This Open Atelier is much more than just a place where someone can take a look at a creatives everyday life, here on display was an entire lifetime of convinced pioneering in the field of social engaged art practices, in social aesthetics as the Manifesto Arte Utile 3, from 1980, puts it down.
The project however starts there, where the digitalization – AU archive endeavor ended. There had to be found a way to structure the information and the many, many operational fields of Pino Poggi’s Arte Utile somehow.
It was frightening, over 10.000 documents scanned, put somehow in a first structure but still to be worked on. The challenge was to find the answer on how to structure the online documentation arte-utile.net.
It was a work of a mad man; scissors and pen and duct tape. For months just that, and thinking and rethinking the finished virtual structure, a structure that had to be solid, not giving too much weight to any working field but to the comprehensive concept of Arte Utile (AU).
These three months of open atelier of the entire group and many, many talks with friends and colleagues Dr. Helmut Schneider and Gerald Baumgartner, to name just the two most involved ones, lead, next to very interesting talks within raum AU and with the interested visitors, that did not know about AU, to another quite interesting result, – arte-utile.net.
Still though, lots of work still needs to be done.
This project of structuring was realized due to minor financing by the ministry of culture of the Republic of Slovenia and some local support. As usual, we could take care of all costs, contributing the usual volunteering.
Our hope consists however in the ability to raise funds to become able to complete the AU documentation arte-utile.net, to fill up the missing pieces and to create language versions of the archive, that is what would help AU to be read about, to be studied, interpreted and adapted to today’s needs.