BACK

On April 6th, vessel received its first guest! In an amazing effort that shifted focus to the local Puglian region, vessel’s curator Viviana Checchia, was interviewed by the editors of Fucking Good Art. Fucking Good Art is an innovative collaboration by Dutch artists and non-academic free-style researchers Rob Hamelijnck and Nienke Terpsma. Founded in December 2003, Fucking Good Art is a traveling artists' publication for research, has a participatory strategy and it is by nature highly sensitive to its context. This ideology fits perfectly with the aims and goals of vessel, resulting in an extremely fruitful interview.

Rob and Nienke espoused their views to vessel:

“For the last 7 years, we have been traveling through Europe to make issues of Fucking Good Art. Our odyssey started in October 2004 in München (FGA#6), continued to Berlin (FGA#12 - 2006), Dresden (FGA#13 - 2006), Copenhagen (FGA#16 - 2007), Riga (FGA#18 web-radio summer of 2007), Basel and Zürich (FGA#20 - The Swiss Issue - a field study on art and market 2008), and last summer from July to October we lived in Tbilisi in Georgia on invitation by GeoAIR. We asked ourselves: What can we, artists from the former West, share with artists, curators, and thinkers in the post-Soviet Caucasus? Our 3 months residency at GeoAIR in Tbilisi we investigated this question and traveled to meet people in Georgia and Armenia. In the Caucasus Reader (published on our website and in print soon) the relationship between art and social and political change of the last 20 years in the post-Soviet Caucasus is explored in a selection of existing texts written or chosen by us and artists, curators and thinkers we met. Publishing this means bringing these texts back into circulation as collective research and cultural exchange between former West and East.

On invitation by Nomas Foundation Rome we are making a 'Grand Tour', and what we are hoping to find in Italy are different artistic proposals. Proposals that try to think in a more 'ecological' way in continuing with art and life in this fucked up world in crisis. Proposals that are not only thinking about 'fame', being an 'Art Star', and money. Proposals that are not dominated by the art market and the capitalistic system. Socialism failed! Capitalism failed!... What's next?”