salonadesso – Mark Divo

SALON ADESSO (GENOA & COPENHAGEN 1997-8)

In the autumn of ‘96 I accepted a studio scholarship in Genoa from
the city of Zurich, which I won with the help of Ingo Giezendanner for
a loveless slipshod mural in the Helmhaus. My natural predisposition for the Mediterranean way of life in a medieval city full of empty
buildings made me wonder how I could live after the scholarship ran
out. I promised the youth hostel a mural, which I skillfully dragged
out for as long as possible in order to stay there for free. I was finally
given the boot after a kerosene stove exploded in my room during a
house party. For the next six months I lodged in an anarchist library,
which was nestled in a virtually unused Renaissance palace.

Eventually I managed to bribe an official of the Italian State Rail-
ways with a Märklin model locomotive and became a proud resident
of the ramshackle railway viaduct arch, costing me 75 francs per
month. Here I finally opened the Adesso salon together with Anne
Bennike, who invited her gang of fellow Danish artists and musici-
ans to hold group exhibitions, concerts and happenings.

The events
were, however, poorly attended. The Italians thought the salon was
either an antique shop or a brothel. It didn’t take long before we had
trouble with the vice squad and then with the anti-sectarian police
unit. Rumors of dirt-cheap groundfloor commercial spaces in the
train station area of Copenhagen lured us to Denmark in spring of
‚98. Within a week we found a three-room shop with large windows
in the Valdemarsgade, where we were able to reopen the salon Ades-
so. We lived in a pantry without any residence agreement and annexed the basement for illegal parties.

This time artists, mostly from
Zurich, were invited to partake in the Gesamtkunstwerk installations
we were erecting in the storefront‘s rooms. Here originated, among
other things, the walk-in automatic shadow theater operated by a
handcrafted interface made of washing-machine cam switches. In
fall of ‚98 our xenophobic neighbors and the fact that I was the only
one from the 4-person collective who hadn‘t killed himself or ended
up in a mental hospital forced me to tie a ribbon on the Copenhagen
experiment and return to Zurich.

ARTISTS: Anne Bennike / Aether / Christian Engel / Christian Alkjær / F.M. Einheit / Flemming Jensen / Flemming Brusgaard / Gry Iben Hansen / Ingo Giezendanner / Jakob Kirkegaard / Kerim Seiler / Mark Divo / Stine Otto Brinklov / Susan Walder / Zaki Youssef