The last 5 days here in Berlin has been dedicated to a special curatorial project that Nicola is developing together with another resident curator at Node Center – Carolina Jimenez, from Spain. Scope of the project is to research on site-specific art, public interventions and the way artists deal with space.

To do so, the two curators decided to leverage an unique space (the ‘greenhouse’ we blogged about a month or so ago) to stimulate a debate, asking artists to held a conversation/interview on this topic with or within the greenhouse itself. Thanks to the priceless help of two professional filmmakers - Alessandro Pinferetti and Mattia Dal Bello - these conversations have been filmed, and the final, edited video will be presented during a public talk at Altes Finanzamt, in Neukolln, on May 8th (we think that the engagement of the public is fundamental to enrich this dialogue).

Since every artist deals with space and with commissioned art in a different way, there have be no fixed scheme for the conversations, and the curators really left the freedom to every artist to choose the way they want to dialogue. It was also a good way to capture a glimpse of the “creative momentum” that leads an artist to conceive and create a site specific intervention and to reason about artistic approaches and researches regarding space.

The artists invited to join the conversation include Riccardo Previdi, who - speaking on behalf of his collective Super! - told us its experience with commissioned and public art; Mario Asef, pictured above, who used the space to reason about important and urgent social issues; Tinka Bechert, that preciously helped us in focusing on what doing public interventions in a city like Berlin means; Felix & Mumford, that approached the assignment in a very particular (and powerful) way (‘the Felix & Mumford way’ – you’ll have to wait for the final cut to see this).

It was hard work but also a lot of fun, and the team ‘played ball’ perfectly! Maybe also because is part of Node’s (and Mazen’s) spirit to mix serious work and serious fun. Like we did on Friday, when Node’s director Perla Montelongo prepared both for the resident curators and the visiting filmmakers a gorgeous ‘Mexican Night’ featuring tons of tortillas and hyper-spice sauces. !Qué deliciosa!