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Good Luck, Archaeologists!
artists guided tour: Friday, 9 September 2016, at 18:00, UGM| Maribor Art Gallery, Strossmayerjeva 6
group exhibition opening: Friday, 9 September 2016, at 19:00, UGM| Maribor Art Gallery, Strossmayerjeva 6
opening night performances: 
Friday, 9 September 2016, at 19:30 and 20:30, UGM| Maribor Art Gallery, Strossmayerjeva 6
performances & concert night: Saturday, 10 September 2016, from 18:00, Cultural Center Pekarna, Ob železnici 16

"To future archaeologists

What remains of the artist’s experience, as he creates a work? Once free of its intention, what becomes of it? There’s its existence, marked by an environment, geography, an era, technicity. But is it meant to be discovered and taken into account by the rest of humanity, as future archaeologists?

After ten years spent working with artists, friends, activists and others, OTTO-Prod was unsure of how to transcribe its history, and could see the vacuity of any attempt at theorising it, aside from mythologies. It thus decided to ask a variety of people to study this art 'through its technique, based on a repertory of material remains which occasionally has to be revealed.' This celebratory event gives an overview of an ecosystem whose sensitive mapping will show artefacts—paradoxically, works whose materials and fabrication make light of their time, and of contemporaneity, but provide a glimpse of liberty.

If this is a call to potential future archaeologists, and not just to specialists in the realm of art, it’s because we want to emphasise the ways in which these artefacts can be interpreted in their complex relationships with the society, its modus operandi and the collective imagination it produces. At the cost of destabilising the coherence of an age, it’s important to reconsider its codes and references, places and dominant aesthetics, which can gradually appropriate a legacy and its commons. Flows and river courses, exchange currencies, electricity, celestial movements, public spaces, private spheres, technologies, mode of expression: fundamentals whose accessibility the artists defend through the mechanisms they reveal.

Dear archaeologists to come, watch over these objects like a space whose topology and history you need to recreate. Their geography’s variable; their migration’s a journey through life; their visions are sometimes anachronistic. It’s by foregrounding the experience of the work as something lived, and its raw substance, rather than any imposed definition, that we invite you to celebrate 10 years of shared living.

OTTO-Prod"

In September 2006, a group of young artists came together in Maribor, in the framework of an invitation by the Pekarna Cultural Centre. In response to the Carte blanche handed by the team involved in the former Yugoslav bakery, Paul Destieu, Monsieur Moo, Luce Moreau, and Olivier Tura founded the art group OTTO-Prod within the month following their first visit. The three artists decided then to settle down in Maribor and beside a regular programme of exhibitions, performances, concerts, the group developed itself as a structure dedicated to art production with the annual and ongoing art season ‘Working Holidays’. Since then, Maribor hosts every summer the latest creations by international artists, within the four hundred square meters space of the Hladilnica Gallery at Pekarna. Most of the art production is related to site-specific responses and original realizations, which take turn in spreading over different exhibition contexts in Slovenia, France and Europe.

All of these projects were realized thanks to the significant input of local synergies; the result of interactions between the guest artists and Slovene individuals: local artists, scientists, members of a Drava club divers, beekeepers, local fireman, randomly encountered seismologists..., among many others.

In 2016, OTTO-Prod will celebrate its 10th anniversary of activity in the field of art between cities of Maribor and Marseille. The group proposes an ambitious group show, gathering at Umetnostna galerija Maribor a selection of thirty noticeable art works created during the last decade here in Slovenia and also elsewhere, together with a night of live performances and concerts at Pekarna Cultural Centre in Maribor. This group exhibition is an invitation to discover a selection of contemporary works reactivated for most of it in their original city of birth, together with the artists and their new creations. The retrospective does not only hand out a ticket for a travel in time among this selection of artworks but also an exploration of their origins in Maribor as their barycentre.

With: Fouad Bouchoucha, Gilles Desplanques, Paul Destieu, Quentin Destieu & Sylvain Huguet, Harm van den Dorpel, Yves Duranthon, Jérôme Fino & Arnaud Rivière, Antonin Fourneau, Anne-Valérie Gasc, Lucien Gaudion, Janez Janša, Jankenpopp, Labomedia, Yann Leguay & Pacôme Béru, Monsieur Moo & Louise Drubigny, Luce Moreau, Pierre-Étienne Morelle, Olivier Morvan, son:DA, Guillaume Stagnaro, Veli & Amos, Artie Vierkant, Zombectro

Good Luck Archaeologists! is co-produced by OTTO-Prod (www.ottoprod.com), Umetnostna galerija Maribor (www.ugm.si), and GuestRoomMaribor (www.guestroommaribor.si) / Pekarna Magdalenske mreže (www.infopeka.org).

Good Luck Archaeologists! is supported by Slovene Ministry of Culture, City of Maribor, French Institute of Ljubljana, French Institute of Paris in convention with the region Provence Alpes Côtes d'Azur (PACA), Région Provence Alpes Côte d'Azur Relations Internationales and City of Marseille.

Good Luck Archaeologists! warmly thank its partners and sponsorships : AGD Gustaf, Soundbiro, PrintofMarseille, Ragonske Gorice, Hostel Pekarna / MKC, Bukvarna, Pacific Princess, and Emmaüs St Marcel.

PRESS KIT