From the Horde to the Bee

Marco Fusinato
Born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1964.
He lives and works in Melbourne.

A visual artist and noise musician, Marco Fusinato explores the rhetoric of leftist radicalism through techniques of appropriation, overlay, and amplification. His interests and strategies are largely informed by his formative reception of punk rock, whose ironic stance toward its own commercialization can also be discerned in much of Fusinato’s work. By appropriating militant source materials and commodifying them as artworks, the artist not only raises important questions about the limits of artistic radicalism, but also about the actual possibility of an authentic image of revolt. In other pieces he investigates the disorganization of revolutionary messages through the aural, visual, and theoretical deployment of the notion of noise. In his series Noise and Capitalism (2010), for instance, he asks whether noise provides resistance or fuel to capitalism. At the core of Fusinato’s work, therefore, lies the question of whether representations of revolt provoke or prevent its actual eruption.
At All the World’s Futures, Fusinato presents From the Horde to the Bee (2015), an event designed to redirect capital from the art event to the Archivio Primo Moroni in Milan. The title of this event references the opening and closing pages of a book that Fusinato produced with materials from the Moroni archive, which is a self-organized institution housed in a squat. Fusinato’s do-it-yourself publication offers an anthology of critical and militant writings from the 1960s to the present and juxtaposes various ideologies of the left. While the assembled documents occasionally run off the pages, the book may be read as a portable archive of radical rhetoric.
At the Biennale di Venezia’s Corderie, the entire print run of Fusinato’s book will be laid out along the outer edges of a large table. With no vendors to monitor the transactions, visitors are encouraged to purchase copies of the anthology by placing their money at the center of the table. As the stacks of books gradually diminish, the growing volume of cash will mirror the economic activity in the exhibition space. By lending visibility to monetary flows while releasing them from surveillance, the artist points his audiences to their responsibility for the economic structures in which they are implicated.

From the Horde to the Bee is a project by Marco Fusinato to raise funds for the Primo Moroni Archive in Milan. The Primo Moroni Archive is an archive and resource for militant and critical publishing. It is located in the squatted and self-managed building Cox 18, on via Conchetta 18, Milan. The print document in the exhibition contains a selection of material from the Primo Moroni Archive. All images are reproduced on 1:1 scale as scanned. Visitors can leave a donation on the table where it will remain for the entire duration of the exhibition.