Formal Interference: A CAAPO Public Art Project
Date uploaded: November 6, 2013
CAAPO is a not-for-profit art production organisation, based in Cardiff: The organisation was formed in May 2009 and is co-ordinated and directed by Brychan Tudor, Jamie Davies and Lee Campbell. CAAPO aim to create and promote ambitious works that push the boundaries of their subject matter; reaching a diverse public audience through a challenging programme that showcases art with an international perspective.
Formal Interference Project: This is an international public art project planned to take place in Florence in 2014. CAAPO has selected a group of UK based artists who will be travelling to Florence to make a series of temporary public artworks. The documentation of these artworks will be housed in an exhibition at Le Murate, an old prison complex converted for cultural use in Florence. The project is supported by Wales Arts International and Florence Department of Culture.
Project Concept: This project - Formal Interference - aims to resist and challenge the legitimacy of an aestheticizing rhetoric that can be insidiously authoritative. Collaborating artists have been selected on the quality and background of their practice: CAAPO are proposing an international public art programme including a variety of new works exploring themes of appropriation, contamination and corruption.
Commercial and news media aestheticize messages from all spheres of the public domain. Events are relayed equally regardless of their substance; the recipient is distanced from the real impact of the information and in effect disempowered.
Disempowerment increases as personal, public, virtual, textual and narrative spaces are transformed into aesthetic spaces. In order to undo and undermine such techniques of control it is necessary for the artist to reclaim aesthetic language from unfavourable associations with
commercialism and escapism.
Critical attention to the subtleties of form can expose how the aggressive transmission of information elicits certain behaviours and responses: It is through intervention and the introduction of disruptive elements that the fiction of authenticity can be exposed and overthrown.
Formal Interference is a CAAPO Project built in association with Spazi Docili (Florence based Italian Public Art Organisation) & the former Curators of Wolstenholme Projects (John O’Hare & Gordon Culshaw), which ran as a gallery in Liverpool City Centre between 2006-10, exhibiting a programme including the work of established national and international artists (such as Keren Cytter, Mark Lewis, Paul Rooney, Jordan Baseman and Wolfgang Tilmans), whilst offering an exhibition platform for arts-collectives (such as the Centre of Attention, London and Stand Assembly/Moot, Nottingham) and emerging artists.
Formal Interference is supported & hosted by Spazi Docili: www.spazidocili.org
