linz_lisboa

Austrian artists Clemens Bauder and Gregor Graf were invited to present specific work to Round The Corner site, in July 2012. They both visited Lisbon in 2011, exactly one year ago and fell for Lisbon.

With an adapted Ford Transit, they began a 2800 km trip: from Linz, in Austria, to Lisbon, in Portugal. The trip began exactly ten days before the opening of the exhibition. Following the road map, they drove in Austria, Germany, France and Spain, arriving in Lisbon. The trip is, more than a way of transporting their work, materials and equipment, a medium to add up to a site-specific work, a site that spreads between their point of departure to Round The Corner. To both Graf and Bauder, as important as the gallery space are the spaces encountered in the trip. Clemens Bauder and Gregor Graf spent every day in different service areas, to recover from the trip and to establish contact with the drivers, creating a multiplicity of stories. Playing chess will be the trope for establishing contact in an universal language and to create situations. During the chess games took place, Gregor Graf portrays the drivers he meets for the series "Kings".

With these projects, the artists generated strategies that take up certain moments from the neo-avant-garde tradition and develop them in new ways. Its relationship with predecessors such as Joseph Beuys and the Situationists can be compared to that which opposes the dominant neoliberal consensus by proposing to distribute common resources in the interests of "performance and survival rather than profit," to quote historian Immanuel Wallerstein (c. 1970). Analogously, if many socially engaged artists previously approached their work as a manifestation of pure matter or authentic experience, which often tended toward ritualism, the projects under consideration here rejects such a model in favor of nonhierarchical collaborative production.

Text: Luisa Santos