Grid - The Freedom Festival
Tomorrow
During April 1939, the New York World's Fair 'Building The World of Tomorrow' opened on what was once a wasteland, just east of the great metropolis. Wedged between the greatest economic disaster in America and the growing international tension that would result in World War II, the Fair promoted the unqualified belief in science and technology as a meaning of economic and personal freedom. Under the title of 'tomorrow' were thus placed the terms of a market-oriented future in which happiness is reached through economic prosperity and endless exchange of products.
The 1939's edition closed just as 'The World of Tomorrow' was turned into 'For Peace and Freedom' in 1940 , a fair to celebrate the new supposed international cooperation. This new title acknowledged the fact that goods and ethical values are two faces of the same coin. Moreover this freedom festival established the tendency toward the dispossession of the cultural production by liberal market logic. As stated, culture was no longer a question of political relevance, but the vanguard policy of economical interests.
Today
To start a production process means to consider the context in which one wants to operate - its rules, functions and distribution possibilities - as well as desired meanings and goals, and the possibility that they are beyond our reach. Freedom Festival is a video-lecture conceived as a short recognition of basic principles that should guide art production and define it as such. A juxtaposition of found footage and silent text, the lecture attempts to reintroduce primary questions concerning the art field in a simple way. Some questions that arise from an overproduction of aesthetic imaginaries in the shadow of bourgeois collectors and business interests, are 'What is art for?' And 'What is the function of art in contemporary society?'
GRID is a collaboration between Paolo Caffoni (Italy 1984) and Jose Roberto Shwafaty (Brasil 1977). Started in 2008 in Milan, and now based between Berlin and San Paolo, GRID works in the fields of critical design, political economy and distribution possibilities, through the production of lectures, publications, art projects and curatorship.