European Cultural Foundation

Report by Ofri Cnaani (Israel/NYC) and Jenny Vogel (Germany/NCY), artists

What are the daily issues one is confronted with?
What are the misunderstandings, frustrations, challenges one is confronted with?
Due to several circumstances like the instability of the political situation in the Middle East, the lack of budget available to us, we had to stay flexible to continuously adjust our original idea and work around obstacles to make “Floating Symmetry” happen.
For a very long time the format of the final presentation was up in the air although we were in a dialog with the curators. By the time the details of the presentation were final we found ourselves to have very little time to produce the project.

What is the mutual gain from the cooperation process?
As artists we have intended to work on a collaboration for a long time, and this was a nice project to bring both of our interests together. We are both very pleased about the fact that Atlante Mediterraneo gave us this opportunity.
Since Going Public 06 was focused on geopolitical and cultural exchanges around the Mediterranean, we hope our project, which presents sections and comparisons between locations, reflects many of the issues that other artists touched on and so serves as an opening platform for conversation.

What are the effects of the cooperation on a personal experience level?
Through the participation with Atlante Mediterraneo we had a chance to learn about other artists with similar interests and projects as ours, and will get to meet them in Venice. From past experience (Ofri in Going Public 04) we know that the face time with other artists is a crucial part of the cooperative part in such a visionary project like this. Living and working in New York the art world seems sometimes to be too concerned with the market. Being in such a great project as Atlante Mediterraneo is a chance to participate in a more political and conceptual discourse.

What can we learn from this?
We can learn from this that planning in advance and agreeing on the objectives of a project are crucial for the collaborative process. Especially if working under such challenging conditions of time and space which has so many variables we must define the working format in order to save enough time and energy for the actual creative process.