Global Art and the Museum

Cargo Lab on Trans-disciplinary Dialogue

The Cargo Lab on trans-disciplinary dialogue is realized by Valentina Carollo in collaboration with several artists, curators, researchers and professionals in the field of “global” artistic and cultural production.

Cargo Lab focuses on creating shared documentation, serving as a platform to guarantee visibility to contemporary art production. The project begins at the Macro Museum in Rome as a meeting point, where demand and connection interact to develop conversations and external collaborations. Cargo Lab addresses both adults and youngsters, so as to promote exchange opportunities to live a transcultural experience: such an experimental proposal represents an invitation for the audience to enter temporary spaces of dialogue, discovery and critical discourse. These are changeable and reprogrammable places, as they are working statements of the project itself. Cargo Lab has in its essence an active environment, a moment of horizontal work that grows thanks to the participations of the audience, with ephemeral and processual practices. Moreover, the idea of a laboratory underlines the opportunity of moving across texts, concepts, practices and thought experiments as possible activators of moments of debate and meditation. The Cargo Lab web archive, characterized by a progressive and open nature, welcomes many kinds of external contributions- photo, video, text and audio documentation- with the intent of picturing likely correspondences between places, cultures, different models of artistic and extra-artistic research, which are then juxtaposed and compared. Cargo Lab is invited to be part of “Beyond The East: Indonesian Contemporary Art” and “(Un)forbidden City: Post-revolution in New Chinese Art” (November 15th 2011– March 4th 2012) at Macro, Rome’s Museum of Contemporary Art. In this case, the curatorial choice considers that any thematization of Indonesian and Chinese Art could end up being too reductive when facing the cultural varieties and consequent practices which distinguish them. A multiple and transdisciplinary approach has been instead adopted since it is able to stimulate a dialogue. In this connection, we may want to review the thematic impulses suggested by several considerations regarding production dynamics and global artistic presentation; at the same time, we can pinpoint some recurring elements in the displayed artworks: the experimental language sprung out of the encounter between Western and Eastern culture, the integration of traditional and contemporary visual culture, every artist’s experiences and the places where each one of them lives and works, as crucial data to understand the contexts in which the art work was created. (Text by Valentina Carollo)