A group of demonstrators also forms the subject of the work by Rumenian artist Mircea Cantor. But instead of the traditional banners, they are holding mirrors to reflect the space around them. The posters seem to have nothing to say to the city. Instead, they just reflect its details, at times distorting their contours.

Dan Perjovschi shows a series of 50 drawings. They are cartoons of subtle but pointed irony, about the contemporary situation and its socio-political dynamics, revealing our poorly concealed complicity in the processes of submission. For example, one of the phrases is: "The cold war is over and I got a flu"...

Living in Memory is the title of the work by the Albanian artist Armand Lulaj. A giant star burns at the top of a mountain while we watch the show, without knowing if the figure is being burned as a protest against it, or as a way of enhancing it with the firelight. The structure burns until it is destroyed before our eyes. We are left there like orphans in search of another symbol, another flag, in any case another idea with which to go forward, until... And here Tania Bruguera arrives to warn us: Until the unreachable victory.