Fourteen artists selected for 2013, crowdfunding adds support "Vice Versa": Italian contemporary art presented as set of opposing polarities Seven rooms, seven spaces, two artists in dialogue in each Fabio Troisi, the attache for Cultural Affairs at the Italian Cultural Institute, hosted a talk there on Thursday evening (Feb 21) by the curator of the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, on the novel concepts underlying his newly ordered design for the Italian exhibition project. His ideas form a radically different approach from the last such exhibit, which included 400 artists in what he characterized as a "bit of a mess". This time there would be only 14 artists, paired off in six different rooms of the Pavilion, with another pair outside, who would engage in dialogues between the various polarities which characterize Italian contemporary art today, Pietromarchi said. He told the overflow audience that he had been inspired by the approach taken by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben in his book Categorie Italiane, Studi di Poetica (1996). In that treatise Agamben had suggested interpreting Italian culture as a set of "diametrically linked concepts" or "binomials" such as tragedy/comedy, architecture/vagueness and speed/lightness. Accordingly, Peitromarchi had found similar dualities in Italian contemporary art and had mounted his exhibition to present these opposing polarities as seen, he said, in the poetics of artists such as Alighiero Boetti, Giulio Paolini, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Luigi Onisni and Gina De Dominicis and their experiments, dualities such order and disorder, image and reflection, visible and invisible, reality and fiction, original and copy, and tragedy and comedy, where boundaries tend to dissolve. "The antithetical nature of our culture thus produces works that turn reality into fiction and fiction into reality, in which, playing the game of vice versa, landscape becomes stage, history becomes performance, artwork becomes theater and pop imagery becomes personal history", he explained. In his exposition, titled Vice Versa, and its seven rooms or spaces, each of these would host two artists in dialogue with one another, in which the works shown would "reveal the profound sense of this dialectical approach (sic)". Thus Luigi Ghirri and Luca Vitone would explore a dualistic way of looking at the landscape, in which the meaning of a place was suspended between vision and memory; the troubled and contradictory relationship with history in its personal and collective dimensions would come to the fore in Fabio Mauri and Francesco Arena's dealing with unresolved gaps in history through the filter of the body and of performance; Dialectic slipperiness and continual swerves between tragedy and comedy would feature in the works of Piero Golia and Sislej Xhafa, which hover between lived life and imagined life, a dimension also found in the works of Marcello Maloberti and Flavio Favelli, who chip away at the boundaries between autobiography and collective imagination through references to culture and pop-folk traditions. Giulio Paolini's works were also characterized by a dialectic propensity, Pietromarchi said, and he would dialogue with Marco Tirelli on the theme of art as illusion, as "perspective gaze: an inmvitation to enter another dimension, one that forces us to teer on the edge between reality and representation. This gambit turns up in the juxtaposition of sound and silence, freedom of speech and censorship, in the work of Massimo Bartolini and Francesca Grilli. Finally the showcase will end with Gianfranco Baruchello and Elisabetta Benassi, who deal with the tension between fragment and system in which the human desire to archive and classify things clashes with impossibility and the failure to do so. Since Pietromarchi did not present any slides it was not clear how this philosophical order would find material expression but he said it would consist mainly of works produced especially for the occasion, with installation, sculptures, paintings, performances and "sound and ambient interventions" within and without the Pavilion. There was no video involved, he confirmed, a fact in line with the cancellation of the proposed Palazzo del Cinema in La Biennale this year. What it all actually looked like would be seen in his second presentation at a later date which would take place well before the opening of the Pavilion on May 30th at 11am The President of the Venice Bienniale, Paolo Baratta, would be visiting New York on the 21st of March. A novel aspect of the project that he was anxious to talk about was that it was hoped that crowdfunding will supply additional financing for the artists' work for the exhibition and for explaining and promoting it to schools, universities and visitors, which will include a Vice Versa exhibition app. Events on February 12 in Rome, Milan, London and New York had already kicked off a 90 day fund raising period live on the web at viceversa2012.org, and if the highest aim of 120,000 Euros is achieved it will bring artists and opinion leaders together in a conference in the Italian Pavilion. Possible contribution levels range from 5 Euros to 10,000 Euros from Patrons with the latter receiving a Magnum of Ornellaia (a Bordeau like Tuscan red wine) and an invitation to dinner with the curator and artists at an "exclusive location" on May 28 (Tues). Among the guests were David Sutcliffe, sports technologist, and Douglas Eisert, investment adviser, whose wife Ning Lu and "guitar-wielding bombshell" singer songwriter Kate Schutt (her latest CD is Telephone Game), sitting with artist Nina Barbararesi Grosvenor, were exploring the event as members of the Harvard Club Program Committee.