Formal Interference: A Public Art Project in Firenze 2014
Date uploaded: July 16, 2014
Creative Assult Art Production Organisation (CAAPO) will present the documentation of an international public art programme, collectively entitled 'Formal Interference', at Arcade Cardiff, Queens Arcade, Cardiff from Thursday the 17th of July 2014, from 6pm to 8pm. Featuring a variety of new works by Kathryn Ashill, Lee Campbell, Jamie Davies, John O’Hare, Paul Rooney, Spazi Docili & Brychan Tudor and exploring themes of appropriation, contamination and corruption - the exhibition will be open from Thursday to Sunday each week, between the hours of 11am and 4pm, up until the 27th of July 2014.
In May 2014, CAAPO selected a group of Welsh & UK based artists to carry out a public art project in Florence over a 15 day period. The project, partnered by Florentine public-art organisation Spazi Docili (www.spazidocili.org), included 8 newly commissioned public artworks and an associated events programme featuring workshops, film screenings and dialogue events. The public works were produced, documented and edited by CAAPO and the resulting footage was curated across a two-floor exhibition at Le Murate Progetti Arte Contemporanea
(a working prison until 1990’s).
This project aimed to resist and challenge the legitimacy of an aestheticizing rhetoric that can be insidiously authoritative. 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.
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. It aims to create and promote 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.
