In this Saturday Talk, Public Programmes Curator Lucia Pietroiusti discusses active and passive viewership as well as appropriation in Sou Fujimoto’s and STURTEVANT’s practices.
Lucia Pietroiusti (b. Rome, 1985) studied critical theory at Birkbeck, University of London (MA) and gender studies at Trinity College, Dublin (M.Phil), with a specific focus on trauma and mourning in literature and the visual arts. As Curator of Public Programmes at the Serpentine Galleries, she is in charge of Park Nights, Saturdays Live, Talks and Seminar series and Serpentine Cinema, among others.
Saturday Talks
On selected Saturdays the Serpentine Gallery hosts free talks that address questions related to the Serpentine Gallery’s programmes. In 2013 Saturday Talks presentations explored the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2013, designed by Sou Fujimoto, and the exhibition STURTEVANT LEAPS JUMPS AND BUMPS, within the context of the ‘interface’, as well as that of the speakers’ multi-disciplinary practices. The term ‘interface’ describes the place and ways in which we encounter an object and make use of it. In the field of computer science, an interface marks the point of interaction between the user and the device. In describing the concept of the 2013 Pavilion, architect Sou Fujimoto stated: ‘the Pavilion [is] to be used as a flexible, multi-purpose social space… Visitors are encouraged to construct their own experience of the building and the events that occur within it’. This emphasis on the visitor’s active shaping of their own experience finds an echo in STURTEVANT’S repetition works which, rather than being ‘copies’, probe beyond the surface to interrogate the relationship between repetition and difference.
