Cesare Pietroiusti
Workshop on Workshops II, Magnetic Fields
LECTURE
5 March 2016
FAR – Villa Sucota
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Cesare Petroiusti (b. 1955, Rome) is a visual artist, founder, and coordinator of several experimental and research centres, magazines, and conferences. From 1977, he has been exhibited in public and private spaces in Italy as well as abroad. Pietroiusti is a psychiatrist and has always demonstrated specific interest in paradoxical or apparently unreasonable situations, normally not considered or "regarded as too insignificant to become the cause of analysis or representation." He is among the founders of Centro Studi Jartrakor in Rome, in the late '70s, and of "Rivista di Psicologia dell'Arte"; in 1977, he was one of the founders of the project Oreste, which was invited in 1999 to the 48th Venice Biennal by Harald Szeemann. In recent years, his work was concentrated mainly on the thematic of exchange and paradoxes that are created in the folds of the systems and in economic organizations. Since 2004, he has been irreversibly transforming other's money; he has distributed thousands of his own signed drawings for free; he sold stories; he ate bills after an auction only to return them after evacuation. He has opened stores that sold bills that were purchased with a glimpse of the buyer; he has managed restaurants where instead of paying the bill at the end of the meal, you were given the amount of money of the price of the food written on the menu. He has set up exhibitions where the works are for sale not for money, but in exchange for ideas and visitors' proposals.