FAQ NET: Part I – dreamideamachine ART VIEW

FAQ NET: It is the name of the new column that we start as Media Partners on a regular basis of Platforms Project-Independent Art Fair, asking a common question to participating artists – representatives of artistic groups and collectives, resulting from the needs of conteporary reality and the changes that have already occurred after the Covid 19 Pandemic and the Global Lockdown; with Platforms Project-Independent Art Fair to pioneer in the European Art Fair space and to transfer the entire fair online at Platforms Project Net 2020 (14-31/5/2020).

By Efi Michalarou & Dimitris Lempesis

How do you feel participating in an online Art Fair like Platforms Project 2020? A new experience that emerged through the needs of Covid 19 World Pandemic fighting. What are the new challenges and what do you expect from this participation?

Guillaume Krick (Bureau d’Art et de Recherche, Roubaix): The pandemic undermines the independent art scene, already a fragile eco-system. Yet, culture is a necessity, not a luxury. Obviously, the Platforms board could have chosen to cancel the fair. Their resilience that maintains an online edition makes me enthousiastic : lockdown doesn’t mean standstill. Despite of an incertain future, we artists are still here, still creating, wishing our work to be presented. After all, artistic innovations often come out of critical periods of history. The virtue of online broadcast lies in the network. In the current circumstances where viewers won’t be physically present, the challenge for the online edition is to catch a wider public interested in emerging artists. This way, they’ll be given the chance to see many artist’s work and get in contact with them. As this fair doesn’t aim to show blue chip artists but is part of an international emerging scene, if each gallery makes an extra effort to bring their followers online, we can expect to have an effect of overlapping the audiences from each country or platform represented. This’ll be a great opportunity to overcome the relative geographic isolation artists can experience when not living in a hotspot of contemporary art.

Topp & Dubio, from “Topp & Dubio in a street”, 2016-20, The Hague

Topp & Dubio (Topp & Dubio – The Hague) : As artists we have a rather strong preference for problematic situations. We simply cannot live without them. If we don’t encounter ambiguous or problematic situations, we usually create them ourselves. Last year we participated in Platforms Project with the installation “Sorry Closed” which dealt with our non existing relationship with Greece and how to start a dialogue on new territory. We never expected that the project title ‘Sorry Closed´ would become prophetic for this year’s edition. But we believe that the new situation will deepen our relationship with Platforms Project, just like we deepened our internal collaboration within Topp & Dubio by overcoming different periods of crisis. Our contribution to the online edition of Platforms Project NET is dedicated to our earlier project “0,00” which happened Minsk, Belarus in 2016. It was a period of artistic and personal crisis which became an art project about the lack of inspiration and the possibility of artists to be non productive. In the same year, we made weekly pictures of ourselves as ‘unemployed artists’ in the empty streets of The Hague, where we live. These randomly shot photographs are now being shown as a Covid-19 crisis art project in public space in The Hague simultaneously to Platforms in Greece. This is how we deal with the different crises. We create connections in time and space to a reinforce our energy and power to act. Just like Platforms does. We are sure something new will arise from this occasion.

Media Partner on a regular basis of Platforms Project-Independent Art Fair