On Failure
Video, sound essay, 15 min, on the downsides, prestiges and spaces of failure, via the figure of Orson Welles, who is paradigmatic for his relationship with failure. Among our contemporaries, failure has no space, no room for development –in other words – it should not exist.
But failure is a precious space where we can stretch our boundaries and experiment with another dimension of living. At this point, most of you will feel the urge to ask why should we fail. It’s not that we should fail in order to live better. Rather I believe we should allow ourselves the space, the mental dimension, of failure.
Welles is considered not for what he manage to realize in relation to his non-materialized ideas, rather for the way he – through the notion of failure – involuntarily played a game according to his rules.
Curatorview [Alfredo Cramerotti] 
Look out for Beyond #04, on Accidents & Failures… http://shrapnelcontemporary.wordpress.com/2010/08/06/accidents-failures/
Alfredo, by chance your film-essay bounced up on my screen just as I was struggling to write the ending to a talk on how culturally we devalue play and over-value productivity. The film helped me think about how play can be a space of free experiment where failure is not feared. Play is an imaginative space where no one is at risk but nothing productive is really being done. It allows us to imagine ‘what if’ without any purpose in mind, just for the sake of it. What we might take for failure in the rest of life opens up new possibilities in play. The question is, how to protect that state from always being assessed by the usefulness of its results? How can we raise the importance of this category of being that is just for itself? The only way I can think to do it is to make an appeal, ironically, to its use-value: the space to play is essential for our creative vitality.