Marcello Mercado
"Politik", 2001
Performance
13º Videobrasil, Sao Paulo, Brasil
Photo Copyright © Videobrasil 2001

Festival Internacional de Arte Eletrônica Videobrasil: Catálogo
By Serviço Social do Comércio Administração Regional no Estado de São Paulo,
Associação Cultural Videobrasil, Administração Regional no Estado de São Paulo, Serviço Social do Comércio
Published by SESC São Paulo, São Paulo, Brasil, 2001
Original from University of Texas
Digitized 7 Mar 2008

La Biennale Di Venezia: 49. esposizione internazionale d'arte: platea dell'umanità
by Francesca Di Giacomo, Harald Szeemann, Cecilia Liveriero Lavelli, Lara Facco, Chiara Barbieri, Arsenale di Venezia, Dario Tagliabue
Published by Electa, 2001
Item notes: v.1
Original from the University of Michigan
Digitized 15 Nov 2007
710 pages

Bunker Poetico:

Harald Szeemann ha voluto in questa Biennale uno spazio molto grande dedicato alla poesia: Marco Nereo Rotelli, artista e curatore del Bunker Poetico, ha installato oltre cinquecento poesie, giunte da tutto il mondo, lungo la rete metallica posta tra l'area delle Corderie e l'Arsenale Militare. Su tale recinzione, di circa trecento metri, si allinea un bunker in cemento armato sul quale è trascritta una poesia di Pier Paolo Pasolini, recitata da Orson Welles nel film Rogopag, censurato nel 1963.
"Si può ri-costituire, attraverso la poesia, una dimensione mentale oltre il rispetto del tendenziale pensiero unico del potere ?" è l'interrogativo che Rotelli pone a intellettuali di tutto il mondo in una Biennale che s'intitola "Platea dell'umanità".
I materiali poetici affissi alla recinzione costituiscono, secondo l'artista, un "muro di poesia materiale", ma anche "un muro mobile e mentale di poesia contrapposta al bunker immobile del potere o di tutto ciò che chiude le menti degli esseri umani".
I poeti sono stati invitati a scrivere e a inviare una poesia "dedicata all'altro, non solo come altro da sé e altro in sé, ma anche come altro in apparenza invalicabile", una poesia sul rapporto conflittuale tra potere e libera parola del poeta. L'iniziativa è rimbalzata in Internet, da un capo all'altro del pianeta, grazie a una rete di collaboratori, tra cui il sito indipendente Karenina.it.
Le poesie sono giunte con fax, posta elettronica, lettere, pacchi, poesie scritte non solo su fogli di carta, ma su materiali diversi, su oggetti d'uso comune, in un flusso dal reale al virtuale, dal libero pensiero e dalla "materia immateriale" della comunicazione alla materia-materia, alla concretezza delle cose di ogni giorno.  
http://www.reocities.com/kareninarivista/page3.html



A Net-poetry event (the on-line happening "Parallel-Action-Bunker") was featured in the Biennale di Venezia in 2001 - Harald Szeemann curator; Bunker Poetico, a collaborative installation by the artist Marco Nereo Rotelli which involved international poets. The virtual happening on-line “Azione-Parellala-Bunker" (Parallel Action-Bunker) was simultaneous with real performances at Orsogrill delle Artiglierie, a real space of the Venice Biennale. With this event, a relationships was created among real and virtual poetry events, a new connective and collective network of poetry, based on communication, and similar to some events and happening by Fluxus, e-mail art and relational art.

ANNIE ABRAHAMS

DANIEL ACOSTA

DEMOSTHENES AGRAFITIOS

NIZLA AMARAL

JORGE LUIZ ANTONIO

SUSANA ARAGON

ADRIANA ARIAS

ROLAND BALADI

JEAN-PIERRE BALPE

TOM BELL

JOHN M. BENNETT

MIRELLA BENTIVOGLIO

ROBERTO BIANCHI

TOMASO BINGA

JULIEN BLAINE

BRICE BOWMAN

DIANE CANEY

HELEN CLARE

MARIA CELIA BRUNELLO BOMBANA

PIERO CADEMARTORI

MARIA CONSUELO CUNHA CAMPOS

DIANE CANEY

ELENA COLOGNI

PEDRO LOPEZ CASUSO (pez)

NADIA CAVALERA

THANASIS CHONDROS

BEATRICE COMTE

ALEX V. COOK

JULIEN D'ABRIGEON

DANIEL DALIGAND

CATERINA DAVINIO

KLAUS PETER DENCKER

JUAN DIAZ INFANTE

ALCKMAR LUIZ DOS SANTOS

GIO FERRI

CHARLES FLORES

ALESSANDRO FO

ROSA FOSCHI

FRANCESCA DA RIMINI

PIERRE-YVES FREUND

NIJI FUYUNO

ALVARO ANDRADE GARCIA

GEORGES

UBALDO GIACOMUCCI

JOHN GIAN

RICCARDO GIOVE

VALENTI GOMES I OLIVER

COCO GORDON

JANINE GORDON

KLAUS GROH

PAOLO GUZZI

CAISHLAN HERD

MAX HORDRE

ALEXANDRA KATSIANI

PAWEL KWASNIEWSKI

ROBERT KENDALL

MARGA KLARKS

DEENA LARSEN

FRANCESCO LEONETTI

CONSTACA LUCAS

MARIO LUNETTA

ROGER MAYER

MARCELLO MERCADO

ROSE ANNE McGREEVY

GIULIANO MESA

JOACHIM MONTESSUIS

MASSIMO MORI

SENADIN MUSABEGOVIC

FRANCESCO MUZZIOLI

CLEMENTE PADIN

CHARLEMAGNE PALESTINE

MARCO PALLADINI

PIERFRANCESCO PAOLINI

STAVROS PANAGIOTAKIS

PAUL PARCELLIN

STEFANO PASQUINI

LUCA PATELLA

IRENA PAVLOVA

ALEXANDRE PAZMANDY

VIVIANA PENKHUES

RICHARD PIEGZA

LAMBERTO PIGNOTTI

JULIEN POIRIER

CHRISTIAN POPP

MAURICE POZOR

NINA REIS

SCOTT RETTBERG

RENEE RODIN

JONATHAN SILVERMAN

SKIPSILVER

FRANK SMITH

CAROL STARR

STAVROS PANAGIOTAKIS

GIOVANNI STRADA

REINER STRASSER

CHRISTIAN TARTING

SILVIA TESSITORE

MARIA TSANTSANOGLOU

CECIL TOUCHON

IGOR ULANOVSKY

EUGENY UMANSKY

ALI VERBAN

JANET WONDRA

REID WOOD

GRACE WYCHOWANSKA

KARL YOUNG

RYU YOTSUYA

MATVEI YANKELEVICH

WOLFGANG ZIEMER

NINA ZIVANCEVIC

Das Kapital.01-07 / Video/ by Marcello Mercado / 1999 -2003 / Germany

Adequatio Artis et Torturae – Towards Marcello Mercados Capital

By Nils Röller
Tuxamoon.de 06/ 08/ 2001

Primo Levi spoke once about the shame to be a human being. The shame to be a human being did grow within him after having survived the holocaust. Levi wrote that the shame to have been tortured, to have been treated in a way that cannot be seen in parallels to other treatments, did grow in himself after the liberation of the concentration camps. This is one factor that helps to see Marcello Mercados work "The Capital”. The videofilm is a work in progress since years, it is finding now its shape. The actual state is 70 minutes long. Most time the capital is formed by moving abstract colours and an overhelming soundscape.
The film is not all the time abstract.
This has to do with the second factor: Of colourmaking and of abstraction. The color Fra Angelico became famous for - the Fra Angelico blue – goes back to lapizlazuli stones. Very expensive stones and a very long and precious way were necessary to produce colour from these stones. Marcello Mercados colours go back to Super 8 films: films of tortured persons in Argentina. It is found footage material that someone gave to him. Mercados colour productions starts from these images. He shows this basic images at the end of the film.
At the end of the film one starts to feel shame, shame to have liked colours and forms that have been abstracted from yellow, blue, deformated, burned bones and organs.
Marcellos work challenges an old definition of what is true or not.
True is when mental concepts are adequate to the things they represent.
Three questions do arise immediatley: What is a mental concept? What is an adequate representation? And what are things?
Stefan Zweig discusses aspects of this questions in the context of the theory of novel. Zweig argues that Dostojewskis novels are beautiful because they are truly lived through: The writer Dostojewski did live through all the cruelties and tortures he is writing about.
This enabeld him in the interpetation of Zweig to represent Russia in a true that is adequat form. Zweig argumentation assumes that art is overhelming when an adequation between the representing artists and the represented reality is taking place. This is highly problematic. At minimum in two regards: First because Dostojewski did need a central idea (in his case: the idea of the becoming moral superiority of russia) in order to maintain and persue the construction of his novels, second because the adeqution is a relativ criterion. At the same time, but in a different geophilosphical context the definition of adequatio is not connected with an action of the soul, but to well working technology (see for example the biologist Ernst Haeckel).
How an adeqution is performed can be discussed in terms of geophilosophical and epistemic conditions. Marcellos Mercados The capital reflects this. Like Dostojewski he has survived extreme situations, but in difference to Dostojewski Marcello does not construct a central idea in order to organize his expressions. Marcello uses distinctly technology in order to question what he has seen and suffered. Flint- and Paintbox – Techniques are used as optical devices who do shape another view on the phenomena to express. This enables him to step beside his powerstation of sensations and to discuss them from a different angle. Colour options and geometric constructions are such angles. They are laid out in the programm of the machines. But this angels are not focussed by a fleeing point, but by an open horizont formed by a critique on capitalism.
The Capital of Marx serves in the Capital of Mercado as an open horizont of questions (not as stock for clear ideas that may order actions and events) and as an invitation to discuss the fact of torture and cruelity in a post-colonial time.