As i blogged the other day, the Bolzano segment of Manifesta 7 exhibition is located in a disused aluminium factory by the Dolomites mountains. The show is called The Balance of Now and words fail me to limited how consequent, intelligent and idea-provoking information technology is.

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The curators, Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula & Shuddhabrata Sengupta from Raqs Media Commonage, took equally a signal of departure for their reflection the abandoned industrial site and the questions its 'after-life' raises, they then enlarged the scope of the give-and-take: What gets left behind when everything is taken away? What can be retrieved, and what can be remembered? How can the remainder become the engine of meaning?

They invited artists but also a few practitioners whose work wouldn't be defined as art to participate to the chat. I'll focus on a couple of them in this post.

David Adjaye is 1 of the most famous and oh! so talented architects from England. One who, although he collaborated with Olafur Eliasson to create the Your Black Horizon installation at the Venice Biennale in 2005, has never tried to confuse his work with one of an artist (like some architects like to do these days)

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His contribution to the Manifesta biennial is Europolis, a beautifully crafted drinking glass and metal foil panel that raises questions such every bit 'What if Europe was condensed into i piece and combined equally one cell? What would be left behind as balance?'

0aapukopuki.jpg David Adjaye, Europolis, 2008. Paradigm courtesy of Manifesta

Adjaye extracted information from the majuscule cities of the European Union and condensed it into a single entity. The sum of many European cities doesn't make a European metropolis. These have not been planned; they have evolved over fourth dimension, through history and war, evolution, devastation, mixing, migration and changing populations. Adjaye's piece of work evokes the idea of the city every bit phenomenon. Its organic form contains all the information about those cities from which it is drawn: material texture, population, time, scale and occupation.

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The other rabbit in Manifesta'south magic chapeau is Piratbyrån (The Bureau of Piracy) who came all the way down from Stockholm to Italy in an old charabanc. Piratbyrån is best known as the initiator of The Pirate Bay, the world'south largest bit torrent tracker and the subject of a controversial court instance.

0apiratebyrannn.jpg Piratbyrån (The Agency for Piracy). Please Join The Party, 2008. Image courtesy Manifesta

The journey doubled as a workshop whose aim was the formulation of a new, collaborative statement based on the grouping'south experiences of the recent Scandinavian conflicts over copyright. The motorcoach was left behind as part of the exhibition, along with the documentation of Piratbyrån's work.

I admire the Biennale for having the guts to support the project in a country whose authorities has recently decided to censor The Pirate Bay. Then far the move has been unsuccessful. I judge that amongst the worries of the caput of State is also the suspicion that nosotros'll use the file-sharing website to enthusiastically download his upcoming CD of Christmas songs.

Unfortunately (for me cuz information technology means i can't download the Commissario Montalbano), Colombo-BT is still blocked due to the same measure.

Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak: "It kinda shows that nosotros're more than than just a site, that nosotros're an idea, and that nosotros're art in ourselves. As I've said many times earlier, we see The Pirate Bay every bit some sort of ongoing art project/performance."

0afrontandbakck.jpg Inside the charabanc

In that location's of course a torrent of TPB'south road movie.

Manifesta, the itinerant European Biennial of Contemporary Fine art is hosted this year by the Trentino – South Tyrol Region. Information technology runs until November 2, 2008.