SAF_ 3rd. Sardinia Art Fair 04. - 10. September 2008Ex. Carceri Castiadas

Urs Bette Gordana Bezanov

Sue CarlsonMarco Chiandetti

LUQUIFER Systems GroupGabriele Schmäh

Martin SiegristAndrew Smaldone

Neil StewartStiefel Kramer

Justin Randolph ThompsonThomas Wirsing

ARCHITEKTUR UND KUNST

ARCHITECTURE AND ART BY

I‘m asking for the sky

The theme that the title refers to (a request, to obtain the sky), takes the sky not as a metaphor, but as a

manifestation of the infinite space (represented in our understanding by the physical universe and by ideas).

The exhibition aims to demonstrate how the infinite space of ideas, through action, becomes a real space on

the physical plane, thus challenging the presupposition that reaching the sky, is impossible.

Laurie Anderson said that, to her, freedom means leaving rules and other people's ideas behind. She

talked about how, as a child, the sky with its immense possibilities represented that for her, adding,

that as adults, understanding that anything can happen, the sky represents that freedom

From Laurie Andersons talk, Hidden Inside Mountains, Film and Screen talk, May 2005, Barbican,

London

Tel. + 41 44 40 00 816 www.number5.ch info@number5.ch Letzigraben 136 CH-8047 Zürich

SPACE

NUMBER5 GmbH

ART ARCHITECTURE

PHYSICAL MENTAL

ENVIRONMENT FORM

MEMORYIMAGINATION

DREAMSPHILOSOPHY

CREATED BY HUMANS

IDEASLANDSCAPE

(A RIVER BED)UNIVERSE

(THE CONSTELLATIONS)

CONSTRUCTEDNATURAL

INFINITE SPACE

ACTION

ART & ARCHITECTURE

Infinite Space (II)

Urs Bette

I had a dream the other day. Roland Barthes was stepping down from heaven. Next second we are in Ginza / Tokyo. Mother and daughter standing in a field of sunflowers, both wearing tissue masks, staring at us. We must have materialised out of nowhere. We turn around. A Citroen Déesse blinking in the low sun in front of the Hermes store. Light blue metallic paint, yellowish lights, right hand steering. Barthes starts lamenting about the myths signified through shape and form, the windows not holes in a facade, but tough soap bubbles, more insect-like than mineral... He goes on and on. He then passes me the keys. We take express way No.4 to Shinjuku and finish the evening at La Jetée.

Urs Bette graduated with a diploma in Communication Design from the Academy of Applied

Sciences, Düsseldorf 1992. In 2000 he received his Master in Architecture from the Master Class

of Wolf Prix, University of Applied Arts Vienna. He worked for renown architectural firms such as

Coop Himmelblau, Eichinger oder Knechtl, SamOttReinisch and Steven Holl. He started his own

architectural practice in Vienna 2001 and moved it to Adelaide, Australia in 2007.

He is a Lecturer and Course Coordinator at the School of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and

Urban Design at the University of Adelaide. His work has been recognised with a number of group

exhibitions and publications. His recent work was shown at the Austrian Contribution to the 10th

Architecture Biennale in Venice.

Gordana Bezanov

Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I invent short stories. This is one called: "The black cat".

Once upon a time there was a black cat. He got lost in the dark room. He was only found again when the light was switched on.

Gordana Bezanov was born in Lusaka, Zambia in July 1972.

In 1993 she moved to Florence, where she studied with professors Rose Shakinovsky and Claire

Gavronsky, attending numerous private workshops in Tuscany, as well as workshops in Cape Town

(1998) and Johannesburg (2004), South Africa. She attended the Performance In Flux programme

with Geoff Hendricks (2004), and Information and Presentation with Ai Wei Wei (2005) at the

International Summer Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg, Austria. She attended the MA Fine Art

programme at the Wimbledon School of Art, London, graduating in 2005. Since 2001 she has actively

been involved in various curatorial projects. Founder and editor of ArtSEEN journal (2005-07) and

co-founder of number_5 GmbH. She lives and works in Florence and Zürich.

Sue Carlson

I had a conversation, a few months after the Malevich retrospective (at the Guggenheim Museum, New York City, 2003):

Me; "Black Square, Black Circle, Black Cross, from 1915....when you see them in reproduction they look so graphic, just a black shape on a white background. But when you see the actual painting, they are really crazy, the paint has been pushed in every direction, cracking and peeling off."

John Baldessari; "Yeah, it's as though he felt such an urgency to get the picture out, he got the paint all fucked up. ...like REAL ART."

Sue Carlson was born in Minneapolis, MN in 1956 and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

She earned a BA in music history and performance from Case Western Reserve University and an

MFA in visual art from CAL-ARTS. Her musical training has deeply influenced her painting practice,

as she uses the model of musical language as a way of embracing the poetry of light and space. Sue

trained as a painter by assisting in the studios of Elizabeth Murray and Lucio Pozzi in New York City.

Her works have been exhibited throughout New York, including Rose Burlingham Fine Art, Gerber-

Seid Fine Arts, Van Brunt Gallery, Lindsey Brown Gallery, Artist's Space and White Columns. Her

work has also been represented by galleries in San Francisco (CA), San Antonio (TX), and Baltimore

(MD). In addition to painting, Sue performs and teaches classical piano.

Marco Chiandetti

One of my earliest memories as a child is from a family holiday in Miami. I must have been no more than eight years old. My family were checking out of the hotel we had stayed in. Our room was on the top floor. I remembered how impatient my sister and I were, as children usually are, in having to wait for the lift, so to save time we decided to take the emergency stairs to the ground floor. We burst through the door and ran down the stairs screaming listening to the echo of our voices in the concrete stairwell. As we got to what we thought was the ground floor, the door wouldn’t open. We tried the door of the floor above. This door wouldn't open either. We tried all the doors and for some reason none of the doors opened from the inside. We paniced. We knew our parents were leaving and maybe they’d leave without us. We would be left all behind. Trapped. We would have to live the rest of our days locked in a stairwell. Like good catholic child-ren we knelt down and prayed that someone would come and save us. A few minutes later the manager, who had heard us shouting earlier, saved us. I guess in the eyes of an 8 year old our prayers were answered and a miracle happened.

Marco Chiandetti was born London 1973. He studied Art History and Anthropology at

University College London and Film Making at the London Film School. After working in

the film industry for several years, he returned to study Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art in

London where he completed his MA in 2007. Marco has been invited on residencies in China,

Austria (with Geoff Hendricks and Ai Wei Wei), Italy, South Africa (with Claire Gavronsky and

Rose Shankinovsky) and more recently in the Czech Republic. Marco has also been invited to a

residency at Gertrude Contemporary Art Space in Melbourne, Australia in late 2008. As well as

his private practice, Marco collaborates with New York artist Melora Kuhn with whom in early

2008 he travelled to New Delhi, India, where they were resident artists at Sanskriti Kendra.

LIQUIFER Systems Group

Whenever I think of the Moon I do not imagine the pale, partly hidden disk perceived from planet Earth, but an infinite landscape I can walk on, …and on, beyond the sloping contour of a promising horizon … with Mars it is exactly the same…

Waltraut Hoheneder, architect, Vienna, Austria

LIQUIFER, a new generation [space] architecture firm was founded by Barbara Imhof and Sumita

Mohanty in Vienna in 2003. In 2005 Waltraut Hoheneder joined LIQUIFER and the 'partnership'

LIQUIFER Systems Group H.u.I. GesbR was incorporated in 2006.

Norbert Frischauf, Barbara Imhof and Susmita Mohanty as an international, multidisciplinary task

force established the ‘association’ LIQUIFER Systems Group (LSG) in 2004. The LSG Board

Members comprise Norbert Frischauf, Sandra Häuplik, Barbara Imhof, Kürsad Özdemir and René

Waclavicek.

LIQUIFER and the LSG association were integrated in 2006. Thus, we have two offices under the

LIQUIFER Systems Group:

Office for [space] architecture & Office for integrated [space] systems

Since June 2008, LSG has a presence in Mumbai (India) led by LSG co-founder Susmita Mohanty.

Managing Directors of the Vienna office are Barbara Imhof and Waltraut Hoheneder.

Gabriele Schmaeh

On a Sunday afternoon we were sitting at a table in the living room 'Stube' of the 'Federihütte', a mountain hut on the Swiss Alps. On this day, the clouds were hanging low, so that the view wasn't as magnificent, as grandiose as on a sunny day, when you can see even the Zurich lake from the hut. A little girl was gazing out of the window and as she could not see the ground but only the pine trees nearby, so she announced, that we were all in heaven.

Gabriele Schmäh was born in March 1966 in Adliswil, Switzerland. She lives and works in Zürich,

Switzerland.

Her education was as a Draftswoman; in Social Pedagogy at "Höheren Fachschule für Soziale Arbeit

Zürich"; in Fine Art at the "Fachhochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst Luzern", Switzerland.

She attended performance workshops with Monika Günther in Luzern, Switzerland.

Various work projects took her to the North Sea, Rotterdam in the Netherlands, the Swiss Alps and to

Vienna, Austria. She explores and works with the "Zone Between - die Zone dazwischen".

The "Zone Between - die Zone dazwischen" defines the space between different uniting phenomenon

of a physical, social and corporative nature, which is the main objective and reference of the focus in

all her work as an artist and social worker.

Martin Siegrist

At times, in my childhood, on the school free afternoons, on Saturdays and Sundays, I went to the nearby swimming pool. Arriving at the swimming pool I decided to try out how it would be to have no legs or arms. So I went, pretending I had no use of my legs, just using my arms to move, through the public area and into the pool. It was always much easier to cope with the "handicap" in the water then outside. Coming out of the pool took some effort, especially on days I wasn’t using my arms. I didn’t bother about the other people and, looking backwards, nobody ever asked me anything about my funny exercises. I was in my own imaginary world and wasn’t disturbed by any adults. I could search the boarders of my being and body all by myself.

Martin Siegrist was born in Baden, Switzerland in 1966. After an apprenticeship as a draftsman

(1987) he travelled in the United States of America, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico. He received

degrees in architecture(1996), scenography (2000) and cultural studies (2004). Founded büro zürich

GmbH in Zürich (2004-2007). Since 2004 he has been actively involved in various architecture and

art projects. Founder of number_5 GmbH in Zürich (2008).

He lives and works in Zürich and Florence as an autonomous architect and scenographer. Moves

around the world a lot.

Andrew Smaldone

Once, while eating bacon and scrambled eggs at a small diner in rural Utah with my dad as a boy, a cow-boy at an adjacent table was discussing his almost being killed in Texas. The gist of the story was that this cowboy got woken by gunfire early one morning and realized that his enemies had accidentally killed his neighbor for one of the brave cowboy’s crimes.

Andrew Smaldone was born in Denver, CO in 1978. He received The Presidential Arts Scholarship to

attend The George Washington University where he also obtained a BA in Fine Art in 2001. Having

studied in Florence during his 3rd year at University he returned to the city in 2001 to further his

interest in what he likes to call ‘all things Italian’. He moved to London in 2005 and received his MA

in Fine Art from Central St Martins College of Art and Design. In the same year, he co-founded the

artists run magazine ArtSEEN Journal, which would later act as springboard for the Architecture and

Art platform numer_5 GmbH. He now spends his time among art -making, writing, teaching, and

helping number_5 bring project ideas into physical form.

Neil Stewart

When it comes to showing work in an ex-prison, I guess it was only a matter of time: The other day I was going through my late father’s archives when I came across his comment that ‘when I returned to my parents house at Rossie towards the end of the war, my father said to me, "Jack, you have a dreadful record, you have spent eighteen years in an Approved School and five years in prison and you are still only twenty-five years old".’Rossie Reformatory was what we’d probably now call a young offenders institute; isolated and self-sufficient, it is where he was born and brought up because his father was the resident school teacher. Prison was Stalag XXI B prisoner of war camp in Poland. Innocent captivity. In his late eighties he lost his memory and would walk into town and forget where he lived. For his own protection, he was sectioned under the mental health act at Sunnyside Hospital. He escaped twice in the first week.

Neil Stewart was born, lives and works in London. Educated at the University of East Anglia, Chelsea

College of Art & Design (BA Practice and Theory of Visual Art) and Central St. Martins College of

Art & Deisgn (MA Fine Art), he is married to Shuk Chan with whom he has a son Xian. His long

standing interest in Chinese philosophy informs his work which explores different concepts of time

and duration. He has written regularly for various international art journals and was also Director

of the Global Art Practice programme for post-MA international artists at Chelsea College of Art &

Design.

Stiefel Kramer

Hannes Stiefel was born in Switzerland in 1967. After his apprenticeship he worked as a draftsman

and innkeeper in Lausanne and Zurich. Studies of History of Art and Philosophy in Zurich. Study

of Architecture in Vienna and Los Angeles. Collaboration with the Swiss Editor, Film Historian

and Specialist in Applied Urbanism Thomas Kramer in the common architectural company stiefel

kramer, vienna zurich. Stiefel teaches and lectures internationally. Various international publications,

exhibitions and awards. Hannes Stiefel lives and works in Vienna, Austria and in Zurich, Switzerland.

FlashbackWe noticed that it’s also literature that connects us. When I heard that S. was taken to hospital – he was said to be seriously ill – I hurried up to send him a book I’ve told him of. Too late and appalled I remembered its title I OWE THE WORLD A DEAD BODY. Out of the clinic grimaced with pain S. resolutely refused an excuse since he would just now – and he laughed – be reading MY LAST SIGH.

Shortly after, during a scenic performance of the Bach Cantatas MY HEART SWIMS IN BLOOD / I HAVE ENOUGH I was able TO HEAR GOYA who himself was deaf.

Justin Randolph Thompson

There is a West African proverb that says, A man in his home is like a hippopotamus in water, he cannot be moved. When I first left home I spent a great deal of time trying to evaluate just how constructive and how detrimental this immobility is.

Justin Randolph Thompson is a Florence, Italy and Minnetrista, MN based new artist born In

Peekskill, NY in ’79. He has lived in Italy periodically, since 2001. Thompson is a scholar in African-

American history, African presence in Italy and African-American Quilting history. Thompson

studied cinematography under Kevin Jerome Everson and has intertwined this past experience

with his current sculpture practice investigating crossroads between ancient Italian references and

contemporary African-American cultural expressions. His work encompasses sculpture, digital

animation, ritual based performances and video installation. Thompson has lectured as a visiting artist

at several University programs and has published articles of his scholarly research in international

publications. He will have a forthcoming feature in Sculpture Magazine written by critic Elaine A.

King. Thompson has solo shows lined up at Buffalo Arts Studio in Buffalo, NY, Number_5 GmbH

in Zurich Switzerland, and Studio Arts Center International in Florence, Italy for 2008. He was a

finalist in the Arnoldo Pomodoro Prize and recent recipient of a Franconia Sculpture Park Jerome

Fellowship. Thompson is currently Professor of Fine Art at the University for foreigners Scuola

Lorenzo de’Medici in Florence, Italy.

Thomas Wirsing

"Rusty Cage" by Johnny CashYou wired me awake, And hit me with a hand of broken nails. You tied my lead and pulled my chain,To watch my blood begin to boil. But I‘m gonna break, I‘m gonna break my, Gonna break my rusty cage and run. I‘m gonna break, I‘m gonna break my, Gonna break my rusty cage and run. Too cold to start a fi re, I‘m burning diesel, burning dinosaur bones. I‘ll take the river down to still water, And ride a pack of dogs. I‘m gonna break, I‘m gonna break my, Gonna break my rusty cage and run. I‘m gonna break, I‘m gonna break my, Gonna break my rusty cage and run. When the forest burns along the road, Like God‘s eyes in my headlights. When the dogs are lookin‘ for their bones, And it‘s rainin‘ icepicks on your steel shore, I‘m gonna break, I‘m gonna break my, I‘m gonna break my rusty cage and run. I‘m gonna break, I‘m gonna break my, Gonna break my rusty cage and run. I‘m gonna break, I‘m gonna break my, Gonna break my rusty cage and run. I‘m gonna break, I‘m gonna break my, Gonna break my rusty cage and run.

Born 1973 in Bad Kissingen, Germany. Studies of architecture at the RWTH Aachen TU Vienna and

ETH Zurich. Since 2001 collaborations as free-surfing architect.

number 5 GmbH Letzigraben 136 CH - 8047 Zürich www.number5.ch info@number5.ch

Gordana Bezanov, for number 5 GmbH, presents the curatorial project entitled "I’m asking for the sky", in collaboration with Martin Siegrist.

As a means to best address the space of the prison, number 5 GmbH is collaborating with artists and architects working within a variety of media including: painting, sculpture, video, installation, and mixed media. Using these different media, number5 GmbH aims to transform the space of the old prison, from an abandoned network of cells, into a space alive with constructed forms. These forms (works of art and architecture) will thus invite the audience to consider ideas of the nature of freedom, by giving spectators the opportunity to ponder the possibilities of how works of art, through collective memory of human experience, can transform the limited space of a cell, into a feeling akin to the infinite space of the sky.

With thanks to Mauro Cossu and Francesca Sassu, the A.C. Artegiovane, and all our friends in Sardinia.