NEO•GRIOT

The End is an international call for artists’ projects in any media, curated by the US-based art critic and curator Gean Moreno. It aims to see what new forms the idea of 'the end' can generate in our particularly turbulent historical moment. THEME Once, the notion of the end traded in simplicity. Things were over. In popular culture, 2012 was its year. The apocalyptic imagination would finally find its prophesies fulfilled. The Book of Revelations was leaving the page. But of course the end is rarely about the end, and it seems to be much less so these days. 2012 was ushered in by a wave of social unrest--the Arab Spring and the proliferation of Occupations--and this may just force us to imagine the idea of endings in more complicated ways. Somewhere George Steiner wrote that we are the children of an autumnal age. Endings and exhaustion should be our things. But now it seems that, with the upswell of dissatisfaction boiling into action, with the electricity that’s in the air, our collective historical imagination has been given an opportunity to reconfigure itself. The idea of the end may now take different routes, flesh out unexpected intersections. It can still mark the course of dissolution and disaster. Visions of a scorched planet still harbor their chilling seduction. Cataclysm always has its charms. But the end is now, also, a space of critical gateways. Things are torn down to build anew on the ruins, to test better ways of living together, to lay a bet on a different kind of future. The idea of the end lends itself increasingly to a broader range of programs.    More than straight apocalyptic depictions or bushy-tailed activist projects, what I’m really interested in are strange juxtapositions, weird syntheses, inexplicable mutations between the seductive drive of destruction and imaginative processes of renewal. Think utopian colonies living in a landfill. Think the Black Panthers operating out of a junkyard, as in Godard’s One Plus One (Sympathy for the Devil). Think Beckett’s wastelands occupied, brightened by rows and rows of tents and grating drum circles. Think Mad Max remade as the story of Oakland’s angry communards. Think T.S. Eliot reporting from Madrid or Tahrir Square. Think, of course, beyond any of these examples, dazzle with weirdness. To be concise, the projects selected for this exhibition will orbit around an imaginative reconfiguration of the idea of the end as an equivocal, slippery, elusive, but inspiring thing, pregnant with new and unexpected potentials, bleak and bright at the same time. Gean Moreno July 2012 Details in brief: ° Deadline for submissions is 15 October 2012. ° Open to artists, photographers, designers and architects worldwide, without limits of age or experience. ° 10 projects will be exhibited 5-8 December at the Miami-Beach Regional Library during the Art/Basel/Miami Beach Fair. ° € 1,000 prize to the winning project. The End is a collaboration between the Miami-Dade Public Library , the curator Gean Moreno and Celeste Network.