Presentation | "The Sky as Public Space," by Cristóbal Bianchi

Friday, October 30, 2015
2:30-4:30pm

Visiting Scholar Cristóbal Bianchi’s “The Sky as Public Space” examined how the sky has been used as material and device of contemporary artistic practice to articulate it as both a public space and an event able to trigger a poetic environment. In this regard, sky-based works and explorations of vertical space question the production and use of public space. Engaging concepts such as intervention, the outdoors, appropriation, and event, these creative practices reveal social conflicts, as well as forms of inclusion and welfare. Based on Dr. Bianchi’s research on the multi-sited public intervention “Bombing of Poems,” this discussion will also incorporate relevant cases serving as precedents for the project.

Cristóbal Bianchi is an artist and researcher who earned his PhD in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London. Along with Joaquin Prieto and Julio Carrasco, he founded the Casagrande Art Collective in 1996. This collective has developed a series of editorial and public art interventions in the public sphere, including “King Kong,”  “HH,” and “Bombing of Poems,” in which 100,000 poems printed as bookmarks are dropped from an aircraft. To date, there have been seven iterations of this intervention in cities that have experienced aerial bombing during military confrontations: Santiago de Chile (2001), Dubrovnik (2002), Guernica (2004), Warsaw (2009), Berlin (2010), London (2014) and Milan (2015). As an editor, Bianchi has developed the online platform Observatorio Cultural from the Consejo Nacional de la Cultural y las Artes, and is the director of a new MA program at Universidad Mayor (Chile), entitled Creación e investigación artística contemporánea. He is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics.

www.loscasagrande.org
observatoriocultural.gob.cl

Hemispheric Institute of Performance & Politics
20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10003