ROME.- Spazi Aperti : THE VAGABOND CAN'T DRAW proposes a theme centered around the notion of the border, seen as a complicated platform where identities clash or mingle.

Territorial borders are symbolic sites of power. They mark the subtle division between inside and outside, consequently determining who is included and who is excluded. Borders, those meandering creases dividing the surface of the earth, are drawn by powers. People inside are manipulated by the same governing powers.

Borders are sometimes fluid sites where various identities merge. At the same time, borders are solid demarcations that can be imagined like walls, built by nations as supreme separation from one another. As walls are obstinately still being erected, they are also continuously being torn down. With or without walls, mobility has always been a problematic act. Some people can decide when, where and under what circumstances to move or travel. These people are tourists. Others have difficulties in the sense of being forced to move away because of wars or famine. Zygmunt Bauman calls them vagabonds. This duality is part of a discourse on power.

Tourists and vagabonds, two sides of the same coin, today in a constant danger of exchanging roles due to global imbalances, are structural elements of the discourse on power, viewed both from a historical as well as from a contemporary perspective. Power is the entity that manipulates and determines identities. While the work of power during modernism engaged in a centripetal motion in order to build fixed identities, today the intervention of power is centrifugal, aiming to create mobile identities, identities in a continuous transition.

All the artists in the exhibition investigate the discourse on power through various game strategies. They inhabit territories with specific rules for entry. The public should be manipulated by these rules in the same way powers determine freedom of movement in the world.

The public will be granted a visa upon entrance into the space of the Romanian Academy (representing actual Romanian land, the gate marks a physical border between extraterritorial space/Italian and the Romanian territory). The public will receive a green or a red visa/ticket for entry according to surprise principles, and will proceed for the trajectory of the exhibition accordingly.