LOOP Festival 2018

PRODUCE, PRODUCE, PRODUCE(D)

On moving image production and beyond

Browse through the full 2018’s programme of exhibitions and activities

Take a look at all the participating proposals of the City Screen

As the hectic progress in technology generates the illusion of hyper-connectivity, it simultaneously feeds the desire of quick-acting individuals to manipulate space and time. While new generations of multi-taskers grow up seemingly networked to each other, the mobile Web becomes the terrain where nimble relationships of ostensible proximity are consumed.

The users of always newer and easily accessible technologies become potential mass-producers that stuff the Internet with (apparently) non-restricted content, and they concurrently turn into unaware ‘makers’ of manifold versions of themselves. While these virtual replicas become estranged from the very body that owns them, they also generate a flow of online contributions that rapidly transform into accumulated waste.

In this context, digital platforms and social media provide the means for texts, images, spams, viruses to be created freely and endlessly copied, shared and downloaded, making it a hard job to detect authorship and filter among these chaotic mass of public domain.

This persistent obsession with hysteric production – that goes well beyond the Internet and its remote extensions as an intrinsic feature of late capitalism and neo-liberal ideologies – then poses important questions on the nature of the relationship between the producer and the product as either codependent, subaltern or mutually antagonistic.

Indeed, if the very etymology of the word production (from the Latin producere, ‘to bring forth’) implies an active “way of motion or functioning”, it is not always clear who is the agent that carries out the action and who is the recipient of it. In other words, in an era of frenzied economic, political, social and cultural change, not only we are empowered offline and online producers but also alienated products of such unstoppable acceleration.

In departing from these considerations, this year’s edition of LOOP will then look at production as an open-ended process of creation that simultaneously determines and affects the artists’ practice as well as the related modes of distribution and circulation in art.

Through a series of exhibitions, screenings, performances and workshops and a solid selection of panel discussions oriented at addressing the specificity of the moving image, the programme will ultimately propose a reading of production as a dynamic system where different disciplines mingle and interact, while looking critically at the accumulation of images and its effect on the construction of subjectivity and the self. Besides, the committed work of international production companies will also be put into value along with the exhibition of recently created artists videos representative of contemporary creation.

Everything connected by two essential underlying questions: “How do we produce?” and “How are we produced?”

Carolina Ciuti

Artistic Director