Rogue Agents: a Curatorial Project by Auto Italia South East
Workshops: 28.04.17 - 29.04.17, 11:00-14:00
Live Night: 01.04.17 18:00 - 21:30
Firstdraft is pleased to present its first international exchange with London-based artist-led project Auto Italia South East.
Rogue Agents is a group project seeking to collectively uncover ideas around figures that can disrupt, subvert and redirect power. From historical and folkloric interpretations of witchcraft to bio-technologies and body hacking, Rogue Agents will explore alternative models of being and desiring.
Auto Italia invite you to the Firstdraft coven to collectively (fore)cast disruptive new configurations for the codification of our future bodies, seeking agency in new modes of technological shapeshifting. Through image making, textiles production, and live music, Rogue Agents will explore transgressive new possibilities for harnessing collective imagination to explore fictional, esoteric and latent modes of self-representation.
Climaxing into full augmentation—how might our subversive exchanges in digital and biomolecular data become weapons in a fight for the production of control, empathy and creativity in the future?
Rogue Agents is a project by Auto Italia in collaboration with Holly Childs, Linda Dement, Angela Goh, Mette Hammer Juhl + Lorenzo Tebano, Spence Messih, Bhenji Ra, Victoria Sin and Pablo Jones-Soler.
PROGRAM
Rogue Agents Reading Group and Collective Banner Making Workshops
Workshop #1 28th March 11am – 2pm
Workshop #2 29th March 11am – 2pm
Taking a range of texts as prompts for discussion, Auto Italia invite you to speculate and design new potentials taking the research interests central to the Rogue Agents project as their starting point. In coming together to read and discuss, we will produce a series of banner artworks, creating a moment for collaboration, making and discussion.
The reading group is open for those interested to attend and join the discussions. Reading material will be circulated in advance. Please send an expression of interest to info@firstdraft.org.au to reserve your place.
ROGUE AGENTS LIVE NIGHT
"We started to feel it edging nearer. We lived and worked in one of the most affluent urban centres in the world; a dense mesh grid of bodies, metal, concrete and production. Glass so clear it looked as if it were air until a greasy pool at the periphery of your vision gave it away, buildings aspiring to exist as the cloud; the workers their data, a seamless flow into intangible mass. We sought total transparency. When we moved through the city it was as if we never even touched the ground. And then the bottom fell out."
Rogue Agents Live Night explores disaster and escape. Promoting a new set of archetypes for this moment where everything must change, this collectively authored piece brings together music, performance, image-production, staging and new narratives across an evening where we will leave this planet behind and seek new modes of representation of, and agencies for, ourselves elsewhere.
ABOUT AUTO ITALIA SOUTH EAST
Auto Italia is an artist-run project and studio led by Kate Cooper, Marianne Forrest and Edward Gillman. Founded in 2007, it aims to provide a framework for developing alternative production and exhibition formats.
Throughout the history of the organisation there has been a questioning of how artists can work together to develop new formats for artistic production. Projects have taken on various formats ranging from collaborative public programming in temporary spaces, commissions and presentations in institutions and galleries, and the production of collaborative projects through working online. This work has been shown nationally and internationally at Tate Modern, ICA, London; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, abc – Art Berlin Contemporary Berlin; Artissima LIDO, Turin; CSS Bard, New York; and Künstlerhaus, Bremen amongst others.
Since 2007, Auto Italia has been led by an evolving group of collaborating artists. Alumni include Marleen Boschen (2014-16), Amanda Dennis (2007-2012), Richard John Jones (2009-2012) and Rachel Pimm (2007-2009).