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Venue:Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art (14 Pariska Street)
Date: October 12th 2019 18:00
Expanding upon the research undertaken in the curation of the second Yinchuan Biennale, that has taken place from June to September 2018, Biennale artistic director Marco Scotini will discuss a new concept of the environment and the role contemporary art may play when it engages the extra-disciplinary, in a multispecies world at the edge of extinction. In its thematic constellation, the presentation will address the relationship between nomadic space and rural space (as semiotics of subjectification), labor-in-nature and nature-in-labor (as forms of production), voice and book (as forms of expression), minorities and multiplicities (as forms of social assemblage). Scotini will argue how, in this project, the new paradigms that inform our understanding of living systems are not reduced to the subject matter of the Biennale but are rather employed to question the limits of the exhibition format as such in order to eventually produce a new ecological model for exhibitions. Situating a biennial, just as Donna Haraway talks of situated knowledge, means liberating oneself from all the principles based on neutrality, objectivity and universalism. Scotini claims a two-pronged method that serves as a sort of navigational compass. It consists, on one hand, in defining the curatorial observation point (what he calls a topographical point of view) and, on the other, in adopting an archaeology of knowledge, following Michel Foucault.
About the Speaker:
Marco Scotini (Italy) is a curator, writer, and art critic based in Milan. He is currently Artistic Director ofthe FM Centre for Contemporary Art, Milan.
Since 2004, he has been Head of the Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies Department at NABA, Milan-Rome and, since 2014, he has been Head of Exhibitions Program at Parco Arte Vivente (PAV), Turin. During his career, Scotini has curated more than 200 solo exhibitions of artists and has collaborated with art institutions such as Documenta (2017); MSU, Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb (2015); SALT, Istanbul (2014); Castello di Rivoli (2013); Raven Row, London (2013); Bildmuseet Umeå (2012); Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2011); Manifesta (2009); and Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2007), amongst many others. He curated the Albanian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2015 and co-curated the 1st edition of the Anren Biennale, China, in 2017. He has been Artistic Director of the 2nd Yinchuan Biennale (2018), titled Starting from the Desert. Ecologies on the Edge. Scotini currently is working on the exhibition The Missing Planet. Visions and Revisions of Soviet Times that will open in November at Museo Pecci in Prato. He is author/editor of the books “Politics of Memory: Documentary and Archive” (DeriveApprodi, Rome 2014, and Archive Books, Berlin 2015); “Deimantas Narkevičius. Da Capo. Fifteen Films” (Archive Books, Berlin 2015); “Artecrazia: Macchine espositive e governo dei pubblici” (DeriveApprodi, Roma 2016), “Politiques de la végétation: Pratiques artistiques, stratégies communautaires, agroécologie” (Eterotopia France, Paris 2017) among others.
The event is free and open to the public.
Marco Scotini talk has been supported by Istituto Italiano di Cultura Belgrado