Ferenc Gróf

From plants to plantations, from plantations to plants, 2020

– digital print, variable dimension, courtesy of the artist.

From plants to plantations, from plantations to plants

As an alternative to a curatorial statement, the research for assembling the Sugar of the east exhibition started with a world map. A map about two plants, the sugar cane and the sugar beet, about their role in the history of slavery and the heritage of the plantation economy. The diagram follows the fluctuation of sugar prices since the 17th century, highlighting the essential moments in the history of the sugar industry and the key points for this exhibition.

Ferenc Gróf (1972, Pécs, HU) is a graduate of the Hungarian University of the Arts, Budapest, and since 2012 he has taught at the École Nationale Supérieur d’Art (ENSA) in Bourges (FR). His work considers ideological footprints, at the intersection of graphic design and spatial experiences. He is a founding member of the Parisian co-operative Société Réaliste (2004–2015), whose work considers questions of contemporary political representations and text-based interventions. Société Réaliste’s work has also been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions and biennials such as Shanghai, 2012; Lyon, 2009; and Istanbul, 2009. Since 2015 Société Réaliste is on hiatus, Ferenc Gróf continues his work as an individual artist. His most recent solo exhibitions were Without index (Kiscelli Museum, Budapest, 2016), X with a dot below (OFF Biennale, Budapest, 2017), Or firing of a red star alert (acb Gallery, Budapest, 2018), Anxiocene (Moulins de Paillard, FR, 2019). Gróf lives and works in Paris.

Kyo Kim

Sugar Ballistic, 2020

– silk screen and digital print, 96 pages, courtesy of the artist.

Sugar Ballistic

Sugar Ballistic is a written form work in printing where the speculations between historical facts and contemporary phenomenons are put together to think about alternative points of view on sugar as a transformative element of the economical and political logic.

Kyo Kim (1991, Daegu, South Korea) currently lives and works in France. He studied psychology before joining ENSA Bourges. He examines questions of digital and physical sovereignty based on quantitative evaluations and technologies. His artistic practices are video and written form driven. He recently participated in a collective exhibition at EP7 in Paris with Emotional Interfaces, 2020, and in the File Festival in Brazil, São Paulo, 2020. He previously participated in the Wrong Biennale with the curator group Emotional Interfaces, followed by an online residency.

Ludovic Bernhardt

Chaos Game, 2020

– digital print on paper, plywood table, lights, courtesy of the artist.

Chaos Game

Chaos Game is a chaotic tabletop game (which is not played) about the Haitian revolution of 1791–1804. Santo Domingo / Haiti was one of the world’s leading sugarcane producers in the 18th century. It became the principal destination of the slave trade in the French colonial empire. The so-called sugar islands were principally places of agricultural production. The insular geographical characteristics of these islands enabled the colonizers to exert quasi-total control over the slave population. The Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804 was the first successful slave revolt at the dawn of the modern world and led to the creation of a republic (Haiti). In the work Chaos Game, the revolt of the sugar-producing slaves is signified in a ludo-cartographic experiment: this work is based on the disruption of graphic and geographical codes as a “chaos-cartography” for a strategic board game in the making. The events, contexts, and slaves that created this revolution are represented by icons, texts and pawns. This chaotic game-installation evokes a world in turmoil, a political event unique in history, but also a manipulative distance from the game as a manipulation of the world on a reduced scale. The installation will soon be adapted to become a board game with rules and players.

Ludovic Bernhardt (1975, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France) is an artist and writer, a graduate of Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains and the Duperré School of Applied Arts. He currently lives and works in Paris, after having lived in Istanbul for six years. Through installation and experimental literature, he questions certain “symptoms” of the present by deconstructing a set of cartographies based on the manipulation of political identification signs. He is represented by SANATORIUM gallery in Istanbul. He has taken part in several exhibitions and art fairs in France, Turkey, Austria, Poland, India, Switzerland, Portugal, China and Greece, and was co-curator of the exhibitions Hyphologie and Fragments Of A Hologram Rose in Istanbul. Ludovic Bernhardt has also worked extensively with the artist-run space Plateforme in Paris. He’s and author of books Work Bitch published by Editions Jou, and Reactor 3 (Fukushima) published by LansKine.

Graciela Carnevale

Tucumán Arde, 1968 / 2020

– posters and archive photographs, 450 x 360 cm, a selection of Graciela Carnevale’s archive on archivosenuso.org, courtesy of the artist.

Tucumán Arde

After the military government decided to close down sugar mills in Tucumán in 1968, people were led to poverty and starvation. Vanguard Artist’s Group, a group of artists and intellectuals that included María Teresa Gramuglio, Nicolás Rosa, Juan Pablo Renzi, León Ferrari, Roberto Jacoby, Norberto Puzzolo and Graciela Carnevale among others conceived the project Tucumán Arde for the CGTA (Confederación General del Trabajo de los Argentinos, General Confederation of Argentinean Labour) as an intervention in mass communication, generating a circuit of counter information about the situation in Tucumán that opposed that of the dictatorship in Argentina while political parties, education policies and the mass media were strictly controlled and censored by the government. Within the frame of the First Biennial of Avant-garde Art (1ª Bienal de Arte de Vanguardia) in 1968, the group developed isolated actions that formed an overall campaign which went unnoticed until its final manifestation: Tucumán stickers were placed throughout the city, Tucumán Arde (Tucumán burns) graffiti and stickers were all over the city as a political campaign. At the same moment some of the artists travelled to Tucumán to research and document the conditions of the workers. The documentation was part of the exhibition which was attended by 3,000 people. (Source: arte-util.org) For Sugar of the East, Graciela Carnevale worked with the curator of the exhibition on an ephemeral wall installation based on her archives of archivosenuso.org.

Graciela Carnevale (1942, Marcos Juárez, Argentina) lives and works in Rosario, Argentina. She graduated from the School of Fine Arts, National University of Rosario in 1964 and has served on its faculty since 1985 until 2009. In 1965 she became involved with Grupo de Arte de Vanguardia de Rosario (GVR), a group that introduced radical changes in the local art scene. With these young artists, Carnevale participated in various exhibitions, such as: Rosario 67, Primary Structures II., OPNI and El Arte por el Aire. The group established Ciclo de Arte Experimental, a series of exhibitions organised every two weeks from May to October 1968. In this frame, Carnevale organized Acción del encierro (Lock-up action), in which individuals attending the opening reception for the exhibition were locked in the gallery for more than an hour. Their only way to break free from the artwork was by shattering the gallery windows. Again in 1968 Carnevale and GVR together with artists from Buenos Aires organised Tucumán arde. In 1969 GVR disbanded. Carnevale returned to the production of art in 1994, when she joined Grupo Patrimonio. Since 2003 she and the artist Mauro Machado have organised the alternative space El Levante and participated in several exhibitions such as Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Pinacoteca, São Paulo, 2017–2018 or Documenta, Kassel, 2007.

Chris Marker

The battle for the 10 million, 1970

– video, 58 min, © Slon-Iskra.

The battle for the 10 million, video still

Fidel Castro’s “self-critical” speech of July 26, 1970 is preceded by an analysis of this historic year for Cuba. A few months earlier, Fidel Castro had appealed to the Cuban people to pool their efforts in order to double the sugar cane harvest – with the goal of producing 10 million tonnes of sugar – as the only way to halt the catastrophic decline of the Cuban economy. Despite an extraordinary mobilization, the goal was not achieved. This was the backdrop against which Chris Marker directed this historical documentary on the economic battle launched by Castro.

Co-director: Valérie Mayoux; Production companies: KG Productions, SLON – Société pour le lancement des oeuvres nouvelles (Brussels), ICAIC – Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos, RTBF – Radio Télévision Belge Francophone; Director of photography: Santiago Alvarez; Sound engineer: Jean-François Chevalier; Composer of the original music: Leo Brouwer; Editor: Jacqueline Meppiel; Narrators: Georges Kiejman, Edouard Luntz.

Christian Bouche-Villeneuve, known as Chris Marker (1921–2012, France), was a French director, writer, illustrator, translator, photographer, editor, philosopher, essayist, critic, poet and producer. He is particularly renowned for his major films: Les statues meurent aussi (Statues Also Die, 1953, with Alain Resnais), La Jetée (The Pier, 1962), Le Joli Mai (1963), Le Fond de l’Air est Rouge (The Grin Without a Cat, 1977), Sans Soleil (1983).

Ferenc Gróf

Sugar Code, 2020

– original lithographs by Honoré Daumier and digital prints, 100 x 70cm

Sugar Code, detail

Honoré Daumier (1808–1879) was a French printmaker, caricaturist, painter and sculptor whose works offered commentary on social and political life in France in the 19th century. A prolific cartoonist, author of more than four thousand lithographs, he is best known for his caricatures. The presented series of litographs by Honoré Daumier was published in the satirical magazine Le Charivari in 1839. In the background: pages of the Code Noir (1724) melting with the red color of the official stamp of the Imperial Library, in order to contextualize the vulgar racism of this series.

Captions of Daumier’s caricatures:

— I won’t tell you to go and get lost, sugar…. I’ll tell you: go and get cooked!, 8 September 1839

— Master, me cannot work anymore on sugar!… while the French eating beet sugar, I get too fat and cannot move any more, 12 September 1839

— Here represented is a great fight, which as one can believe, is commanded by the General Beetcracker! Which will not make its way into the historical museum of Versailles but one can already see a certain similarity to the battle of Canne, 20 September 1839 

Samuel Ferretto

Feitos de Açucar, 2020

– A5 folded digital print, bioplastic and sugar letters, courtesy of the artist.

Feitos de Açucar

Feitos de Açucar talks about the transformation of sugar and how it became a key ressource in Brazil. By following those changes, from sugar to bioethanol, political, economical and ecological issues are emerging.

Samuel Ferretto (1995, Paris, France) is a graduate of the applied art school of Duperré and is currently studying at ENSA Bourges. His work is about the transmutation of paint, dealing with the many experimentations of its process. His painting explores the theme of serendipity while bringing together “cooking” and “science”. His work has been included in exhibitions such as Salon Réalités Nouvelles (Parc Floral of Paris, 2018), Format de poche (Abstract project Gallery, Paris, 2018) and Solitude Sidérale (Poteaux d’angle Gallery, Bourges, 2020).

Anna Ponchon

I like my CEO as I like my sugar, white and refined, 2020

– A4 brochure, digital print, 36 pages, courtesy of the artist.

I like my CEO as I like my sugar, white and refined

I like my CEO as I like my sugar, white and refined is a publishing project that uses the codes of the educational and open access website combiendesucres.fr. This work aims to show the absurd economic disparities between the different actors of the sugar industry, from top to bottom as well as the pervasiveness of the sugar lobby locally and internationally. In the space of this print, money no longer exists, everything is transformed into sugar as a primitive medium of exchange.

Anna Ponchon (1996, Paris, France) is currently studying a Master in Fine Arts at ENSA Bourges. Starting from a growing personal archive, she is interested in the relationships we have with images and their power of seduction that they exert on us. The act of assembly is one of her privileged tools.

Ilona Németh

Eastern Sugar: Videos, 2017-2022

– in collaboration with Cukru production, multi-channel video installation, courtesy of the artist.

Ilona Nemeth’s Eastern Sugar: Archive at La Box, ENSA Bourges

These videos synthesise Ilona Németh’s research into the history and gradual disappearance of the Slovak sugar industry. Between 2017 and 2022, the artist and her collaborators interviewed important personalities of the Slovak sugar industry, carefully mapped and filmed the former production sites. This selection of the Eastern Sugar videos assembles accounts from key figures, outlining their individual roles during the latest transformation processes affecting the fundamentals of sugar trade and production.

Ilona Németh (1963, Dunajská Streda, Slovakia) is an artist, professor, and curator based in Slovakia. Her artistic practice is a search for the balance between the personal experience of growing up in the country marked by plenty of political turmoil and the universal history of the Eastern Bloc countries during the transition period from 1990 until now. She was professor, head of the Studio IN, leading the International education program Open Studio at the Department of Intermedia at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava between 2014-2019. She has exhibited widely, both locally and internationally. Her project Eastern Sugar was presented at Kunsthalle Bratislava in 2018. Her solo shows were organised among others in Bratislava, Prague, Budapest, Vienna, Helsinki, Rome. She represented Slovakia (together with J. Suruvka) at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001. She co-curated the exhibition series Private Nationalism in 6 countries (2014–2015); Universal Hospitality 1., 2016, Vienna, Austria and Prague, Czech Republic, 2017. She is currently working on the international exhibition and research project Eastern Sugar supported by Creative Europe program. → https://www.ilonanemeth.sk

Matteo Locci

I’d like to build the town a font #2, 2022

– video, 3’19, silent and map, cut out paper and used insulin needles from diabetic friends, 33×45 cm, courtesy of the artist.

I’d like to build the town a font #0

The first time Coca-Cola was served was on May 8, 1886 at Jacob’s Pharmacy soda fountain in Atlanta, where the delicious brownish syrup added to carbonated water could be purchased for the fixed price of only 5 cents. John Stith Pemberton, the inventor of the delightful syrup, grew up in Rome, in Georgia, USA. However, the old papal city of Rome actually left a substantial mark on Coca-Cola’s history. What is often considered to be the commercial of the century was filmed, not in Georgia or California, but on a rural hilltop to the north of Rome (Italy). Specifically, in the town of Manziana, where the glorious 1971 Hilltop commercial was shot and where people from around the world sang the famous jingle about love and harmony.

I’d like to teach the world to sing

In perfect harmony

I’d like to buy the world a Coke

And keep it company

However, they didn’t really sing it; as barely anyone knew English, they used Lip sync. Coca-Cola company planned its masterpiece shooting in Dover UK. However, a few days of continuous rain scrubbed the shoot. Searching for better weather, the crew moved to Rome without singers and actors which were casted among passerbies and tourists in the streets in Rome. Unfortunately, and despite the indisputable relevance, Manziana’s residents are unaware of their centrality in the history of advertising. Nobody really knows where the video was shot and nobody simply seems to care. All it’s known is that in one day the crew met in Manziana and from there went towards the yet to be famous Hilltop which was probably made of 3 different locations. One in Rome, one certainly in Manziana, one somewhere else. The exhibited maps are part of a long-term project, with or without official support, that aims at exhausting Manziana residents with a hammering branding of Coca-Cola and that will hopefully generate a form of Insulin protest from the town inhabitants. 50 years after the original shooting, an exhibition and a reenactment proposal await on the desks of multiple Coca-Cola marketing directors which were reached thanks to the help of a betrayed friend of mine working in Madrid’s European Coca-Cola headquarters.

Matteo Locci (1986, Rome, Italy) is a multimedia artist and a critical conjurer with a designer background who graduated from the faculty of architecture at the University of Roma Tre in 2013. He is currently completing his Diplôme Supérieur de Recherche en Art with EESI and ENSA. Situated at the intersections of popular history, art, activism and performance, his work highlights the shifting relations between power, technical images, and participation, focusing on the ways by which attention is triggered, produced, circulates, and disappears in neoliberal participatory governance. Instigated by the notion of distraction within the attention economy, his current research analyses the neurological implication of the dopamine based circle of addiction while exploring the variety of the existing non attentive perceptions. Most of his research is carried out with and thanks to the interdisciplinary collective ATI suffix of which he is a co-founder. At the base of the collective’s research is the understanding and the stressing of the contributions given by each actor participating in the construction of the city. They conceive their involvement as contaminated contaminants in co-created processes that open and are co-directed by the circumstances, the contexts, the people and the communities encountered. They refuse to operate in the urban environment within the logic already governing the city, thus they push their research as a trojan horse to decode, provoke and break pre-established convictions while operating as an unbalancing factor. Over the years, the group has exposed and performed in multiple international venues, among which: ATI @ Frac Orleans, MelatoninATI @ JoanneumMuseum, RebootATI @ Venice Architecture Biennale, DisturbATI @ Istanbul Design Biennial, DepurATI @ Istanbul Modern, ArenATI @ Columbia University StudioX. → https://www.atisuffix.net/

Fokus Grupa

Vedutas from the palace of the Privileged Company of Trieste and Rijeka, 2020

– wallpaper, text, courtesy of the artists.

Vedutas from the palace of the Privileged Company of Trieste and Rijeka

In the oldest Austro-Hungarian sugar refinement plant opened in the mid-18th century in Rijeka, Croatia, a series of ‘idealized’ landscapes painted by unknown artisans include depictions of slaves. The so-called Vedute ideate are a rare depiction of the racialized slave labour in the Austro-Hungarian Empire that points to the invisible labour that enabled the industrial production of sugar and made visible the relations of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, together with the peripheral port town of Rijeka, to the global flow of capital and the history of colonialism. By drawing on Catherine Baker’s Race and the Yugoslav Region, Postsocialist, Post-conflict, Postcolonial? Fokus Grupa looked at how the representation of slavery did not receive critical assessment while the resentment of racialization across ethnic lines, in relation to Europe proper where the inhabitants of ex-Yugoslavia are themselves racialized as the European other, perseveres. With the repurposing of the industrial building in the framework of the European Capital of Culture project, Rijeka 2020 – Port of Diversity, the Vedute ideate are today publicly displayed as part of the Museum of the City of Rijeka display. The global connections are acknowledged in its new display but the explicit recognition of colonialism as a constituent part of Rijeka’s industrialisation and development has not been put forth.

The article presented in the exhibition was originally written for the Issue 10.1 of the ArtMargins (MIT Press). Authors of the article Fokus Grupa, photographs: Ivan Vranjić.

Art collective Fokus Grupa (founded in 2012) uses texts, objects and images, and incorporates them in mainly spatial installations and public interventions. These are focused on exploration of power relations within the art system and its public manifestations, as well as within the broader economic and social contexts. The group’s work extends over the diverse disciplines and borrows and learns from design, architecture, curating and literature. Therefore, Fokus Grupa also works with occasional collaborators, be it with specialists for a specific discipline or for a specific topic. The collective works/lives from between Rijeka and Ljubljana. → https://fokusgrupa.net/

Thibaut Gauthier (Fonction Support)

PRICE INVENTORY IN ASCENDING ORDER, Sugar No. 11, illustrated by stamps, 2020

– silkscreen, 70 x 100 cm, courtesy of the artist

PRICE INVENTORY IN ASCENDING ORDER, Sugar No. 11, illustrated by stamps

Sugar No. 11 is the world benchmark contract for raw sugar trading. This screen print ranks these prices in ascending order over more than 100 years. In the present day where the economy is master, making an inventory of prices means using an accounting tool to write history, a story that is told through Excel spreadsheets. These prices are illustrated by a (non-exhaustive) catalogue of stamps issued between 1918 and 2019 with sugar as their subject. This poses the question of why some states promoted sugar with stamps in a particular year when the price of sugar was at a particular price. These stamps represent the other side of the coin: sugar production and its links to national will.

Thibaut Gauthier (1988., Saint Remy, Francuska) (1988, Saint Remy, France) is a graduate of the ENSA Bourges. In 2015 he was a research student on the “Document and Contemporary Art” post-graduate degree at the ÉESI (Angoulême and Poitiers). His practice then moved towards exploring the place of the economy in society via its own cultural productions: grey literature, accounting, activity reports etc. In 2017, at ‘La Neomudéjar’ Avant-garde Art Centre (Madrid), he created an archive on LGBTQ fanzines in Spain from 1970 to the present day. After a period of employment at a Corporate Social Responsibility rating agency (Vigeo-Eiris), in 2019 he created Fonction Support, an artistic fiction developed on the basis of www.fonctionsupport.eu. Fonction Support is interested in corporate culture as a major contemporary cultural fact.

Luz Blanco

Landscape, 2020

– 70 x 55cm, digital print on silk, courtesy of the artist.

Landscape

Landscape is formed of two superimposed printed silk pieces: two archive images from the sugarcane industry, slavery, and stock market speculation in reference to American interference in Cuba in the first half of the 20th century. One of the silk pieces obscures part of the other, as a result of the superimposition. By lifting the shroud, we discover that this part is totally blank: absence, erasure, disappearance… the document is truncated. In the visible part, it is difficult to make out the presence of the female agricultural labourers who blend into the landscape as if camouflaged. The two images dialogue with the erasure of memories, leading to a reflection on the notion of archive: they make visible an erasing of the invisible labour force by the speculative power represented by the top image – a detail of a stock market share certificate for cane sugar – which erases the image beneath like an amnesia-producing agent, producing blank areas that appear to be irremediably condemned by history. A razed landscape.

The French artist Luz Blanco (1973, Paris, France) is a graduate of the Duperré School of Applied Arts, and lives and works in Paris. She has spent much of her life abroad, particularly in Istanbul and Lisbon, and regularly exhibits internationally. Her drawings, photography and installations explore the potential for dialogue between erasure, memory, and forgetting. Her work propels the viewer into a veritable archaeology of memory. Just as historical and personal memories are intrinsically fragile, her images are haunted by their own disappearance. Her goal: to capture and preserve what remains, however faint the traces.