Roberto Rovetta's Kripto was chosen as winning project by curator Gean Moreno at the opening reception which was held on 5 December at the Miami-Beach Regional Library right next to the ArtBaselMiamiBeach Fair.

Gean Moreno adds "although all the works selected were very interesting and it was a pleasure to come to know them, I selected Roberto Rovetta as the winner because it seemed animated by a series of interesting ambiguities that went right to the core of the way in which I was thinking about The End. The ten projects selected for exhibition oscillate between desolate landscapes quietly palpitating with strange potentials to new monuments emerging from ruined worlds. Rovetta’s table feeds on the tension that this oscillation produces. As I wrote in my notes when I was thinking about these works: “Roberto Rovetta’s furniture stands strangely between material realities--part bound to the geometries of modernist design and part quasi-organic and potentially proliferating mineral pattern. It straddles rigid borders. Shown alone, a forlorn object becoming slowly animated, one wonders who exactly this object is for. It may not be for us.” It is the last suggestion that emanates from the object, the question it leaves open, that I think registers what I found so compelling about his engagement with the notion of The End--and the reason I chose him as the winner."

Exhibition dates:
December 5 - 8, 2012

Opening hours:
Every day 10am – 6pm, closed on Sunday

Location:
Miami Beach Regional Library,

227 22nd Street, Miami Beach, Florida 33139, USA.
Tel: (305) 535-4219

All 10 projects

OqLeBarron, Romania - My World Collapse , Digital Graphics

Alec Von Bargen, Mexico - Confessions from the Still, Photography

Michael Cheung, Hong Kong - Dooms Day, Digital Graphics

Matteo Girola, Italy - Geo, logiche, Photography

Moria Lahis, Israel - Untitled, Photography

Virginia Lee, Canada - Sundial, Painting

Rosario Leotta, Italy - Sturm , Photography

Valentina Venturi(NastyNasty), Italy - Nicht Gerettet, Video

Roberto Rovetta, Italy - Kripto, Sculpture

Bianca Salvo, UK - The Only Records of Our Ancestors are in Their Fossils, Photography

The End is an international call for artists’ projects (call closed in October) in any media, curated by the US-based art critic and curator Gean Moreno. It aims to see what new forms the idea of 'the end' can generate in our particularly turbulent historical moment.

THEME
Once, the notion of the end traded in simplicity. Things were over. In popular culture, 2012 was its year. The apocalyptic imagination would finally find its prophesies fulfilled. The Book of Revelations was leaving the page. But of course the end is rarely about the end, and it seems to be much less so these days. 2012 was ushered in by a wave of social unrest--the Arab Spring and the proliferation of Occupations--and this may just force us to imagine the idea of endings in more complicated ways. Somewhere George Steiner wrote that we are the children of an autumnal age. Endings and exhaustion should be our things. But now it seems that, with the upswell of dissatisfaction boiling into action, with the electricity that’s in the air, our collective historical imagination has been given an opportunity to reconfigure itself. The idea of the end may now take different routes, flesh out unexpected intersections. It can still mark the course of dissolution and disaster. Visions of a scorched planet still harbor their chilling seduction. Cataclysm always has its charms. But the end is now, also, a space of critical gateways. Things are torn down to build anew on the ruins, to test better ways of living together, to lay a bet on a different kind of future. The idea of the end lends itself increasingly to a broader range of programs.

More than straight apocalyptic depictions or bushy-tailed activist projects, what I’m really interested in are strange juxtapositions, weird syntheses, inexplicable mutations between the seductive drive of destruction and imaginative processes of renewal. Think utopian colonies living in a landfill. Think the Black Panthers operating out of a junkyard, as in Godard’s One Plus One (Sympathy for the Devil). Think Beckett’s wastelands occupied, brightened by rows and rows of tents and grating drum circles. Think Mad Max remade as the story of Oakland’s angry communards. Think T.S. Eliot reporting from Madrid or Tahrir Square. Think, of course, beyond any of these examples, dazzle with weirdness. To be concise, the projects selected for this exhibition will orbit around an imaginative reconfiguration of the idea of the end as an equivocal, slippery, elusive, but inspiring thing, pregnant with new and unexpected potentials, bleak and bright at the same time.

Gean Moreno

July 2012

Details in brief:

° Deadline for submissions is 15 October 2012.

° Open to artists, photographers, designers and architects worldwide, without limits of age or experience.

° 10 projects will be exhibited 5-8 December at the Miami-Beach Regional Library during the Art/Basel/Miami Beach Fair.

° € 1,000 prize to the winning project.