Mini presenta Check In Architecture La Biennale di Venezia - Torino 2008 World Design Capital - Board of Architects - UAV

Rome, Italy

Mission Title: Rome on Fire – Nero as Independent Magazine

Mission By: Rossella Bicco, Carolina Palmieri

Mission Finished on Date: 01-07-2008

SCRIPT

  • Visit the Nero headquarters.
  • Have the guys there introduce you to the mag. How do they stay independent (or are they) from the market? What does it mean to run an independent magazine in Italy?
  • Talk to them about how they negotiate advertising, funding, and honest coverage. Do ever feel pressured by sponsors or investors to shift the magazine in a direction they feel is potentially unethical?
  • Visit a local gallery mentioned in the latest Nero issue. Ask the gallery owners – or clerks – about the magazine's networking role in the city's cultural life.
  • Discuss with them issues of territory. Given the international milleau of the artworld, other Italian art magazines publish in multiple languages (usually English or sometimes German), why is Nero just in Italian? Is this a statement or a drawback?
  • Take your camera and flip through some magazines at a stand concentrating on advertisements, especially art magazines. How do the advertisements interact with the content?
  • Give your mission a narrative arc, make it a story about your journey in relationship to your subject of research. Whatever you do, be creative in your approach, both visually and narratively.

TRAVEL BAG

How does an independent magazine navigate a cultural economy?

Though it's ambitions are unknown, Nero, Rome's newest art magazine, has a name that smacks of the mad ambition of the Roman Emperor who sang while the capital burned. Given their sharp critical reasoning, not withstanding the state of Rome or of contemporary art, one could easily say that they not only dance why the fire burns but they might be the ones to try and set the fire themselves.

The landscape of art magazines in Italy has long stagnated with strange ways of Flash Art ruling supreme, but lately Mousse out of Milan and now Nero have been vying to be the next major art magazine. Newspapers are granted critical distance by the marketplace of advertisers given their general coverage, they can write honest and critical reports on a car company and still get ladies' underwear ads. Art magazines are a particular entity in this sense, as they have all the onus of critical distance but have to depend for advertising on the people they critique. How critical (or honest perhaps) can you get and still stay in business?

Nero began as a zine from four young editors, but since 2004 Nero has grown both in consideration and distribution. The magazine covers transversal fields of interest - art, cinema, music, contemporary culture, but it's not meant to identify with a particular slice of the market, rather to connect to a certain imaginary. But how do they stay independent as a magazine?

Mission Report

Our mission’s aim was to reach Rome and to get information about the independent magazine Nero.
We first met Lorenzo Micheli Bigotti, one of the four editors of the magazine. The interview took place at Villa Ada. Then we took some pictures at “Paraphernalia”, a clothes shop where Nero is distributed.
We visited the MONITOR gallery, where we had the chance to interview the gallerist Paola Capata and ask her about Nero magazine.; at the S.A.L.E.S. gallery we listened gallerist Norberto Ruggieri’s opinion about the magazine. The last gallery we visited was the Lorcan O’Neill Gallery, where, besides taking pictures and shooting Martin Creed’s pieces of art, we interviewed the gallerist Lorcan O’ Neill about Nero.
Last place we went has been “Brakbar drinks 42”, another spot where is possible to find Nero.
Rossella Bicco e Carolina Calmieri