The rise and fall of the ideal city

Marta Czok and Urban Visions Film Festival / A-Place

Edited by Jacek Ludwig Scarso. With the participation of Luisa Bravo and Anna Marazuela Kim

On the occasion of the opening of the Project Space in Venice, the Marta Czok Foundation presents a selection of works from its Collection, seen in dialogue with video artists and film-makers from all over the world, in a special collaboration with Urban Visions Film Festival and A -Place. Curated by Jacek Ludwig Scarso, with the participation of Luisa Bravo and Anna Marazuela Kim, this first exhibition is entitled The Rise and Fall of the Ideal City, in conjunction with the Architecture Biennale 2023.

CURATORIAL NOTES

Jacek Ludwig Poor

The Renaissance concept of the Ideal City is here a provocation to critically explore the ideological connotations of the urban context and the need for social changes, locally and globally. As focal points for transient civilizations, cities are built, rebuilt and destroyed, becoming, both metaphorically and literally, battlefields for power plays: social injustice, economic greed, the desire for supremacy, indifference towards an increasingly fragile ecosystem are the backdrop to the experience lived by citizens. The result of human intervention, cities appear to be in constant development, while hiding an increasingly unstable nucleus. Glimmers of hope are offered by the resilience of citizens who, undeterred, fight social unease through individual and collective efforts. The depictions of the city in Marta Czok's paintings, ranging in period from the early 1980s to the last decade, show a satirical perspective on social hierarchies. In these works, the powerful believe they are unstoppable, yet the world they want to dominate is nothing more than an ideological construction: everything is contingent, everything is transitory, everything can be overturned. At the other end of the social scale, ordinary citizens appear helpless, but it is through their work that the riches of a city are built and that social change truly becomes possible. In dialogue with these works, we present a selection of short films from Urban Visions – Beyond the Ideal City, an independent film festival promoted by City Space Architecture and curated by Luisa Bravo. Part of the European project A-Place – Linking places through networked artistic practices, the Festival is co-funded by the Creative Europe program of the European Union. Within this selection, with which we also celebrate the first ten years of City Space Architecture, we find a set of perspectives from all over the world, in which the city is told in relation to the contexts of migration, social and community injustices resilient. Thanks to this dialogue, The Rise and Fall of the Ideal City wants to be a starting point for critical reflection on the urban context, but also an inspiration on how artistic languages in different disciplines can bring new ideas and important testimonies to this context.

Art, Politics and the Rise and Fall of the Ideal City

Dr Anna Marazuela Kim

"A city is a machine with innumerable parts created by the accumulation of human gestures, a colossal organism that is incessantly dying and being born, an ongoing conflict between memory and erasure, a center for capital and for attacks on capital, a kidnapping, a misery, a mystery, a conspiracy, a destination and a point of origin, a labyrinth where some get lost and some find what they are looking for, A discussion of how to live and proof that differences don't always have to be resolved, even if they can crash and fuse against each other for centuries." Rebecca Solnit

Cities are places of hopes and dreams, of aspirations for economic and social well-being, of community and belonging, but also of forces and structures that work against the very ideals and people they are supposed to support. The question of what constitutes a good and just city, as it promotes these ideals, has taken on renewed urgency in recent years, as the United Nations predicts that seventy percent of the world's population will live in urban settlements by 2050. Cities are both the epicenter of the greatest challenges of our age - social, political and ecological - and the reasons needed to respond to them. It is this duality, or dialectic, that gives insight into the complexity of our cities - as "a colossal organism that dies and is born forever", a "discussion about how to live". As a deeply social and political species, we seem inexorably drawn to live together in this form, as an ideal that promotes the highest form of life. Yet it is a form that, paradoxically, can lead to our eventual demise: the end of life on a planetary scale, the ultimate rise and fall. How we arrived at this situation, in which the city is central to ideals of civic life that is always in danger of failing, has a long historical arc. Aristotle and Plato provide the earliest existing attempts to define the fundamental dynamic between the political and the place of the city, in the idea of the polis. In Aristotle, social and political virtue, or human prosperity (eudaimonia), are necessarily linked to an imagined form of life within a city-state. Plato's Republic, an investigation into the ideal form of the city that gives rise to justice and just, or virtuous, human life - as well as challenges to that ideal - famously outlawed artists and the arts of poetry as threats to the its realization. With roots in classical Roman thought, the Ideal City reaches its apogee in the city-republics of the Renaissance. While harking back to classical ideas, these nonetheless suggest a counter-model to Plato's Republic, seeing the arts play a crucial role - not just in the development of the architecture of great cities, but in critical arguments concerning the life of the citizens within. In their critical commentary on the ideal city, historically and in the present, Marta Czok and the video artists of this exhibition continue this trajectory.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Martha Czok

British of Polish descent and Italian by adoption, Marta Czok was born in Beirut (Lebanon) in 1947. The following year her family obtained political asylum in London, where she lived until 1974 and where she completed her academic studies at the St Martin's School of Art, repeatedly participating in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Over the past forty years, he has exhibited his works in Europe and the rest of the world, also collaborating on the "Alitalia per l'Arte" project. In 2000, Alitalia commissioned a triptych from her which was given to Pope John Paul II for his 80th birthday. In the same year she was invited by the French Embassy to the Holy See to create a work on the theme of the Jubilee which was exhibited as part of the Roma Jubilans exhibition. Royal Caribbean has also commissioned her, in collaboration with the Albemarle Gallery in London, for a work for its ship Navigator of the Seas. In 2008, the Polish national television TV Polonia dedicated a documentary to her which highlighted the relationship between her work and the Second World War. Among his most recent public exhibitions, Icons&Idols, a multimedia exhibition held in 2013 at the MACRO Museum in Rome, deserve particular mention; the anthological exhibition at the Castle of Calatabiano, organized by the MACS Museum of Catania, 2014; the personal exhibition Mother Rome at the Carlo Bilotti Museum in Rome in 2016; the personal exhibition at the Italian Cultural Institute in Warsaw, 2017; Baroque Intrusions at the Baroque Museum at Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia, Rome in 2018; the personal exhibition O Nas at Konstanciński Dom Kultury Hugonówka in Poland in 2023. Marta Czok has also worked on traveling exhibitions such as the personal exhibition dedicated to Children in War and the Shoah, held at Palazzo Ferrajoli (Rome), at the Civic Museum of Albano and at Palazzo Antico Ghetto (Padua) and the About Us exhibition, on the theme of humanity, at Palazzo dei Papi (Viterbo), Palazzo Zuckermann (Padua) and Palazzo Zenobio (Venice). In Poland, from 2020, the exhibition To Nazywasz Sztuka? it was held in various venues, including in Warsaw, at the Museum of Caricature, and then in Lublin at the Centrum Spotkania Kultur. Marta Czok lives and works in Castel Gandolfo, Rome. His works can be found in public and private collections around the world.

Urban Visions /A-Place

Urban Visions - Beyond the Ideal City is an independent film festival that investigates the complexity of the contemporary urban dimension, exploring the connections, intersections and activities that take place in our cities, seen through the complex interweaving of social practices, cultural contexts and geographies human rights, beyond the stereotypes and widespread consumerist images, with particular reference to the multiple and changing expressions of public life. Promoted by the Italian non-profit cultural association City Space Architecture, it is part of "A-Place. Linking places through networked artistic practices". A-Place is a project co-funded by the Creative Europe program (2019-2023), dedicated to strengthening the links between people and places, which takes place in six European cities: Barcelona, Bologna, Brussels, Lisbon, Ljubljana and Nicosia. A-Place is a platform for creating, debating and experimenting with the sense of belonging and identity that groups from multiple backgrounds and cultures maintain in their social and physical environments. Through site-specific art, creative spatial practices and cultural projects, A-Place aims to engage a variety of stakeholders - residents, artists, architects, students, policy makers - in a process of reflection through action on meaning and the value of creating places.