Introduction

A new site-specific and collaborative artwork by Liam Gillick and Hito Steyerl has been inaugurated in the village of Roddino, Italy. The brightly colored mural covers the outside walls of the newly established multifunctional space for the village's community. The building houses a library, a doctor's office and a new workshop and meeting place and will be used by citizens and visitors on a daily basis. Liam Gillick and Hito Steyerl's collaboration is entitled However Many Times We Ran The Model The Results Were Pretty Much The Same (Per quante volte sia stato applicato il modello, i risultati sono stati più o meno gli stessi).

The intention behind the work was to produce a seemingly abstract work of art with an underlying complexity, something bold that aims to express future, continuity and change, values that are shared with the center's social purpose. Having visited the area and seen the way the landscape is divided and worked upon, the artists devised a skewed grid pattern that may reflect the way the surrounding landscape is perceived when seen from an elevated village position, and that suggests the economic partitioning (of land) that influenced the villagers' society throughout the past centuries.

Using publicly available data, the artists analyzed the future of the surrounding area and potential changes in terms of economy, ecology and class. Using a simple simulation program that converted this information into the color scheme underpinning the work, the results were, as the title suggests, "virtually the same" regardless of the data entered. The two things that completely ruined the pattern were extreme climate change and conflict, the calamities dominating the recent public discourse. In Gillick and Steyer's work, which reveals their shared interest in data, landscape is finalized as a social portrait that is both abstract and rooted in the local context.

Liam Gillick and Hito Steyerl
However Many Times We Ran The Model The Results Were Pretty Much The Same
Roddino, Piedmont
Ongoing
www.prospettive.art