Isola Art Center and Tovarna Rog project

Art Center in Italy, Milano would like to plan a project on TovarnaRog and its members.
The following document explains the main idea and its origin.

This project comes out from a series of cases of the fate (typical Italian expression, hope it can be understood in English too!)
In the last early autumn I found myself reading a women’s magazine while waiting for a friend, in my studio. This magazine contained an article about “Izbrisani” and their history.
At the end of the article the journalist said that they are used to meet in a “non formal” place, named “Rog” that is an old abandoned bicycles factory somewhere in Slovenia.
Suddenly I was caught by the gravity of the Izbrisani’s situation and wanted to do something about it with my activity as an artist to let their voices come out from the boundaries.
In the beginning I was just trying to find out where’s this place (Tovarna Rog) in which they meet themselves, just to have a point to reach them.
Then, after a while I found out this TovarnaRog website and started to read about it.
And you know what happened??
The place I’m working in as a volunteer here in Milano, Italy, is totally the twin of TovarnaRog!
The same.
It’s named “Isola Art and Community Center” but the previous name was “Stecca degli Artigiani”
So now sometimes we call it like this or that..
Anyway, to me this discover was really a bunch of possibilities, especially when I red in your blog that you’d like to get in contact with similar entities.
So, this is my thinking about this “fate” meeting.

I think that things don’t come only by chances but there’s a reason in.
Our site is really in danger of becoming just broken cement and stones, but we accepted it, (I appreciate your temporary concept!) because it is impossible to keep on working like this. They bought everything surrounding us and I think also the soil on which is based our Community Center. So now, the only thing that we can do with city councils and private buyers is to negotiate with them to have another space like this in which we can keep on working.
Isola Art Center is part of this Stecca degli Artigiani in which conveys artisan’s laboratory, theater company, surrounding areas councils and night music club.
Everything there is totally self-made and all the people that work there in are intellectually involved in the developing process of the Center.
Anyway, we’ll have to move out from there, but remains the fact that we still plan for exhibitions and cultural activities.
So, in few days we’re going to have the big member’s meeting to plan the next year activities.
Here is the point.

The main idea is to make a twin cities project. That means to bring our experience in contact with yours. It can be developed as a “round tables” conference in which we can speak about our activities and exchange them.
One of the main topics for me is to make out an exhibition here in Italy about “denied identities” (starting from Izbrisani’s topic) and work on this concept artistically. We have a pool of artist here (from different countries) and I think you have artist as well, over there.
We could work on this concept both in our way (installations, videos, sculptures, paintings, etc..) and see the results. From that we could choose the best expressions, from yours and ours and make an exhibition here in the Isola Art Center in Milano with both our products. Then, if you think it’s a good project, we can travel the exhibition to you, in TovarnaRog spaces. In the same time we could organize conferences about our status and our ways of problem solving supported by materials such as photos, videos, plans and so on. You can also bring out your own projects, such as this web-lab and radio-project that is much interesting to me.

In all of this I ask you to turn this request to all the members of TovarnaRog and Izbrisani’s council. That is very important to us, to get in contact with the whole of you.

This is just the rough draft for the effective project, but it’s just to let you know what we are thinking about. And in this you have to consider that we are planning a four hands project, so you can feel free to suggest us a further develops for the project.

It’s about all for now!

Thanks for collaboration, and hope to hear you soon.

Luciana Andreani
Piazzale Veronica Gambara 7/6
20146 Milano, Italy
MOBILE +393287680926
HOME/STUDIO +390289919829

Email:loudica@hotmail.com
Website:www.isolartcenter.org
Resp. Arch. Bert Thies