VIULife, art to narrate an university
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Venice International University presented the VIULife: Billboards catalog, published by Marsilio
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| VIULife is a project promoted by Venice International on the occasion of the University’s tenth birthday, a new way to experiment university life, interacting with spaces in a creative way, and a special way to comunicate, narrating academic activities and projects through art, events and suggestions. VIU is an international center of higher education and research which was founded in 1995. Its members are ten universities from Europe, Usa, Israel, China and Japan, the Italian National Research Council, Fondazione di Venezia, Provincia di Venezia, Italian Ministry for the Environment and Territory. The shared aims of the members focus VIU’s activities on the themes of competitiveness, the environment and subsidiarity. Some recent projects developed by VIU dealt with creativity, art and design: the Radar project (2003 Biennale of Art) wished to connect contemporary artists and Venice through the language of visual arts, to enable the city to be looked at and reinvented with new eyes. The presence of Michelangelo Pistoletto and his Cittadellarte foundation (2005 Biennale of Art) produced workshops, which were open to the city with the presence of artists, designers students and Italian companies. |
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| To celebrate its tenth anniversary, VIU Boris Missirkov and Georgi Bogdanov, two Bulgarian artists who have already worked in Venice for the Radar project, to capture the route it has undertaken. With irony, passion and a special poetic, the artists invented a game which let students, researchers, professors and staff share the experience of creativity, following the process and the many steps that transform an idea into a finished work of art from the inside. VIULife draws inspiration from the idea that creative processes may become a stimulus for re-thinking about ourselves and relationships with others and with the spaces we act in and that even people who are outside the art system are positively affected by similar procedures. |
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| There is a lot of irony in these images; there is a classic taste for shots (obtained by digital monitoring) and a good dose of complicity with those photographed, students from different nations, austere professors and amused researchers and members of VIU staff, there is the splendor of the locations on the island, there is the description, precise and yet poetic, of the activities carried out in the island, study, research, teaching, work and contacts with the world and overall there’s a sense of playing a game which profoundly changed the relationships and thoughts of the ones who participated in it. The presentation of the VIULIfe: Billboards catalog published by Marsilio, which describes the creative process of the artworks, became a party which mixed mettings with fun, culture with narration, dj’s and vj’s, live music with food and multiethnic drinks, light designers, who re-contextualized the island’s internal and external locations. In events like this, as in future workshops, contemporary art, design and performance projects, Venice International University opened itself further to the city of Venice and to its residents and students, having the perspective of becoming a space of international dialogue. The artworks, exhibited in Venice International University spaces, can be viewed on the VIU website in the Art@VIU section. |
