MAKING USE. LIFE IN POSTARTISTIC TIMES IS AN EXHIBITION AND PUBLIC PROGRAM FEATURING MORE THAN ONE HUNDRED PARTICIPANTS

S.a.L.E Docks

S.a.L.E Docks

Fragment – S.a.L.E. Docks pop-up book, 2016, photo courtesy S.a.L.E. Docks.

S.a.L.E. Docks is an independent space for visual art initiated in 2007 by a group of citizens who decided to occupy abandoned salt-storage docks in the heart of Venice. S.a.L.E. Docks is run by art and theatre workers, artists, and students, and the program is always evolving. S.a.L.E. Docks aims to reverse the processes that privatize the art commons, starting with the questions: What is the relationship between cultural capital and endemic precariousness? Why is it that gestures broadly agreed upon as radical don’t result in real change? Why are art, finance, and real estate locked together? S.a.L.E. maintains two different dynamics: facilitating collaboration between local artists, citizens, and young students; and developing projects with international art agents and artists. S.a.L.E. organizes seminars, exhibitions, workshops, and public actions to create a physical space, a cutting-edge perspective, and a solid practice in which the central focus is culture – culture as an element of collective work and common good, rather than a form to be exploited. For this exhibition, S.a.L.E. collective created a pop-up book in which they present some aspects of their practice. They discuss their attempts to recycle the Venice Biennale, ways of organizing alternative pavilions, and curatorial experiments in modes of mapping and self-representing artistic dark matter.

 

www.saledocks.org