SARAJEVO WINTER FESTIVAL, February 7th-28th, 2011

THE MOVING CREW: WHAT’S INSIDE IDEAL X?

The Moving Crew art collective project, What’s inside Ideal X? from the Modern and Contemporary Art Museum in Rijeka collection is being presented at the XXVII International Festival in Sarajevo, The Sarajevo Winter 2011., Gradska galerija/The City Gallery – Collegium Artisticum, February 7th-28th, 2011.

The Modern and Contemporary Art Museum in Rijeka has been invited in the middle of 2010 to participate in the XXVII International Festival in Sarajevo, The Sarajevo Winter 2011 (http://sarajevskazima.ba/) and present The Moving Crew, What’s inside Ideal X? project.

The Sarajevo Winter Festival started in 1984., the year of Sarajevo Olympic Games, and has since developed into a traditional arts and culture manifestation, which exhibits numerous art programs from various countries – in the City’s center, on Olympic mountains, and in other Bosnia and Herzegovina towns. This year it is organized by the Sarajevo International Center for Peace, under the title:  ART OF LOVE / UMJETNOST LJUBAVI .

What’s inside Ideal X? project by the art collective The Moving Crew has entered The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka collection as a donation, after its Rijeka premiere in July 2010. This unusual multimedia installation has been produced collaboratively over a longer period of time by The Moving Crew, the Rijeka public and hundreds of other participants worldwide who answered the project website Open Calls for participation (http://www.idealxshipping.com/,http://www.themovingcrew.org). The project gathers digital media, documentary films, videos, photographs, physical objects – hundreds of hand-printed and folded cardboard boxes that have been iconically transformed into shipping containers and filled with various contents or placed into urban landscape sights. Extracted from their marginalized visual status in our quotidian lives, the container becomes a means for cultural and creative exchange, a linking tool for conversations and dialogue of different persons, cultures, environments and languages.

The art collective states: “Ideal X was the name of the first ship to use intermodal shipping containers, which revolutionized shipping goods from train to ship to truck to final destination. Today these containers are used to transport everything– from agricultural products, to toys or weapons, but we perceive them only functionally and aesthetically from the outside. We are often unconscious of these objects as they blend with our urban or rural landscapes. The containers’ interior space, however, is never visible or accessible. It is a “non-space” that contains ideal, unknown objects and concepts. As they speed by on ships or trucks, we have no idea what is officially or illegally inside them. From international ports to rural warehouses, shipping containers link the world. Shipping containers reveal the late capitalist system of global trade, transfer of goods, ideas and capital. The directional flow of these containers reveals power structures that are far beyond our individual control yet affect our daily life. This movement is difficult to detect and comprehend due to its massive scale.”

By posing the question what’s inside the box? the project is questioning what is inside a community as a whole. It plays on the margins of what is visible and emphasizes the communicational aspects of art, trying to provoke all hidden layers of perception, the neglected aspects of reality, and especially the grey zones of he socio-political context. The power of the capital and the dynamics of ownership and trade are being “disarmed” by the project’s strategy to include wider communities and various creative and critical ideas of different individuals. In doing so, the What’s inside Ideal X? project also subverses the very issue of the status of the artist and the work of art, and questions the classical conception of the original, authorship, media or discipline classifications.

MORE ABOUT THE IDEAL X PROJECT:

What’s Inside Ideal X? is a collaborative project that uses the motif of the shipping container as a platform for cross-cultural and creative exchange. Initiated in 2009, this inclusive project continues to develop through many phases and sites. As it travels to various locations around the world its aim is to invite audiences to participate and interact with the project in various media. Audiences are invited to fill the containers with relevant content that may reflect their own context– personal, social, local, national, etc.

Ideal X was the name of the first ship to use intermodal shipping containers, which revolutionized shipping goods from train to ship to truck to final destination. Today these containers are used to transport everything– from agricultural products, to toys or weapons, but we perceive them only functionally and aesthetically from the outside. We are often unconscious of these objects as they blend with our urban or rural landscapes. The containers’ interior space, however, is never visible or accessible. It is a “non-space” that contains ideal, unknown objects and concepts. As they speed by on ships or trucks, we have no idea what is officially or illegally inside them. From international ports to rural warehouses, shipping containers link the world. Shipping containers reveal the late capitalist system of global trade, transfer of goods, ideas and capital. The directional flow of these containers reveals power structures that are far beyond our individual control yet affect our daily life. This movement is difficult to detect and comprehend due to its massive scale.

The Moving Crew observes and questions this complex system and its disempowering aspects. TheWhat’s Inside Ideal X? project asks people to interrogate what is concealed and what is revealed by this banal object? We invite a wide range of participants to wonder, to speculate, to imagine, to re-think…

The What’s Inside Ideal X? exhibition in Rijeka, Croatia and Grinnell, Iowa presented 1800 miniature containers, stacked to make the volume of one life-size international standard TEU shipping container (6.1m x 2.4m x 2.1m). The miniature containers were produced collaboratively: hundreds of logos and container designs were submitted by artists worldwide in response to an Open Call on The Moving Crew website. Then, in both locations, community workshops were organized by The Moving Crew to teach silkscreen and print, fold and construct each miniature container. The cardboard containers were then used for a series of urban actions and interventions, photographed, filmed and performed with by The Moving Crew and local community members.

This exhibition presents the documentation of prior events, together with an on-line station where Sarajevo Winter audience can browse the project websites and post their on-line answers to the question: What’s Inside Ideal X?

www.themovingcrew.org
www.idealxshipping.com
Rijeka EVENT: http://themovingcrew.org/rijekaevent.html
Grinnell EVENT: http://themovingcrew.org/grinnellevent.html
Sarajevo EVENT: http://themovingcrew.org/sarajevoevent.html