Leave the Community Alone is a research project centered around the politics and the ethics of “community art” in rural contexts. By way of a journey to remote and depopulated villages in Italy, Russia, Iceland and the United States, the fieldwork is comprised of four case studies of art residencies and festivals, each activating a critical exchange between villagers and artists and triggering problematic power dynamics of representation.
Drawing on scholars like Hal Foster, Claire Bishop, Grant Kester and Miwon Kwon, this research questions the positionality of curators and artists in relation to the communities they work for and with. What does it achieve to identify a “community” when its image is created by another? How do curators and artists, in the role of outsiders, activate dialog with the villagers? How do they manage conflicts and antagonism?
Answers are sought from the curators themselves. A closer listening of their words reveals good intentions along with, often, colonial and hegemonic attitudes, where local people are treated as malleable subjects and the village as a mere backdrop. This approach is critiqued for promoting a hierarchical and centralized way of making art, usually silencing conflicts in favor of an idealized harmonious community. Leave The Community Alone aims to unveil the rhetoric of community in contemporary art, and to challenge romantic notions of community, while encouraging critical thinking and emphasizing the complexity of rural areas as contested cultural spaces.
The research is presented publicly as a 30-minute lecture performance, incorporating anecdotes, images, and voices from the field. The primary audience for the talk includes curators, scholars, and artists, who are invited to a convivial moment at the end of the talk, fostering further discussion and reflection on the research findings.