“To expand is to reduce, to affirm is to negate; the problem is how not to let any of these moments crystallize into a position or a program via the fetishism that transforms relations into objects. ”—Marina Vishmidt Autoreduction is a project initiated by Dora Budor at Progetto (Lecce, Italy) in the summer of 2021 that began with detouring a solo exhibition onto a collaborative course to traverse the itineraries of work, leisure, and consumption in southern Italy. Conceived as a companion to the exhibition, the book features commissioned texts by Noah Barker and Marina Vishmidt, with contributions by all the artists originally participating in the exhibition (Noah Barker, Dora Budor, Michèle Graf and Selina Grüter, Niloufar Emamifar, and Ser Serpas), together with an addendum by Stefano Faoro. In “Case of Enrichment” Noah Barker assesses how the exhibition and region of Puglia instantiate what Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre have called the enrichment economy - which is characterized by the enrichment of existing things and places and modelling of the consumer on the collector. In “Why Must You Reduce Everything to Money?” Marina Vishmidt casts reduction as a political and artistic strategy; from a form of resistance developed by Italian Autonomists to its aesthetic application as a mode of refusal. Informed by the industrial history of the Salento region, which once featured a heavily feminized and militant tobacco workforce and now sees this legacy sanitized as a heritage for luxury tourism, Autoreduction rides the carousel of capital’s value-forms eliciting critique and complicity in tandem.
