the european biennial of contemporary art
manifesta 7 logo

artists

Tom Holert with Claudia Honecker

Tom Holert, 1962, Hamburg, DE Lives in Berlin, DE, and Vienna, AT Claudia Honecker, 1965, Limburg a.d. Lahn Lives in berlin, de

Ricostruzione: Disertori / Libera, 2008 video essay, 19’12” Photographs, printed matter

TRENTO

M7

Tom Holert’s writings deal with visual culture, politics, war, mobility, glamour, and the governmentality of the present. In Ricostruzione: Disertori / Libera he has teamed up with Claudia Honecker to create a multilevel inquiry into architecture, politics, psychology, and philosophy loosely based on the lives and works of Beppino Disertori (Trento 1907–1992) and Adalberto Libera (1903, Villa Lagarina, Trento – 1963, Rome).
Disertori was a neuropsychiatrist with neovitalist leanings as well as a humanist philosopher and antifascist active in the resistance during the German occupation of Italy. His prolific writings span clinical studies, psychology, philosophy, and travel. Libera, likewise a native of Trentino, was one of the most visible young “rationalist” architects during Italy’s Fascist regime; he continued to work in postwar Italy as a project manager with INA-Casa, the vast state reconstruction program – posited as a laboratory for new articulations of dwelling – that generated hundreds of building projects between 1949 and 1963. The juxtaposition of Disertori and Libera may (and should) appear incommensurate and forced. Ricostruzione neither initiates a posthumous dialogue between the two nor suggests reconciliation. Instead, it reads their historically and intellectually specific projects by reconfiguring and fictionalizing them. At the same time, it raises questions about the potential for research within the institutional and theoretical realm of contemporary visual arts.
Berlin- and Vienna-based art historian and critic Tom Holert is working on a long-term study of “the diagnostic modern.” Claudia Honecker is a TV journalist living in Berlin.


Location

TRENTO

ANSELM FRANKE/HILA PELEG: "THE SOUL (or, Much Trouble in the Transportation of Souls)"

PALAZZO DELLE POSTE, VIA S.S. TRINITA’ 27, I-38100 TRENTO, ITALY

more