Monday, January 30, 2006

Multiplicity

Multiplicity is an agency for territorial investigations based in Milan. The agency realizes projects in diverse areas of the world using multiple systems of analysis, surveying and representation. Multiplicity is an ever-changing network (actually involving 40/80 persons in 5 main projects) recruited in the actual geographical area of intervention. The network is formed by architects, geographers, artists, urban planners, photographers, sociologists, economists, moviemakers etc. Multiplicity projects and produces installations, workshops, and books about the recent and hidden processes of tranformation of the urban condition. Multiplicity detects the physical environment, researching clues and traces produced by new social behaviors. Realized projects include USE-Uncertain States of Europe (Bordeaux, Brussels, Tokyo), Tokyo Voids (Tokyo) and USE-The future of City Europe (Milan). Publications include Mutations (Actar), Mutations (TN Probe) and USE-The future of City Europe (Skira).

Exhibition: "Geography and the politics of mobility"

The exhibition pursues questions around the transformative quality of locations and geographies at a time when subjects are no longer bound to one particular place. Rather than focussing on the formation of dislocated subjectivities due to global migration or the participation in virtual world-wide activities, Geography and the Politics of Mobility will look at the way places are being constituted through them. One of the recurring questions will be how the human trajectories and the traffic of signs and visual information form particular cultural and social landscapes and inscribe themselves materially in the terrain.



Exhibition: archilab 2004

Exhibition: "On Mobility"

Exhibition: "Solid Sea 03 - The Road Map"

"Solid Sea 03 - The Road Map" is the result of an experiment carried out in the Jerusalem region. Members of Multiplicity accompanied, in one case by a person holding an Israeli passport and in the second a Palestinian, undertook two similar journeys. The first trip took one hour, the second more than five hours. These taxi journeys underline the extraordinary entanglement of zones, borders and control points which make this region one of the hardest in the world to inhabit.



Exhibition: "Tour-isms. The Defeat of Dissent"

"Tour-isms. The Defeat of Dissent" investigates different manifestations of tourism to work towards a critical analysis of the influence of this global phenomenon in contemporary society.



Gathering: KLARTEXT!

Klartext! The Status of the Political in Contemporary Art and Culture: A Series of Discussions with International Artists, Activists, Curators, and Theoreticians

This raises the questions: what levels do the social and political relevance of art operate on? Does the political content perhaps only satisfy the function of an alibi, with whose help the art market can clear its conscience? Does it make any sense at all to use art as a means to articulate social and political concerns? Can art be employed as an effective agent for the change or resistance to the hegemonic forces? Or is art doomed to be the decorative, irrelevant footnote to a power stronger than its own capacity for confrontation? What shapes should this kind of art assume? And in what context can it be most effective?

"Cartography of Excess : Bureau d'études, Multiplicity" / Brian Holmes

Multiplicity is a networked research team, exploring the European territory as it changes, in twenty-six different sites from Athens to Espoo, from Porto to Bucharest or Moscow. The basic premise is that borders are ungraspable, that architectural programs and urban limits are unstable - but everywhere, the subjective excess of "autopoetic innovations" creates recognizable patterns of change, at least for the observer who mingles with them....

Francesco Jodice is an architect, photographer and professor of Theory and Practice of the Technological Image at the University of Bolzano, Italy. He is a member of the group Multiplicity, an agency for territorial investigations based in Milan.