ARTEXT : La Biennale di Venezia
55 Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte
Giardini di Castello - Grecia

HISTORY ZERO
Stefanos Tsivopoulos

History Zero comprises a film of three episodes alongside an archive of text and images. The film questions the value of money and the role money plays in the formation of human relationships by depicting the experiences of three very different individuals; an elderly art collector suffering from dementia, an immigrant trawling the streets for scrap metal, and an artist taking snapshots of the city.

At the center of the installation will be an archive of examples and evidence from various models of alternative, non-monetary exchange systems. Rather than simply documenting these models, the archive stands as a political statement proposing a reformation towards autonomous communal patterns and forms of survival and resistance.

History Zero, specially commissioned for the Biennale, comes at a critical moment in contemporary Greek and European history. The artist views the culmination of the multi-layered crisis as an opportunity to interpret an alternative visualization of the future. History Zero implies not the end, but a point of departure, of recovery and growth: the beginning of something new. By approaching our relationship with money poetically, from a philosophical perspective, the artist proposes dynamic ways to reaffirm solidarity, cooperation and co-responsibility in response to the present crisis. The combination of the archive and films brings together the diverse culture surrounding economic exchange whilst challenging the social, political and performative aspect of alternative currency models.

The idea for the pavilion was obviously related to the crisis in Greece, but I wanted to make sure that the issue was analysed from a completely different perspective that prompted us to ponder and analyse economy, the value of money and our position in relation to that, Stefanos Tsivopoulos recounts. There was no point in showing the crisis in a way that victimises Greece or focusing on all the side effects that we have grown accustomed to know. So a key point for me was taking a step back from all this and wondering how a crisis is generated, what do we mean when we talk about it and what lies behind the very idea of crisis.

The crisis for me has to do with the change of value and the way we perceive or approach value: as the alternative currencies included in this part prove, value has been contested by different cultures, communities and societies, he states. This part of the pavilion is also a manifesto of our obsession with value in times of recession. The information on display propose an approach that goes beyond the historisation of economies and communities, Tsivopoulos points out.

It's easy to wonder if, after his research the artist may have found a way out of the global crisis. I'm not a politician so I wouldn't be able to answer this question, he promptly replies, but I conceive my work as looking inside myself and finding a relation between who I am and what is happening around me. What I can do is presenting my point of view through my work, being very honest with my critique and keeping on inspiring other ordinary human beings.

Curatori : Syrago Tsiara
Artisti : Stefanos Tsivopoulos

Web site : http://greeceatvenice.culture.gr/