an idea of
Joykix and Rossella Moratto
Exhibition project conceived by Joykix and Rossella Moratto
with the participation of Roberto Casti, Marco Cesari, Lucrezia Costa, Francesco Fossati, Joykix, Lorenzo Lunghi, Rebecca Mari, Matteo Urbani, Danilo Vuolo//Compostpunk, Vincenzo Zancana and the activations of Agenzia X, Scuola Nomade, WURMKOS
Curated by spazioSERRA
Critical text by Deborah Maggiolo and Piermario De Angelis​
On display from 21/09/2023 to 27/10/2023
Opening Thursday 21/09/2023 at 19:00
Lancetti railway station, Milan
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Joykix (Milan, Italy, 1964), an activist in the underground scene of the 1980s and 1990s, was a part of collectives like Virus and Helter Skelter in Milan and was among the founders of @shake_edizioni and the Decoder magazine. Since 2008, Joykix has also been dedicated to visual arts, creating projects that utilize photography, video, and installations.
Rossella Moratto (Milan, Italy, 1965), active in the Milanese underground scene of the 1980s and 1990s, is an independent critic and curator. Since the late 1990s, her activities have focused on contemporary art. She curates exhibitions, projects, and events and collaborates with specialized art magazines.
Both are founders and curators of the @Subplace space in Milan.
Piermario De Angelis (Pescara, Italy, 1997) is an independent critic and curator. Since 2021, he has collaborated as a writing contributor with various contemporary art magazines, both online and in print. He is the co-founder and current president of the non-profit cultural association Genealogie del Futuro.
Deborah Maggiolo (Milan, Italy, 1994) is an independent curator, researcher, and co-founder of the cultural associations Genealogie del Futuro and Sympoietic Society. Her interests intersect post-human ecologies, feminist politics of care, and community activation in a critical (re)reading of the present. She has proposed and coordinated curatorial and editorial projects and collaborates with national and international institutions and associations.
Babylon can be viewed from the outside every day during the opening hours of the Lancetti Station and can be visited by appointment by writing to babylon.spazioserra@gmail.com.
CALENDAR OF ACTIVATIONS
September 21, 7:00 PM
Cambio di Forma (Carta MAGIA), performance by Rebecca Mari
L’antennista, performance by Lorenzo Lunghi
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October 7, 4:00 PM
Agentive laboratory by Compostpunk
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October 14, 7:00 PM
The Outsider, sound performance by Roberto Casti
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October 15, 3:00 PM
Premio Dubito di poesia con musica 2023, public listening of the contestants curated by Agenzia X
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October 16, 6:30 PM
Decoding a Muse [Contemporary practices and reflections on the new artistic horizons of Artificial Intelligence], talk with Roberto Beragnoli, Alessandra Condello, Matteo Urbani
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October 19, 6:30 PM
Presentation of the book Spazio comune. La città come commoning by Stavros Stavrides, in collaboration with Agenzia X Milan, with Paola Zedda, Massimiliano Guareschi and in connection with Stavros Stavrides
October 21, 4:00 PM
Agentive laboratory by Compostpunk
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October 22, 5:00 PM
Workshop by WURMKOS
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October 27, 7:00 PM
Unknown, performance by Danilo Vuolo//Compostpunk
Babylon
Babylon is an exhibition project conceived by Joykix and Rossella Moratto, presented as part of unpostoIMPOSSIBILE, spazioSERRA’s current exhibition season in which the selected artists abstract their artistic experience from a physical space to an unplaceable “elsewhere” through a continuous dialogue between internal/interior and external/exterior. The exhibition is on display from Thursday the 21st of September to Friday the 27th of October 2023 at the Lancetti railway station in Milan.
Following Corpo a Corpo a Corpo #2, Volume XX, and In accumulo o in sospeso ma in equilibrio, the modular grid structure designed by Joykix and Rossella Moratto becomes the skeleton for Babylon, a collective hybridization site where the works and research of different artists coexist. The structure, essentially porous, enters into a relationship with the artworks, creates interference with them, and is contaminated by them and modified according to needs.
Babylon is a scenic machine with a dual nature, both an artwork and a display, which can potentially be articulated infinitely. Babylon is the new Babel where diversity doesn't generate discord but peaceful coexistence: the name is also inspired by New Babylon, Constant's city, sharing its nomadic spirit, adaptability, playful attitude, rhizomatic expansion, disorientation, and consequently, surprise, encounter with the other, and exchange.
Babylon goes beyond the concept of an artwork-display to become a space for commoning, laboratory and participatory, including ongoing design modes that take place within its articulations. There is no final outcome, but rather a continuous development, contamination, and hybridization of work through active sharing and inclusive participation: the constitutive process evolves through continuous horizontal and egalitarian negotiation, and the interventions are the results of dynamic relationships between participants and between them and the structure. In addition to the works inside spazioSERRA, Babylon will be enriched over the weeks with performative actions, laboratory moments, and sound events. All interventions share recurring themes that run through Babylon: nature, body, and structure, understood as technique and rational scientific thought. Piermario De Angelis and Deborah Maggiolo write in the critical text accompanying the exhibition: "In the SERRA, otherness comes into contact, in a mutual recognition of the interdependence of identities. Perhaps the underground newsstand is also a mental geography: the threshold that connects, while separating, and that separates, while connecting, the inside and the outside, in a continuous play of references and reflections, of mutual influences. Letting (f)all, letting flow, without fear of destroying boundaries to redraw more porous and welcoming ones."
Babylon's structure could have been a homogenizing element but instead fosters the coexistence of differences, welcomes what contaminates it, opens up to divergent directions and to new solutions that proliferate within it; this is what makes it an impossible place. It is a living and active object that continually lowers the threshold of impossible feasibility, canceling vertical relations and that of power. "Even now, as we exit the newsstand, we are within the organism of Babylon, crossing the threshold between us and the rest, forgetting any distinction and remembering every difference."