Dear Friends

We wanted to let you know that the opening of the exhibition “Unclaimed Luggage” at the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, which took place on Thursday 3rd of February, was a great success. Lots of people were present at the opening and felt fascinated by this group installation!

The exhibition received a lot of publicity through invitations, press conferences and was covered by newspapers and TV channels. The Circulo de Bellas Artes published a special catalogue for the show and also included a special article in their monthly magazine “Minerva”.

The venue

The event took place at the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid (http://www.circulobellasartes.com), Spain, between the 3rd to the 27th of February 2005. As a part of the celebration of the centre’s 125th anniversary, the Circulo de Bellas Artes has organized a series of exhibitions aiming to look into the future and support young creators and new artistic tendencies.

The Artrageous Group created an installation in the space of the Circulo de Bellas Artes which took the form of a storage space of unclaimed luggage. Corridors of metal shelves were constructed to store every item individually. Each item was labeled indicating, the name, place of origin, destination and any description of contents. The space resembled a storage room were lost and unclaimed items have been placed and archived.

The Artrageous Group has invitied artists to create a work for the exhibition “UNCLAIMED LUGGAGE”. The luggage were collected in Cyprus and sent to the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid via shipping.

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The Concept

On the 22nd and 23rd of May 2004, the Artrageous Group organized “NOMADIFESTA 2004 – Pack your suitcases”, which took place in Nicosia, Cyprus. This was an international event which successfully gathered artists from around the world and different disciplines, into a two day public interaction event. The main focus of the project evolved around the suitcase as an object and the different perspective each artist had around the concept of a suitcase.

The group extended the idea and concept of that event into a second event titled “UNCLAIMED LUGGAGE”. “Unclaimed Luggage” is a story of forgotten luggage, lost, abandoned, homeless objects which have been separated from their owners (deliberately or not) in the process of a journey. Artists adopted a metaphoric approach, choosing, for example, to focus on a lost cause, a lost idea, an abandoned dream. The suitcase which has been the main focus of the first project of the group NOMADIFESTA, was used once again to represent an object which is loaded with memories, carrying within it the history of its origins, the story of a person. The idea of forgotten, abandoned, or lost luggage opens different avenues of interpretation all together. For further reading on the “suitcase” click on Nomadifesta.