Olga Chagaoutdinova

Special Award ‘Eleonora Duse’

Born and grown up in Russia, but now living and working in Canada Calgary/Montreal Olga Chagaoutdinova creates photo and video-based art that examines domesticity, globalization and, most recently, suffering in contemporary society. She holds BA in Russian Language and World Literature (1992) from Pedagogical University of Khabarovsk, Russia; Certificate Program in History of Culture and Religion (1994) at St. Petersburg University, Russia; BFA in Photography (2005) from Emily Carr University Vancouver, and a MFA (2008) from Concordia University, Montreal, Canada.

In her work she observes an exchange of cultural codes through the search of personal identity, values, collective and individual memory. She has received numerous awards for her work, most notably the Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward International Competition (2005), the Foundation de Sève Award (2005), the Power Corporation of Canada Graduate Fellowship, and the Roloff Benny Fellowship in Photography (2006), 2010 Opline Prize, France. It was with her MFA Graduate Solo show (2008) at Trois Points Gallery, Montreal, Quebec that she was selected as one of the ten best graduate students in Canada by Canadian Art Magazine. In 2011 two projects where presented at Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA) and Stome-Ache project was nominated for Kandinsky Award, Russia. A number of national and international institutions hold her work in their permanent collections: the Museum of Fine Art of Quebec the Far East Museum of Fine Art in Khabarovsk, Hydro Québec, Canada; Royal Bank of Canada; Andy Pilara Collection USA; Kebola Collection, Havana, Cuba.

Francesco Conz

Special Award ‘Art and Culture’

A FLUXOGRAPHIC AUTOBIOGRAPHY

«This year I’ll be 55 years old. During the first twenty years of my life deep in the heart of the province of Padua. I tried to do what my family expected of me. I was sent to the Catholic University of Milan to study economics and business, and before me lay the life of a son of a good middleclass family with very traditional and religious values. Then, quite suddenly, and for reasons too complicated to describe here, I broke off my studies and left with all my belongings-first stop, France.

In a word, the notorious post-adolescent crisis.

I toured Europe endeavoured to do whatever my family did not expect of me. Trained to command, I put my hand to every immaginable trade and learned to obey.

I learned many languages: a passion for culture led me into innumerable galleries, museums, libraries etc…

In a word, I had entered upon the difficult path of the self-made man.

Half way through the sixties, I returned to my little town of origin, pitied by all (including my family) because because I had not made my fortune abroad (in those days, when someone returned he did so showing off a fancy automobile and telling stories of his economic triumphs). What is more, I had taken part in person in the uses and abuses of the beat generation, and my views and my ways created a scandal. Son of a family of partisans, proud possessors of an ancestral medal of courage (for one of the heroes of Garibaldi), I had incurred the family disapproval by marrying a blonde girl from Hamburg.

My good partisan brothers, who had never set foot outside of Italy, convinced that Germans were accustomed to devouring children, quite understandably were concerned for the continuation of my descendancy. However my excellent sense of smell did not fail me, nothing happened to my two sons who enjoy the best of health.

Those were the years of hard labor: family business and business-family, then business, business, business.

I had begun to collect art, and, like any beginner, I sought out the advice of the more experienced professionals.

That is how conventional collectors made such successful careers in Italy ( but only in Italy), with the help of the the Madonna and of the political parties. However this yielded me no satisfaction at all: I had no relations with the “masters” and took no part whatsoever in their creativity. Hence no fun there!

In the beginning of the seventies I thought of opening a gallery in Venice and did so. This was an addition to my life, now composed of family business and gallery. I had taken a step forward. Liquidating my former collection (scandalizing as usual my farsighted collector- colleagues, who still have not forgiven me my later choices), I concentrated on what the fashionable newspapers called “the new avant-garde”; in a word, on those artist who were assiduously published in architectural reviews and who it was very chic to have in your home.

But even this situation was not satisfactory to me. These new masters gave themselves incredible airs, and I, a neophyte gallery-owner, had little to offer them except my few pennies which they took, albeit with much disdain. For the second time, I soon considered closing the gallery and giving up any further artistic activities. Toward the end of 1972 I had to sojourn in Berlin for business reasons, and there Saint Francis, my patron Saint and Protector against discouragement and dejection, led me to become acquainted with Joe Jones who spoke to me of the Fluxus group and of Gunther Brus, who introduced me next to Nitsch and Muehl and thus to “Viennese actionism”. Very excited, I returned to Italy and attempted to complete my Knowledge of the phenomenon. I visited Nitsch in Diessen, Münich ( where he was in temporary exile), and I had the good luck to meet Gerhard Rühm who spoke to me for the first time of the Wiener Group and of “visual poetry”. I went home and in a month liquidated the gallery and my second collection. A few weeks later, with Beate, Nitsch and Brus we left foir a trip to New York and I, well supplied with first names, family names and notes by Joe Jones, began to visit the artists who had so greatly interested me. On my return another miracle from my Holy Protector: immediately after a televised interviews I received a telephone call From the distinguished Count Orazio Baglioni di Asolo who wanted to meet me and offered to rent me a palazzo in Asolo.. Met, agreed, done. Now I had a worthy headquarters for my new activies, with premises on the ground floor soon to be the site of exhibitions. This was truly a magical moment in my life, and Asolo was still immersed in the memory of former cultural glories. Eleonora Duse Seemed never to have passed away and Robert Browning and Malipiero still appeared to be sunning themselves on the terrace of the Caffe Centrale.

Those were times in which the Cipriani restaurant had its tables set with silver and linen-cloths, and the Caffe Centrale possessed the romantic aura of a Viennese meeting-place. Asolo, far from the Ski resorts and beaches, had remained protected from tourism. A true paradise for artists, for me and for art.

Joe Jones established himself there (where he would remain until 1978), and it was also there that Nitsch in June of ’73 created his most representative environment, “Asolo Raum”. Marvelous evenings, creative meetings, dinners in the inns of the surrounding countryside and unending discussions in the Caffè Centrale into the early hours of the morning.

Works which have become history were done there from 1973 to 1979; the following artists worked and stayed in the town: Erich Andesen, Heinz Cibulka, Philip Corner, Giuseppe Desiato, Al Hansen, Geoffrey Hendricks, Jon Hendricks, Juan Hidalgo, Dick Higgings, Milan Knizak, Alison Knowles, Joe Jones, Michel Journiac, Jackson MacLow, June Paik, Gerhard Ruehm, Takako Saito, Carolee Schneemann, Bob Watts, Emmett Williams and so many others.

I particularly wish to thank the photographer Jan Van Raay for having allowed me to duplicate the archive of “Guerilla Art Action Group” of Jon Hendricks and Jean Toche. Some editions appeared at the time under the label “Pari e dispari”, the reason being that I was overburdened by obligations at the factory which I still owned and managed. Further thanks go to Rosanna Chiessi and Giuseppe Morra for their collaboration in those years. It would be too lengthy to describe here the Golden Time of Asolo. Of one thing I am certain: art, the universal and secret religion which should reign today, does not permit any activity outside of itself; this I have learned with experience.

I am grateful to art for having freed me from the destiny which I seemed to have been born for: businessman, exemplary parent, bourgeois model. I am grateful to art and to artists for having taught me a different model of life: you don’t have to be a businessman even when you seem to have been born to it; you can love your family in different way, and it’s not necessarily the worst solution. Born into a middle-class family it’s best to remain middle-class, providing you keep before your eyes the most enlightened and not the most made-up and useless people of fashion. I live in Europe now and often in Verona which is the seat of my activities as a publisher.

The Fluxus family is a part of my program and now Asolo (not to be remembered like a period dead and buried) elives with all the positive corrections which experience and age have brought. The family is more than 25 years old and almost all its members have joined the third age, including myself; we have become more or less wise and had to bid adieu to our old habits, including drinking into the wee hours.

Someone asked me recently, “Francesco, you live with artist, you take part in their creative work. Do you consider yourself to be an artist?”. I answered, “Yes , I consider myself to be an artist also. I do my job as a publisher as a publisher of the fifteenth century would do, endeavouring to offer the best and to do my best”. This is what the religion of art taught me and what Fluxus has prescribed.»

Francesco Conz

Cataloge “Fluxus spqr” in collaboration with Archivio F. Conz/Archivio Domus Jani, Illasi” at Galleria Fontanella Borghese, Rome, June 1990.