“Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it.” The quotation from Lautréamont chosen as the project’s epigraph sums up on its own the ambition of Dadaclub Online: to show that what we now call remix, mashup or participatory culture is the direct continuation of what the Dadaists were inventing a hundred years ago in the cellars of Zurich. The project, led for a year by the Link Art Center in Brescia, consisted in publishing daily high-definition digital copies of historical works of the Dada movement, inviting the online community to reappropriate, transform and redistribute them.

What is presented at Galerie Charlot is the outcome of this collective adventure: a living archive, a museum of copies and appropriations, a celebration of the artistic gesture as an act of transmission and transformation. Dadaclub Online raises a fundamental question for our time: in a world where every image is infinitely reproducible and the notion of the original has become problematic, what does it mean to create? Dada’s answer — and that of the digital artists who inherit from it — is that to create is always to take something up and displace it, divert it, reinvent it.

Curated by Fabio Paris with Link Art Center, Brescia, IT

“Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it.” - Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont, 1870

Dadaclub.online is a collaborative project conceived to celebrate 100 years of Dadaism in the light of two fundamental concepts of 21st-century art that the Dada movement anticipated: the sharing and the recycling of pre-existing materials.

For one year, from 5 February 2016 (the anniversary of the beginning of the Dada movement in Zurich) to 5 February 2017, Dadaclub.online published high-definition digital copies (2D scans and 3D models) of a selection of Dada works and magazine covers, and invited artists, designers and students from all over the world to download them and use them in their own work, sharing the results in a dedicated gallery.

The digitisation and publication of original Dada works was made possible by the Campiani Collection, one of the most comprehensive collections of Dada works in Italy.

Over the course of the year, the project collected more than 120 remixes of Dada works: still images, short animations, videos, web pages, 3D models and documentation of objects. In addition to the many works submitted by the artists themselves, a selection of commissioned works was published as a “Monthly Feature”.

All works were put online under the same terms of circulation and use as the original works on which they are based (Creative Commons 4.0 licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike).

Galerie Charlot presents a selection of the works published on the Dadaclub.online website, together with the corresponding original works, thus showing the vital energy they still possess, even after a century.

Original Dada works by: Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Paul Citroën, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy

With works by: Andreas Agam, Domenico Barra, Aram Bartholl, Vasiliki Biska, Camilla Bassani, Marco Cadioli, Vuk Cosic, Ludovic Coutinho, Giovanni Fredi, Emilie Gervais, Fausto Gilberti, Thomas Israel, JODI, Inhye Lee, Jan Robert Leegte, Raquel Meyers, Esther Miquel, Rick Niebe, Zaven Paré, Leonardo Petrucci, Giulia Ravi Ravasi, Intimidad Romero, Evan Roth, Heinz Kralle Schielmann, UBERMORGEN, Eric Vernhes, Paolo Visentini

> Event website