Mecenes hands
The republic of Crotonia is a fiction developed by Unai Reglero in Colombia, developed from the reality, with currents means of communication : pictures, documentaries, magazines… This project focuses on the national university of Colombia in Bogota and draw on this reality. His strategy consist in particular to interview people and ask them to replace in their speech « national university » by the word « republic of Crotonia ». He aims so to germinate this reality in the mind of people, like a faraway country, for European people for example, or just a bad knowledge. He creates a reality duplicating the same problems of real republic, but in the actual story of republic of Crotonia. We were talking about many similar artworks, which are connected with Expeditions. Frequently exploratory, navigators and other adventurers are sponsored by a power with differing interests. One discovers a new territory, the other aims to define and master it. One thinks this project in its existential dimension, which would lead in the constitution of a known approach, the other projected in a rationalization of the knowledge, for example conquest, power, imperialism. We have to be lucid about our economic legitimation to approach the expedition pattern. As a collective sponsored by Europe, we are kind of explorers going to discover a territory, but also going to conquest (cognitive and descriptive) this territory on behalf on Europe and its cultural, social and scientific politic. Somehow, Christophe Colomb or the captain Cook has also gone into this kind of expeditions from a promise of territory, power, progress and wealth. It is a reason for which the power gives money for those trips. We know the rest. How hijack this situation ? How restore a critical extent and no-domination to Expeditions project ? What are we able to say about the reality explored ? How product our discoveries in order to don’t give them to our sponsor ? The link with Unai art work give us an interesting track work : built a fictional of explored territories from a reality inside our walls. We know that we can’t make a promise for our sponsor, because our project is non-profit. However, maybe we have a role in symbolic power maintaining of domination on the popular neighborhood. There is a proverb saying that the gift hand is always over the hand that receives. From the web, this sentence is coming from… Napoleon Bonaparte. We must don’t forget that our project sheltering, without our knowing it, a global movement of social regulation and pacification, by culture, pedagogue and science. Then, we have to disable this obstruction for our self expression of subjective intentions from which we create this project.