THE BLACK MANA AND THE EVIL SPIRIT OF THE COBBLESTONES
(2019)
author(s): Gian Luigi Biagini
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
This hyperstitional text describes the Disturbanist practice of the Anartist, that consists in subversive urban interventions on the edge of politics and counter-sorcery. Drawing on the theory of post-structuralist philosophers, it focuses particularly on artworks made with black cobblestones. This material, taken as symbolic concentrate of "black mana", evil spirits and spectral antagonist mythology is remodulated in provocative installations and interventions. The text shows also how the intensification of repetition of gestures, materials, symbols and forms can generate a singular territory-refrain based on a transpersona that - at its hyperstitional limit-unfolding - could resist, infect and counter-attack the Integrated Spectacle of Capitalism.
CRITICAL PLAYGROUND AS PLAY-CE UTOPIA. (MANIFESTO FOR A DIFFERENCE IN ITSELF.)
(2023)
author(s): Anartist
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
City of Panic is an urban intervention, which has been realized by The Anartist (Gian Luigi Biagini and John Dunn). It happened in 2019 in the central train-station square of Helsinki. The installation-performance is a "caged mini-golf", which catches and elicits many disruptive resonances. The intervention challenges, contests and makes visible the "iron cage of rationality" that organizes the capitalist urban space through an ordoliberal trans-institutional consensus that does not leave space for the expression of Difference. The intervention puts in "play-ce" a critical and mystic playground of Difference in Itself that breaks the cage of assimilation to a functional hierarchical identity. The article describes this complex experience of rupture and cata-comic rapture by a phenomenology of the process in becoming. A phenomenology and an ethnography of difference, with theory references "in flight", that cannot be completely grasped by a homogenous and unified signifier, narrative, representation. Even the style of the graphic tries to evoke this "virtual heterogeneity of intertwined planes and becomings" that are sutured and re-composed by creative writing.
GRAPHIC NOVEL CLANDESTINE JOURNAL
(2022)
author(s): ANARTIST
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
The article describes, with a self-ethnographic position, the limit and potentiality of an "art of subjectivity" carried out by an a-modal "stranger" thrown into a foreigner country with abstract rationalist features that obstacle the immanent becoming(s) and repress the excess of a practice of interventions that is necessary to shape an uncoded "ethico-aesthetic territory". In this context of extinction the writer of the article, who is also the protagonist of the described art practice, presents the necessity of a new clandestine media for his art research publishing. After a brief outline of a Deleuzian theory of the media, he reveals and presents his project that consists of a "graphic novel clandestine journal". This "graphic novel style form" suits well to his practice of disruptive interventions in public space and the character-avatar "Anartist", which is the mask performed by the writer in its critical urban interventions. The "author" writes that our hyper-capitalist reality is already a form of dystopian graphic novel. For this reason the portrait of his action as a "graphic novel" is a form of realism and an aesthetic strategy to deal with it.