Daniela Ortiz. Tiro al Blanco

The 2024 edition renews the collaboration between Arte Fiera and Fondazione Furla for the live performance program curated by Bruna Roccasalva, the Foundation’s Artistic Director. This partnership reinforces the path undertaken in 2023 e and confirms the intention of Fondazione Furla and Arte Fiera to work together in the field of performance, a part of Arte Fiera since its earliest editions and an essential aspect of the exhibition, which celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2024.

The featured artist for the new edition is Daniela Ortiz, invited by Fondazione Furla to create a new work for Arte Fiera.
Daniela Ortiz, a Peruvian artist, has always investigated the systems of political, economic, and cultural power that rule the world, and specifically the institutional mechanisms that exercise violence on Global South populations. With linguistic experimentation that embraces a wide variety of expressive means – including video, photography, painting, and performance – Ortiz creates visual narratives that scrutinize the concepts of race, nationality, and social class, revealing the discriminatory ideology hidden in colonial and capitalist power structures.
For the 2024 edition of Arte Fiera, Ortiz presents Tiro al Blanco, a new and ambitious installation that will be activated by a participatory performance.
The work is the result of her long-term investigation of the domination of the North over the South, and specifically of the critical role played by the arms industry has had in reinforcing this supremacy.
In 1936, a few weeks after the coup d’etat that led to the Spanish Civil War, Daniel Guerin published the book “Fascism and Big Business,” one of the first documents to denounce the existence of a military industry interested in promoting war in Europe and in the Global South. Since then, this industry has grown enormously, developing sophisticated technology designed to kill more and more people from a greater and greater distance, and has also exponentially increased its economic and political power. 
With Tiro al Blanco, Daniela Ortiz turns the spotlights on the power that the war industry has had in the past 90 years, and on the fact that its invisibility has guaranteed absolute immunity to the few individuals who control, develop, and impose its power.
As often happens in Daniela Ortiz’s works, the complaint, dissent, protest in Tiro al Blanco derive from a linguistic elaboration that employs irony and play to express complex subjects in an accessible and direct way. Aware that the setting is a fair, she decided to create a shooting gallery, based on the structure and functions of normal amusement park stands but completely changing its content with regard to the targets to hit and the prizes to be won.
While the targets are the military industrial complex, reproducing the shapes of corporate logos and various kinds of weapons, such as machine guns, missiles, or drones, the prizes celebrate individuals, from the past and the present, who have fought against capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism, such as Lenin, Daniel Guerin, Frantz Fanon and Vijay Prashad, whose most famous books are reproduced in the form of tiny ceramic sculptures. Among the prizes are also colorful wood marionettes and finger puppets honoring peace heroes such as doctors in conflict zones, who challenge bombardments in their ambulances, or groups of workers who rebel against arms transport through ports.
A performer walks along the corridors of the fair, inviting visitors to play. As the real protagonists of Tiro al Blanco, the visitors can win these prizes by trying to hit the target, i.e., to symbolically overturn a system that has imposed its power much too long. The game becomes a tool for generating awareness and stimulating critical thought.
Tiro al Blanco derives from the artist’s need to focus on the dynamics that govern multiple forms (both historical and current) of exploitation and marginalization, stimulating visitors to contemplate one of today’s most urgent issues: the war industry.

Daniela Ortiz (born in Cusco in 1985, living in Urubamba, Peru) has had one-person shows at Kunsthaus, Zurich and Wiesbaden Kunstverein (both in 2023), Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation, Turin (2022), Kölnischer Kunstverein (2021), La Virreina. Centre de la Imatge, Barcellona (2019), Las Ataranzas Valencia and Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (both in 2017), Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven (2016), as well as recent group shows at Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, KADIST Paris, neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK) Berlin, Kunsthalle Wien (all in 2021); Kunstverein Hamburg (2020); Contour Biennale 9 (2019). She was awarded with the Follow Fluxus Prize from the Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden (2022) and in 2023, she created her first theatrical work with the Neumarkt Group, Zurich.

Technical partner: I.E.InfrastruttrEcologia srl of Mirandola (MO)

Actor: Leonardo Bianconi

Guard: Samet Rahova

Toy prizes production was done by: Juguetes Rafael, Cerámicas Ramos Kintu, Taller Kusi Urpi, Antonia Molina Confecciones, Tejidos y confecciones Tanitza