Facing the crisis by problematizing methods, values and criteria of artistic production and scientific research means situating ourselves, in a certain sense, at their border, multiplying it: as an area of research capable of creating tension in the relationship between the subject and the object of study, as a cognitive tool and a place to be crossed.
We have chosen the border between Greece and Turkey in the Mediterranean, to observe its capacity to join and divide, to give form to the reality we experience by connecting and separating, splitting and overlapping. What interests us about this place is not so much its ability to construct a clear line between a presumed homogeneous, known inside and a hypothetical outside, as its ability to produce indistinct zones, to express contradictory perspectives and ambivalent viewpoints.
The border is an exercise of translation and displacement, an activity that triggers oppositions and clashes in which to negotiate between disciplinary divisions; it is the tool to break up the single method of doing research, to multiple working practices and to observe their reciprocal, at times unexpected implications, their dissonances and frictions.
Studio Roma wants to continue to question the production of knowledge inside and outside the academia, bringing out differences and overlaps between institutions in a continuum of places, functions and geographies. When art stimulates the criteria and the standards, a production arises that is sufficiently articulated to stand up to the naive threat of academization of art institutions, as a new form of ingenuous conformism. Beyond any academic caricatures, it is this path we want to continue to follow, proposing a program of activities in which to test the values and the balance of forces necessary for their discussion. This year we immerse ourselves in the turbulences produced when latent and potential conflicts that cross the hierarchies of knowledge are made explicit: a frontier of juxtapositions and contradictions, the space of the research in common of Studio Roma.
