Vito Acconci. Vito Hannibal Acconci studio. Alicia Chillida

The exhibition Vito Hannibal Acconci studio presents the artist's evolution from his beginnings as a poet to his current dedication to architecture.

On the occasion of his exhibition at the CAAM, Vito Acconci creates a project site specific: Cityscape which establishes a dialogue with the architecture of Saenz de Oiza in the central courtyard of the building on Calle de los Balcones.

Focusing on the artistic career of Vito Acconci (New York, 1940) from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, this exhibition, curated by Corinne Diserens, director of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, examines the artist's evolution from his beginnings as a poet to the most recent projects realized by the Acconci Studio. The exhibition comprises a selection of works that brings together poetry, performance documentation, films, videos, installations and a database containing more than thirteen hours of sound works - many of them unpublished - remastered for this occasion.

Conceived by the Museu D'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), the project has been organized jointly with the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes in collaboration with the Atlantic Center of Modern Art. As can be seen in the exhibition and according to its curator, Corinne Diserens, "Vito Acconci's artistic development follows a singular and complex path". Thus, the exhibition also includes works from the eighties related to the artist's interest in mobile architecture, as well as the projects carried out by the Acconci Studio over the last twenty years, through the screening of three lectures by Vito Acconci, which are also included in the form of a DVD in the catalog, in addition to the production of specific works conceived for the CAAM space.

Vito Acconci began his artistic career as a poet in the mid-sixties, under the name of Vito Hannibal Acconci. In his creations he treated the blank page as a space in which to act, using words as elements for movement, and the page as a container. His poetic actions shifted from paper to the gallery space, evolving into performances in which he reflected on his own physical and psychological being. Both in the performances and in his installations of the early seventies, the figure of the artist was always present, either physically or through film or recordings of his voice, the sound of which offered the visitor an intense sensory experience.

Acconci proposed both a new definition of the material object and a space of common experiences between the viewer and the artist by blurring the traditional boundaries between an artist and his audience, an object and a temporary event, a work of art and its existence in a spatial and/or social context.

His interest in space led him to create the Acconci Studio in the early 1980s, a work cell that brought together architects and artists whose research is developed on an architectural scale and proposes environmental and architectural interventions. The power of the Acconci Studio's proposals, in which the artist maintains his commitment to language, the body and its relationship to space, is to drastically rethink the definitions of public space.

In fact, Vito Acconci's entire production shares as a thematic axis the interest in the border between the public and the private and in the communicative possibilities of each of his works. His evolution can be analyzed from a process of expansion that develops from the private space of writing, voice and body to the public, collective, habitable space. Acconci's interventions are always related to the concrete place in which they take place, and they act by decomposing its meaning and function. If in the poems the signs of the text referred in a self-referential way to the language, in his latest works there are words and signs inserted in the urban space.

...First "I" with "my", then "I" with "he" or "she", then "I" with "you"....

Vito Acconci became known as a poet under the name of Vito Hannibal Acconci, and since then the poetic practice and the presence of orality have been the basis of his later work, regardless of the materials used.