Thoughts on the Eternal Internet Brotherhood (via Artribune)

When and how did The Eternal Internet Brotherhood came up?

 The Eternal Internet Brotherhood started last year when I was asked from a magazine interviewed by the artists LuckyPDF for Dazed and Confused magazine. They asked what would have been my dream project and I started describing a perfect situation, an ideal working and leisure environment.  It included artists, writers, poets, in a beautiful place, escaping  from the visual provincialism we all live in front from our screens.  For this I used as a reference the tiny greek island of Delos, off the coast of Mykonos, because it was the main cultural centre of ancient Greece. In Ancient times they would go to Delos once a year and perform rituals to glorify god Apollo, the god of Music and Visual Arts. These fairs were really radical in terms of entertainment, creation and sexual expression. It was a space of liberation, a collective hallucinatory experience, and it contained so many definitions of how I see the internet still. After the interview, I just thought, why not try to make this happen for real?  I changed the place because Delos is uninhabited and was more of a conceptual reference I chose the island of Anafi which still at our times is calm, isolated beautiful with a metaphysical vibe. Friends were already going there, and the island is framed by an enormous rock, the second biggest after Gibraltar, so it seemed the perfect place to perform this metaphysical portal.

How would you define the experience of first edition in Greece?

First of all I am very happy and grateful that many people came from all over the world. Artists always produced great stuff working in front of the same horizons, and so we replaced the horizon of the screen with that perfect horizon of Anafi, a true spiritual awakening.  The situation was really idyllic, easy, hard, the beach at night was like a virtualized reality, the whole thing felt like inside a video game. It was an intimate experience of collective space as we spent time together staying by the beach in tents  working, discussing, realizing stuff. There were people who were just only friends on Facebook who met physically at the first time. The vibe was very communal and collaborative, we were also very close with artists participating remotely. The experiment worked!

Why did you choose Mexico for the second edition?

I decided this project to happen every year in a different place which is warm, has a very strong ancient history and beautiful nature. Mexico has all these and I wanted to get in contact more with N. American and Latin American artists. For the next edition I already got invitations to do it in Spain, Portugal, Peru and in Malaysia.

What are your expections for this edition?

We will continue expand notions of distrubution, materiality, social interaction  all tied together with corporeal and mental well-being with or without the presence of technology using a wide range of media. This year there are more than 40 artists and still the list is growing. I am already receiving the ideas of each participant and it's an interesting specturm of media and disciplines. 

You opened a fundraising campaign on Indiegogo in order to realize the event. In recent months a lot of art initiatives were born thanks to this kind of support: do you think online fundraising is going to change the relationship between art and the wider public?

We live in times where the artist can become the producer, the promoter and the fund-raiser. The global economy is in a precarious state. Personally I live in a wrecked country with a decadent art scene. Funding for projects like this does not exist and never existed for projects outside the art market. God bless the internet and such platforms such as twitter, tumblr, instagram and indiegogo where we can reach out easily to supporters, peers and critics globally in the most transparent ways. In the case of the Eternal Internet Brotherhood our supporters are mostly young people from everywhere in the world of any gender and beyond any social class. This is why I strongly feel crowd-sourcing will really change how exisiting hierarchies function within the art world.

This is an interview I gave to Filippo Lorenzin published on the Italian Artribune