THE ANIMAL QUESTION AND CONTEMPORARY ART: THE RAVE EXPERIENCE

RAVE East Village Artist Residency is a project created by the artists Isabella and Tiziana Pers.

It deals with the role and responsibility of contemporary art in relation to the otherness represented by animals, and more generally with the need to rethink ourselves and our world through biocentrism. Furthermore it supports contemporary artistic research, dialogue and diffusion, promoting non-specist thinking in an experimental and multidisciplinary art project. The residency program takes place in the Friuli countryside, in Italy, in a farmstead inhabited by animals that had been rescued from the slaughterhouse and from consumer mechanisms through Tiziana Pers’ performances Art_History (always in-progress), and are now hosted and cared for in huge fields, in a more natural environment. Indeed the residency program originates from the individual artistic researches of Isabella and Tiziana, and their practice. If the focus of Tiziana’s work is the animal question and the investigations on the parallels and connections among different forms of dominion, such as racism, sexism, colonialism, capitalism and speciesism, Isabella develops her projects with the use of different languages (painting, participatory intallation and action, video, photography and drawing) but very clearly connected by some common elements, main themes of the artist's research: the apprehension for the planet's conditions, the observation of social, natural and cultural ecosystems, and changes accelerated by globalization. From singularity to plurality: the commonground among the two sisters that generated the metaproject RAVE is the possibility to imagine new scenarios, and to work on the thresholds, on the crossroads of coexistence in a more biocentric, and maybe posthuman, perspective.