Mauro Felicori
Director, Bologna Biennial

The creation of the Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean grew from a good deal of successful intuition and the credit for this should go to Stefano Cristante, Alessandro Stillo and to Vincenzo Striano's ARCI Kids.
Credit should also go to all those councillors, managers and officials starting with our friends Miquel Lumbierrez, Eric Truñó, Nuria Fradera in Barcelona, and continuing with Luigi Ratclif and Afrodite Oikonomidou who were able to understand the strength of an idea and to turn it into cultural action.
The first intuition involves the expression "young artists" and the opportune and precocious discovery that youth art production could be the new growth area for the art economy. Perhaps even something more, given that art is much more than simple economy. Today, those who observe the emphasis that artistic communication places on young artists, the politics of institutional support for young artists and increasing market investment in the late and latest generations, cannot even imagine the hard work carried out in the mid-eighties. Twenty years ago we struggled to assert the need to pay attention to the production of art by young people. It was considered to be a sociological approach and as such different, if not opposed to, artistic endeavor. It was considered to be welfare in a society where all cultural activity enjoys public support and the establishment is absolutely liberal. In the end, it was secretly considered politically unsound as it only offered results in the mid to long term in a period when, thanks to the "Roman Summers" of the late seventies, public institutions had just discovered the extraordinary short-term productivity of funding cultural consumption.
Despite difficulties, the brilliant Nicolini project became mainstream immediately and soon found imitators in many Italian cities. This project was the most successful throughout the eighties as institutions tried to fund the youth movements of the late seventies that were most prominent in Rome and Bologna.
The answer in Rome was to increase the cultural consumption of the newly educated product of mass education¹. In Bologna and Turin, among the most active cities in terms of youth politics, the opportunity of encouraging youth art production was also emphasized. Furthermore, the decision of the Municipality of Bologna and of Alma Mater Studiorum to host the 1988 edition of the Biennial of Young Artists came at the end of a decade of commitment from the city towards innovative youth politics.
It tended to give a response to the interesting suggestions which emerged from the dramatic experiences of 1977. These included orientation towards artistic creation and jobs in cultural economy and communication, the option of self-managed entrepreneurial forms and interest in free and flexible ways of working, including social centers where community life and artistic production were combined.
The Biennial of Young Artists, with programs designed to involve students in the celebration of the 9th Centenary of the oldest European university, certainly represented the height of all of this experimentation.
This enterprise was consistently opposed both outside and sometimes inside the left-wing majority. This phenomena was highlighted by the connection between the exhibition and the "Nuova Officina Bolognese" music festival held at the Gallery of Modern Art between 1991 and 1992. This initiative sprang from the work of Mauro Felicori and Pier Giovanni Castagnoli with artistic input from Adriano Baccilieri, Roberto Daolio, Walter Guadagnini, Dario Trento, Alberto Caprioli and Lucio Dalla.²
The second lesson I learned from the experience of the Biennial of Young Artists was the importance of networking as a modus operandi. Having previously worked in youth politics, I had already understood the importance for a public official, of establishing relationships and applying experience gained in creating information and education circuits. I had, however, never tried networking itself as a function of institutional action. Once I had, I treasured it.
Networks, of course, are hard to manage because they lack hierarchy and nobody actually commands them.
This mixture of ministries, municipalities and associations requires a good deal of patience on all sides to reach understanding and agreement. Despite this, I do not think that traditional organizations could manage the same projects with equal efficiency. I have been pleased to note, that during my ten-year absence, the Biennial of Young Artists has gone on living and growing. Every two years it finds a new city willing to embark on this exciting, expensive and risky adventure and it has consolidated its own structure with the creation of BJCEM, the "Association Internationale pour la Biennale des Jeunes Créateurs de l'Europe et de la Méditerranée." This experience has lead me to continue with this way of working, with the choice of networking in Europe at first, comprising the inclusion of the City of Bologna in Eurocities. Perhaps today, the EC commission of culture should pay more attention to the BJCEM. A few years ago, I even created one myself, being involved in a project concerning cemeteries and the absence of a European association to enhance their cultural importance.
The outcomes of the Mediterranean suggestion were much more contradictory and controversial. Cristante had no difficulty in underlining the value of the adjective "Mediterranean" in describing Europe. The Spaniards, Italians, Greeks and Portuguese all welcomed the idea of a network aiming at filling the traditional and current gap between Southern artists and the mighty North European cultural structures with a Southern network oriented towards the North.
Nevertheless, Cristante had a broader project in mind which was less "economical" and more "cultural" and functioning as a bridge to Mediterranean Africa. The network of the Biennial of Young Artists listened to him, but did not agree on supporting his project. Of course, during the Bologna Biennial an Arab film festival was financed. This was a really new event for Italy which had some short term following. Of course, during the Biennial of Marseilles 1990, dear Patrick Circolez enhanced the bright vocation of the French port by inviting many Maghrebi artists, but we never intended to go any further. In fact, the solution to the ambiguity of Mediterranean Europe, opening either to the whole continent or to the whole Mediterranean Sea, would have resulted in the event losing its charm, which is based on its amphibious and ambiguous message. When, however, soon after the mission in Tipasa (Rotte Mediterranée, 1990), which Cristante wanted to avoid surrendering to the "normality" of the Biennial, we got news of rising Islamic terrorism and of the authoritarian degeneration of the Algerian government, I must admit that I felt unfulfilled. I, that is we, never intended the Biennial of Young Artists to be an end to itself, a glittering showcase and nothing more. We wanted a starting point to be developed in several directions, following the entire procedure from creation to market. Above all as a part of an ensemble of promotional politics for young artists. After the 1988 Biennial, but unfortunately only sporadically and on a small scale, we created several exemplary experiences in this direction, which could have been summed up by the expression "no man is a prophet in his own land." Particularly because, in Bologna, we wanted to invent the most favorable environment for the development of artistic creativity.
We set up a framework made up of many initiatives, including the concession of spaces for new cultural organizations and studios for artists, leading to the later abandoned project for a district of multimedia enterprises and the interconnection between art and new technologies. These initiatives also included participation in further young artist networks, the repayment of travel expenses to the city's artists when engaged abroad, designed to remove the main obstacle to the circulation of artists in Europe, contributions to the publication of debut work, support for Films produced in Bologna and support for export. Among the missed opportunities, were the participation in TransEurope Halles, a network of important European self-managed cultural centers including UFA Fabrik in Berlin, Melkweg in Amsterdam, Les Halles de Skaerbeck in Brussels in which Bologna took part thanks to the small but extraordinary reality of "Nowall" by Alberto Masala.
The promotion of the arts in a city should, therefore, be a system. In the meantime, the Association for the Biennial went on developing relationships and connections, veritable bridges between the most authoritative international artistic institutions, thus offering artists not the generic visibility of an ordinary audience, but the competent eye of those who can offer further and more elevated opportunities. The idea of the system in which the institutions, as well as encouraging artistic production, should work on the instruments of marketing.
I believe that one of the most pressing needs in the Italian cultural system is the creation of regional agencies to distribute their local artistic production. Production capacity is widespread in many regions of Italy, despite, perhaps, the cultural politics oriented more towards consumption than production. This is thanks to the talent of artists and designers working in music, theater, literature, visual arts, and in the organization of exhibitions and events. This is where the problem arises. The Italian cultural system, in fact, has poor marketing capacity with high-quality events that have no circulation, music groups and theater companies that do not have agents although they are world-famous and art galleries that fail to expand their markets. The difficulty of breaking into European and International art markets is evident. Therefore, one feels a sense of waste. Artists and producers who should reach much wider markets cannot because of the lack of the final and most important link in the economic chain. The reason for this is that public commitment is relevant for both the phases of cultural consumption and production, but is extremely poor in the commercial phase. So, I want to propose, once again, what I consider to be a logical consequence of the common work done on the Biennial of Young Artists. I propose agencies working as subsidiaries to the regional art systems, boosting their selling capacities at a national and international level.
Agencies that will work with a planned annual deficit, but which are judged on the basis of the results obtained according to economic parameters. It is high time that the institutions definitively appreciated that the promotion of arts and culture is one of the strategic axes of urban development and not just because of the natural tourist implications of artistically attractive cities³. After the '88 Biennial, I had the honor of leading the project presenting Bologna as a candidate for the European City of Culture. This competition began in 1992 and ended in December 1995 with the nomination for 2000. Therefore, in one sense, the steps that the development of a modern urban cultural policy should follow are the same steps I have followed in my own professional development. What good luck? So what's the point? The point is that the cities themselves must decide if the production of art is part of the identity they aspire to. A natural condition for the "global management cities," such as Paris and London or Rome and Milan. Mid-size cities on the other hand can settle for good cultural consumption, leaving the role of production centers to the capital cities. This means promoting the development of industry and cultural services while optimizing their own global vocation. This is the choice made by many almost-capital cities. It is not a question of aspiring to a general and unjustified expansion of cultural activities but the inclusion of culture in the "strategic plans" of cities (here comes Barcelona again, the mother city of the Biennial of Young Artists and inventor of the "strategic plan" with many followers around the world). Right at the beginning of the nineties, the idea that cities could be thought of as single systems spread rapidly among the European urban management class.
This means that, just like business operations, cooperation and competition should be encouraged and that these initiatives should be at least continental in scope. Hence, several cities, with Barcelona in first place, drew their conclusions. They needed a plan that shared its medium-term goals with the main players in finance, commerce and the trade unions. Bologna 2000 was created from that context. For the first time culture had the chance to assume a central position in the choices concerning urban development. The promise of politics and the promises the cultural system makes to politics and all citizens, is that culture will definitely have a greater distribution of resources, but will also succeed in demonstrating the generation of wealth and competitive opportunities for the city as a whole. Bologna never had a manifesto, with such explicit guidelines for its cultural program. Unfortunately, that period was not adequately followed up by the Guazzaloca-Deserti administration between 1999 and 2004.
Another step forward would be the creation of a European system for the arts, able to communicate with similar systems. As we have seen, the first organizational phase would consist in creating regional agencies for the national and international promotion of local work. These agencies would interface and share with similar agencies from the various continents.
A second working strategy would relate to the consolidation of national systems for the promotion of European cultures and languages. In Italy, this would lead to linking up the network of Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs cultural institutes spread throughout the world thanks to the work of the Ministry of National Heritage and Culture, the Ministry of Foreign Trade and the National Institute of Foreign Trade. This would operate at a central and peripheral level and would lead to the consideration of culture as an area of great economic importance both in Italy and in the central and satellite (Enit) organizations promoting tourism. The same holds true for the European Union ⁴. It is impossible to avoid the feeling that something absolutely incoherent stands between the role of culture in the image of Europe itself, its economy and its secondary role in the policies of the institutions representing Europe. Surely the words "culture" and "art" are the words most frequently associated with the "Old Continent." Culture is the Cinderella of European policies though. This is because the European Union considers cultural policies to be the responsibility of the nation states and therefore subsidiary. The European Union, without contravening this principle, could achieve its priority goal in the field of culture as well. It could be an instrument of competition and cooperation between continental systems. This would generate a new selective criterion for financing projects. If, up to now, the main goal was to foster collaboration among entities in several member states, in the future it would be necessary to provide financial support for planning skills in Europe aimed at exchanging culture with other continents. In particular, the idea of organizing competition and cooperation among the continents should inspire structural initiatives. Here is my proposal. If in some great capital cities of the world it is understandable and reasonable that every European country stands alone, with its own cultural institute, it would be much more efficient for most of the cities in the world to create European culture institutes, real cultural embassies, large enough to generate strong gravitational attraction, where each culture and language could enjoy stronger bases for its own diffusion.


1. For an analysis of Italian cultural policies in the eighties, see: M. Felicori, "Feste d'estate," in Luoghi e misure della politica, edited by A. Parisi, Il Mulino, Bologna, 1984.
2. Comune di Bologna, Assessorato alla Cultura, Galleria d'Arte moderna, Nuova Officina Bolognese, Arte visiva e sonora, 25 artisti, Galleria d'Arte moderna, Bologna, December 14, 1991-January 19, 1992, Edizioni d'Arte Renografica, 1992. Texts in the catalogue by Pier Giovanni Castagnoli, Mauro Felicori, Brunella Torresin, Adriano Baccilieri, Roberto Daolio, Walter Guadagnini, Dario Trento, Lucio Dalla.
Photographs by Daniela Facchinato, Marco Lambertini, Gianni Gosdan, Francesco Guidoboni. Musicians' files by Alberto Caprioli, Artists' files by Ambra Stazzone. Graphics by Massimo Osti studio.
3. M. Felicori, Le politiche culturali: il caso di Bologna, Il Mulino, Year L, no. 396, 4/2001; M. Felicori, Bologna, un esempio di politiche culturali urbane, Proceedings from the international seminary "Le politiche culturali delle città: esperienze europee ed americane," Bogotà, Colombia, May 5-9, 2003 (acts edited by the Municipality of Bogotà).
4. Mauro Felicori, La politica culturale europea, Governareper, March 30, 2005.