COPY SHOP was a collaboration between Filip Berg and Archivio Conz echoing the archive’s “Pause: Broken Sounds / Remote Music” exhibition at KW Institute for Contemporary Art. The project explores and combines pop music’s concert merchandising with one of the core values of the Fluxus movement: that it must be accessible and obtainable by all! Translating original art pieces from the archive by John Giorno, Astrid Furnival and George Brecht into wearable multiples, the mass-produced serves the masses.
Filip Berg was inspired to initiate the project with Archivio Conz after having read a well-known Italian fashion designer explain the importance of bootleg fashion and black-market copies, unoriginals and fake fashion. She justified, and practically insisted, that her work and the fashion world must be infiltrated and copied in order to survive, create value, and reach people beyond the establishment, equal to the notion of Fluxus.
Inspired by the banality of an ordinary copy-shop, a place where everyone can walk in from the street and make copies, the space and act becomes charged with controversy in the institutionalised art world: an establishment that the Fluxus movement and its artists wanted to break free from, but perhaps was not successful in. COPY SHOP does not distinguish between real or fake, institutional or black-market, orginial or unoriginal. It is concerned with art only.