ROSKILDE.- What happens when you stop thinking through the white cube and start thinking through the city instead?

This question lies at the heart of Civis Bloomcraft, a new exhibition protocol created by the transdisciplinary art collective Apparatus 22 based in Brussels, Bucharest and Suprainfinit utopian universe.

Civis Bloomcraft is a living script, a set of instructions and conceptual challenges that prompts the Museum of Contemporary Art Roskilde to reimagine, rethink and reorganize what we might call standard procedures for curating, commissioning and many other aspects of museum’s activities. It invites the museum to bloom across urban and private spaces into a construct that is tentacular, nomadic and ever-morphing by dissolving institutional boundaries and embracing the complexity of the city as a site of aesthetic, social and political resonance.

Excerpt from the protocol:

“Civis Bloomcraft is thinking through the city. While a city can be nurturing and inspiring, it can also be merciless, indifferent, easily rendering things and efforts invisible, therefore a Civis Bloomcraft solo exhibition should be a crafted mix of artworks unfolding in different registers of visibility and engagement.

By operating in the city, outside the institution, Civis Bloomcraft is for the artists and the museum an amazing chance to evade the art bubble. As a gesture of citizenship, Civis Bloomcraft is giving the artist and the museum the possibility to hear what the city wants by working with ‘The Local Council’ – a group of 5-7 citizens not involved with art.”

Rooted in the 1960’s Fluxus-movement, the Museum of Contemporary Art Roskilde holds a noteworthy collection of sound, performance, hybrid and transient works of art. With the acquisition of Civis Bloomcraft the museum welcomes into the collection both an immaterial work and an engaging, expansive and community-based exhibition concept, with a commitment to recreate it every three years with new artists.

The inaugural edition of Civis Bloomcraft taking place between May 15 – June 28 is unfolded by Apparatus 22 in three acts of performances, installations, riddles, conversations, otherworldly exchanges and engagement with Roskilde and its citizens.

Apparatus 22

Founded in 2011 by Maria Farcas, Dragos Olea, Erika Olea together with Ioana Nemes (1979–2011), Apparatus 22 is a group of daydreamers, citizens of many realms, researchers, poetic activists, and (failed) futurists. For Apparatus 22 everything is up for negotiation and reinterpretation – drawn to the tangled knots between economy, politics, gender, and social movements they try to make sense of the now and imagine better futures.

Their work spans installations, performances, and text-based forms that weave reality with fiction, storytelling with critique. They draw freely from design, sociology, literature, and economics to shape a practice that’s as poetic as it is analytical and presented across public and private spaces throughout a myriad of formats.

The first edition of Civis Bloomcraft with Apparatus 22 is supported by New Carlsberg Foundation, Danish Arts Foundation and The Obel Family Foundation.