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Scarso, Jacek Ludwig (2023) The Rise and Fall of the Ideal City. [Show/Exhibition]
The Rise and Fall of the Ideal City - an exhibition of Marta Czok's work in collaboration with Urban Visions Film Festival, A-Place and TAKFLIX. Curated by Jacek Ludwig Scarso with Luisa Bravo and Anna Marazuela Kim.
The Renaissance concept of the Ideal City is here a provocation to critically explore the ideological connotations of the urban context and the need for social change, locally and globally. As focal points for transient civilizations, cities are built, rebuilt and destroyed, becoming, both metaphorically and literally, battlefields for power games: social injustice, economic greed, the desire for supremacy, the indifference to an increasingly fragile ecosystem are the backdrop to the lived experience of citizens. The result of human intervention, cities appear to be in constant development, while hiding an increasingly unstable core. Glimmers of hope are offered by the resilience of citizens who, undaunted, fight social hardship, through individual and collective efforts.
Curated by Jacek Ludwig Scarso, the depictions of the city in Marta Czok's paintings, which vary in period from the early eighties to the last decade, show a satirical perspective on social hierarchies. In these works, the powerful believe that they are unstoppable, yet the world they want to dominate is nothing more than an ideological construction: all is contingent, all is transitory, all can be overturned. At the other end of the social scale, ordinary citizens appear helpless, but it is through their work that the riches of a city are built and that social change is truly made possible.
In dialogue with these works, the exhibition features two subsequent chapters, each marked by a collaboration curated respectively by Luisa Bravo, with a selection of short films from Urban Visions Film Festival and A-Place co-funded by the Creative Europe program of the European Union, and by Anna Marazuela Kim, with a selection of short films from Takflix, which partners with international organizations to showcase Ukrainian cinema abroad.
Thanks to this dialogue, The Rise and Fall of the Ideal City provides a stimulus for critical reflection on the urban context, but also for inspiration on how artistic languages in different disciplines may bring new ideas and important testimonies with respect to this context.
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