On May 24th and 25th, thanks to the collaboration between MK and Routes Agency in partnership with the MeLa Project, the National Museum Luigi Pigorini in Rome will host two events: the performance Impressions d’Afrique and the discussion panel Performing the ethnographic museum, with the aim of rethink and redesigning the museum space with a different approach to vision.

“The choice of Museo Pigorini as a place of performance, is primarily concerned with the cultural ambiguity of the dances shown in Impressions d’Afrique, which do not refer to ethnographic memories but invent a brand new repertoire of aesthetic contaminations and identities, starting from the tension produced by the Western classificatory obsessions” explains Michael Stefano, MK choreographer.

In the words of Giulia Grechi, one of the curators, we can identify the meaning of this dislocation of dance in the museum’ space: “Many have insisted on the approximate death of Museum, [...]]]>

On May 24^th and 25^th, thanks to the collaboration between MK and Routes Agency in partnership with the MeLa Project, the National Museum Luigi Pigorini in Rome will host two events: the performance Impressions d’Afrique and the discussion panel Performing the ethnographic museum, with the aim of rethink and redesigning the museum space with a different approach to vision.

“The choice of Museo Pigorini as a place of performance, is primarily concerned with the cultural ambiguity of the dances shown in Impressions d’Afrique, which do not refer to ethnographic memories but invent a brand new repertoire of aesthetic contaminations and identities, starting from the tension produced by the Western classificatory obsessions” explains Michael Stefano, MK choreographer.

In the words of Giulia Grechi, one of the curators, we can identify the meaning of this dislocation of dance in the museum’ space: “Many have insisted on the approximate death of Museum, while deconstructing it as a non-neutral and colonial device of identity and power. But before declaring its  irreversible demise, we should reflect on the possibility of a new activation of its social functions, above all  the capability to build narratives that are able to produce an identification process, a “imagined community”, not in a colonial or national sense, but in a postcolonial, intercultural and transnational one, which can create an experimental laboratory for new meanings of citizenship ” (G. Grechi, What dust will rise? Il museo sotto assedio, o in esodo, being published in the journal Visual Ethnography)

In December 2012 Mk had already presented at the Museum Pigorini the performance “Four colonial dances seen at close range” as part of the project Crossing Bodies – Immaginari  postcoloniali, curated by Routes Agency for Idee migranti within the exhibition [S]oggetti migranti.

24.25 May 2013 – h.18
Impressions d’Afrique

performance
with Philippe Barbut, Biagio Caravano, Laura Scarpini & guests
choreography Michele Di Stefano
management Anna Damiani with Valeria Daniele
promotion PAV/Diagonale artistica
production mk 2013, Regione Lazio Assessorato alla Cultura Arte e Sport
in collaboration with Routes Agency and Museo Nazionale Preistorico Etnografico Luigi Pigorini Rome
with the suppost of MiBAC

The African continent as prefigured by Raymond Roussel in his novel Impressions d’Afrique (1910) is a surreal landscape, which has no other purpose than to serve as a background for a combinatorial process, based on continuous chain reactions of words and arbitrary clashes of different worlds.
In the same direction goes our Africa, which is unreadable and wild – not picturesque at all – and is furiously prone to absorb all the informations coming from the Western cultural regimes, in order to spit them out in a hybrid unpredictable trajectory.
This project aims to establish new bodily dynamics and postures, and in this sense the movement research constitutes its main goal. Even if the performance pretends to show characters as in an adventure story, there is no romance and no journey, just an “anywhere” which is the place for the collection of different bodily behaviours. We will see a woman destined to be sacrificed, a platoon of Marines in recognition, warriors experts into hypnosis technique … but they are just bodies who do not know how to develop a story. Their purpose is to identify and bring out the posture of a new identity, in the exact moment of its appearence in front of reality.

The prologue to Impressions d’Afrique staged Novenber 2012 at APERTO Festival, Reggio Emilia I.
The performance will be presented on June 30th 2013 at the BiennaleDanza in Venice.

May 24th 2013 – h.16.15
Performing the Ethnographic Museum
Dances at the Museo Etnografico Pigorini

Public talk curated by Routes Agency
with
Vito Lattanzi – Museo Preistorico Etnografico Luigi Pigorini Rome
Giulia Grechi – Università L’Orientale Naples, Routes Agency
Rossana Macaluso – Routes Agency
Annalisa Piccirillo – Università L’Orientale Naples
Stefano Tomassini – Università Ca’ Foscari Venice and USI-ISI Lugano
Michele Di Stefano – Mk

moderator
Viviana Gravano – Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, Milan, Routes Agency

The performance will be introduced by a talk, in which researchers from different disciplines will investigate the relationship between contemporary dance and post-colonial issues, discussing the role that museums (and in particular ethnographic museums) can play in proposing a different narrative of their archives and a renewed role of intercultural mediation.

For further information please contact:

PAV – Emanuela Rea: organizzazione@pav-it.eu, 06 44702823, 3338537295

Routes Agency – Rossana Macaluso: rossana.macaluso@routesagency.com  320 2842897

mk  focuses on body research, choereography and sound making.  It is considered as  one of the most interesting research ensemble of the Italian scene. The group staged at Indonesian Dance Festival in Jakarta,  Sparks Festival of Arts in Minneapolis, Kitazawa Town Hall in Tokyo, Tanzfabrik Berlin, BE Festival Birmingham UK,  Hungary, Spain, Portugal and so on. 2011 production Around the world in 80 days premiered  at TorinoDanza Festival. Other projects are the dance piece Quattro danze coloniali viste da vicino, !Exotica! , the delirious Grand Tour, Clima (on tour in 2013)and  the Instruction series, a format which involves different casts of performers and visual artists,  in collaboration with Xing. Michele Di Stefano helds the 2013 Invenzioni workshop at Biennale Danza in Venice and a new piece for the National Dance Academy in Rome. The 2014 piece Robinson  will be hosted and produced by Teatro di Roma at Teatro Argentina. MK is amongst the five groups selected for Corpo Sottile (Ubulibri, Milan 2003), a book about the new European dance scene (with Jerome Bel, Xavier LeRoy, Myriam Gourfink and Kinkaleri). Agenti autonomi e sistemi multiagente , written in collaboration with Margherita Morgantin is published by Quodlibet 2012. Starting 2010 the group is supported by MIBAC Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività culturali.

Giulia Grechi holds a PhD in “Theory and social research” at the University La Sapienza (Rome, Italy). Her Phd thesis, “The embodied representation. An ethnography of the body between colonial stereotypes and contemporary art”, examined the works of the Afro-American artists Lorna Simpson and Kara Walker, focusing on colonial representation, the concept of embodiment and emotions as field of knowledge’s production. She is currently research fellow at “L’Orientale” (Naples) as a member of the EU Project “Mela – European Museums in the Age of Migrations” (EU-7PQ), where she is working on the relation between museums, curatorial practices, anthropology and contemporary art. Her research interests include cultural anthropology, post-colonial studies, museography, contemporary art and embodiment. She teaches Photography – social communication at the Fine Arts School of Brera (Milan, Italy), Sociology of communication at the European Institute of Design (IED) in Rome. She is also co-coordinator and Professor of Visual Anthropology and Contemporary Art for IED Master’s Program in “Museum and Events Curator – Contemporary Arts and Performing Arts”. She is editor-in-chief of the on-line journal roots§routes – research on visual culture. She works in a team of independent curators based in Rome, called Routes Agency - Cura of contemporary arts.

Rossana Macaluso works as curator of contemporary art in Routes Agency. She is editor of the on line journal roots§routes. She is professor of Contemporary Visual Communication and assistant coordinator of the IED Master’s Program in “Museum and Events Curator – Contemporary Arts and Performing Arts”. She has worked for various institutions including: Studio Untitled  by Bartholomeo Pietromarchi, Dorotheum Auction House and Gallery, Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia Foundation, Auditorium Parco della Musica, Photo Studio Prestige, Artistic and Historical Studies Department of the University of Turin (project MIBAC sector Catalog).

Viviana Gravano, Viviana Gravano lives and work in Rome where she was born in 1961. She is a Contemporary Art Curator and Professor of Art History at the Accademia delle Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, and at the IED (Istituto Europeo del Design) in Rome. She is also the Director of the Event and Museum Curator at IED in Rome. She was photo editor and editor in the journal “Gomorra – Territori e Culturi nelle Metropoli Contemporanee”; she was Assistant Director in the journal “Avatar-Dislocazione tra Antropologia, Comunicazione e Arti Visive”; she was Curator in the Nova Gallery and in LopLop Gallery in Rome. She published many essays in exhibition catalogues, books and journals, such as: L’Arte fotografica, Fotografi da tutto il mondo nelle collezioni italiane, Fondazione Italiana per la Fotografia, Palazzo Cesi, Acquasparta(TR), Carte Segrete, Roma 1996; L’immagine fotografica, Mimesis, Milano 1997; Crossing. Progetti fotografici di confine, Costa & Nolan, Milano 1998; Paesaggi attivi Saggio contro la contemplazione/L’attivismo paesaggistico nell’arte contemporanea, Mimesis, Milano 2012.

Annalisa Piccirillo completed her Ph.D. in “Cultural and Postcolonial Studies of the Anglophone World” at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” in 2012, with a dissertation entitled  Disseminated Choreographies: Body-Archive of Women’s Dance.  Thanks to a research fellowship by the Regione Campania, she is developing a project on “New Practices of Memory: the Mediterranean MatriArchives”, in which she analyzes the artworks of contemporary dance and performance art by female artists from the Mediterranean, at the crossroad of Deconstruction and Performance and Dance Studies.

Stefano Tomassini teaches at Ca ‘Foscari University of Venice and the University of Italian Switzerland in Lugano, in 2008-2009 was a Fulbright-Schuman Research Scholar (NYC) in 2010 Scholar-in-Residence in the archives of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival (Lee , Mass.) and, in the fall semester, 2011, Associate Research Scholar at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University (NYC), participating in the international project Commedia dell’Arte in Context (ed. Christopher Balme, Stefan Hulfeld, Piermario Bishop, Daniele Vianello, Cambridge University Press, 2014).

The Triennale di Milano is currently promoting the initiative “Milano&Oltre. Una visione in movimento / A vision in motion“, curated by the association Connecting Cultures, and aimed at re-inventing the relationship between the city and the people who live, use and cross it, with a special focus on those places which seem irrelevant, alien or undesirable. This series of events, which represents the conclusive phase of the three-year project developed by Fondazione Cariplo, is intended as a workshop on the future metropolis open to all the citizens. Throughout May 2013, artists, architects, urbanists, photographers, scientists, policy makers and performers will offer various readings of the city, debating, analysing, depicting and interpreting such topics as the plural city, new citizens, interculturalism, participation, open-source design, etc. The workshops, roundtables, exhibitions and performances will highlight the role of art and culture as catalysers of energies and transformations in the contemporary urban contexts.

On 9 May 2013 Europe will celebrate the 63rd anniversary of the Schuman Declaration. Sixty-three years ago, on 9 May 1950, the then French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman made the first move towards the creation of what we now know as the European Union (EU).

This year’s celebrations will be especially poignant following the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize 2012 to the EU. In its citation, the Nobel Committee said that the EU had “for over six decades contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe”.

The European External Action Service (EEAS) will be joining the other European Institutions throughout the month of May to celebrate Europe Day worldwide. EU Delegations will be leading a range of different events in their host countries on the theme of Europe in the World. Lectures, competitions, film festivals and other events organised by the EU Delegations in cooperation with [...]]]>

On 9 May 2013 Europe will celebrate the 63rd anniversary of the Schuman Declaration. Sixty-three years ago, on 9 May 1950, the then French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman made the first move towards the creation of what we now know as the European Union (EU).

This year’s celebrations will be especially poignant following the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize 2012 to the EU. In its citation, the Nobel Committee said that the EU had “for over six decades contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe”.

The European External Action Service (EEAS) will be joining the other European Institutions throughout the month of May to celebrate Europe Day worldwide. EU Delegations will be leading a range of different events in their host countries on the theme of Europe in the World. Lectures, competitions, film festivals and other events organised by the EU Delegations in cooperation with Member States’ embassies will demonstrate the best the EU has to offer.

A recently published Austrian essay collection about museum and migration – Wonisch, Regina, and Thomas Hübel, eds. 2012. Museum und Migration. Konzepte, Kontexte, Kontroversen. Vienna: transcript Verlag. – aims at comparing different approaches of visualizing migration in museums. Authors analyze and compare projects developed in German-speaking countries (such as the 2004 Gastarbajteri exhibition in Wien Museum, which is online as a virtual exhibition) or the work of DOMiD (Documentation Centre and Museum of Migration in Germany) to French and Anglo-Saxon concepts. Though questioning whether the visualization of migration history in museums or exhibitions could lead to new exclusion, the essays argue that the aspect of diversity and a steady history of migration should rather be a fundamental principle in depicting general history in museums. The book can be purchased online; the first pages are available through this link: http://www.transcript-verlag.de/ts1801/ts1801_1.pdf.

The recent Seminar was meant as an opportunity to debate about the role of migrants throughout history, as the engine which fueled human progress. The talk highlighted how their movement has sparked innovation, spread ideas, relieved poverty, and laid the foundations for a global economy. In the contemporary more interconnected world, characterized by increased migration flows, Goldin looks at the profound advantages that such dynamics have for countries and migrants the world over, and proposes new approaches [...]]]> On Apr 23, Professor Ian Goldin held a Seminar to discuss about “How Migration Shaped our World and Will Define our Future”. Goldin is Professor of Globalisation and Development and director of the Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford; together with Geoffrey Cameron and Meera Balarajan, he is the author of the book Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped our World and Will define our Future (published by Princeton University Press in September 2011).

The recent Seminar was meant as an opportunity to debate about the role of migrants throughout history, as the engine which fueled human progress. The talk highlighted how their movement has sparked innovation, spread ideas, relieved poverty, and laid the foundations for a global economy. In the contemporary more interconnected world, characterized by increased migration flows, Goldin looks at the profound advantages that such dynamics have for countries and migrants the world over, and proposes new approaches for governance that will embrace this international mobility.

The podcast of this special talk can be downloaded and listened through this page.

The Narodni muzej Slovenije/National Museum of Slovenia is currently hosting the travelling exhibition “Imagining the Balkans. Identities and Memory in the Long 19th Century”, investigating the formation and development of modern nations in this area during the “long 19th century” (as Hobsbawm described it). The event is part of UNESCO’s global initiative “Culture: A Bridge to Development”, that seeks to enhance cooperation and dialogue among national history museums.

The exhibition focuses on the constitution and evolution of modern nations in South-East Europe during the 19th century, and is structured around eight thematic paths: “Living in the old world”, “Travelling, communicating”, “A new social order: the rise of the middle classes”, “Creating and diffusing knowledge” “Mapping”, “Using history, making heroes”, “Public celebrations” and “Images of the Nation”. In the foreword to the exhibit’s catalogue Irina Bokova writes that “This exhibition traces the history of a vibrant cultural mosaic, revealing the [...]]]>

The Narodni muzej Slovenije/National Museum of Slovenia is currently hosting the travelling exhibition “Imagining the Balkans. Identities and Memory in the Long 19th Century”, investigating the formation and development of modern nations in this area during the “long 19th century” (as Hobsbawm described it). The event is part of UNESCO’s global initiative “Culture: A Bridge to Development”, that seeks to enhance cooperation and dialogue among national history museums.

The exhibition focuses on the constitution and evolution of modern nations in South-East Europe during the 19th century, and is structured around eight thematic paths: “Living in the old world”, “Travelling, communicating”, “A new social order: the rise of the middle classes”, “Creating and diffusing knowledge” “Mapping”, “Using history, making heroes”, “Public celebrations” and “Images of the Nation”. In the foreword to the exhibit’s catalogue Irina Bokova writes that “This exhibition traces the history of a vibrant cultural mosaic, revealing the diversity of this region’s cultural heritage and the energy arising from the interweaving of influences between and within countries. Travelling from one museum to another, Imagining the Balkans will help strengthen cooperation among cultural institutions and professionals and raise public awareness as the basis for deepening dialogue”.

The exhibition, inaugurated on April 8th, will be on display until 25 August 2013. It is meant to travel to Serbia and Romania in September/December 2013, and to other countries from South-East Europe in 2014-2015.

#invasionidigitali is a grass roots movement, enhancing a network of institutions and events focused on the dissemination and valorization of the Italian artistic and cultural heritage through the use of internet and the social media. The instrument implemented by the movement are programmatic “digital invasions”, aimed at raising awareness about the crisis which is affecting the Italian cultural sector and promoting the Nation’s cultural and artistic heritage through social media. These invasions consist of a network of coordinated events, which take place at the same time in different museums and heritage places in Italy. Bloggers, tour guides, photographers and social media users will illustrate their experiences in the selected cultural sites through pictures and videos, which will all be posted on the social media, as well as on the project’s YouTube channel.

The next “digital invasion” will take place from April 20-28, 2013 (during the week which was meant [...]]]>

#invasionidigitali is a grass roots movement, enhancing a network of institutions and events focused on the dissemination and valorization of the Italian artistic and cultural heritage through the use of internet and the social media. The instrument implemented by the movement are programmatic “digital invasions”, aimed at raising awareness about the crisis which is affecting the Italian cultural sector and promoting the Nation’s cultural and artistic heritage through social media. These invasions consist of a network of coordinated events, which take place at the same time in different museums and heritage places in Italy. Bloggers, tour guides, photographers and social media users will illustrate their experiences in the selected cultural sites through pictures and videos, which will all be posted on the social media, as well as on the project’s YouTube channel.

The next “digital invasion” will take place from April 20-28, 2013 (during the week which was meant to be the dedicated to the celebration of culture, and which was recently cancelled). #invasionidigitali invites everyone who may be interested to participate to visit a museum or cultural site with their camera or smartphone, to share these experiences on their personal accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest or Youtube, and to assign these docs a #invasionidigitali tag. All the tagged contents will automatically be aggregated of the #invasionidigitali portal, and available

The aim of the event is to transform the participants into #DigitalCulturalAmbassadors, and to spread a free and shared culture.

In October 2012, the European Commission promoted an international conference investigating “European Audiences: 2020 and beyond“. The event took place in Brussels, and brought together 800 culture professionals to discuss about how to engage more meaningfully with the audiences of today and tomorrow. The lively participation and debate at the conference highlighted the crucial role of audiences for the cultural sector, who are hungry for engagement, for shared experiences, for a sense of community. Audience development is in fact one of the priorities of the EU’s future funding programme for the cultural and creative sectors, ”Creative Europe”.

The EC has recently published the conclusive outcomes of the conference, which you can download through this link: http://ec.europa.eu/culture/news/documents/conclusions-conference.pdf.

Is it possible to think of language and image, discourse and art works as equally valent? It stands to reason that curators and art historians would have a different answer to this question, as they have different disciplinary socialisations, different tools and methods, different experiences with art. Ruth Noack’s lecture will not clarify these differences, but instead experiment in conflating both approaches. The exploration of the topic will focus on the work by Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-1990).

On April 11th, Ruth Noack, Leader of the MeLa Research Field 04 from the Royal College of Art, will participate in the Para/Site International Conference, that will take place at Para Site contemporary art space in Hong Kong. This three-day forum brings together a group of original thinkers, artists and curators from around the world to discuss and navigate on the spectral contemporary condition of art. The conference will present different contextual genealogies, realities of production and interpretative vocabularies and allow for their reading from the perspective of Hong Kong and its changing position in the globalized contemporary art field.The International Conference 2013 is premised on a need to rethink the basis of international solidarity, with a special attention to the field of contemporary art, to the means it still has and the needs it now has, after the end of its phase of rapid global institutional expansion. The conference will also [...]]]>

On April 11th, Ruth Noack, Leader of the MeLa Research Field 04 from the Royal College of Art, will participate in the Para/Site International Conference, that will take place at Para Site contemporary art space in Hong Kong. This three-day forum brings together a group of original thinkers, artists and curators from around the world to discuss and navigate on the spectral contemporary condition of art. The conference will present different contextual genealogies, realities of production and interpretative vocabularies and allow for their reading from the perspective of Hong Kong and its changing position in the globalized contemporary art field.The International Conference 2013 is premised on a need to rethink the basis of international solidarity, with a special attention to the field of contemporary art, to the means it still has and the needs it now has, after the end of its phase of rapid global institutional expansion. The conference will also review a number of case studies of artistic practices in given contexts, looking closer at artistic forms and vocabularies and their complicated relationship to the historical circumstances that generate them and which they try to address.

The conference is thus organized around two broad thematic fields. On 11 and 12 April, “New internationalisms after multiculturalism/Contemporary art after global expansion” will feature Charles Merewether (art historian, writer, Director of Institute of Contemporary Arts, Singapore, and curator of the Biennale of Sydney 2004; Singapore), Hammad Nasar (curator, writer and Head of Research and Programmes at Asia Art Archive; Hong Kong), Ruth Noack (art historian, writer, Head of Department of Curating Contemporary Art at The Royal College of Art, and curator of Documenta 12; London and Berlin), Erika Tan (artist, curator, writer, and researcher; London), Georg Schöllhammer (writer, researcher, independent curator, and editor-in-chief of springerin and documenta 12 magazines; Vienna), David Teh (curator, writer, academic, director of Future Perfect; Singapore), and Yeung Yang (curator, writer and founder of soundpocket; Hong Kong).

On 12 and 13 April, “Determinisms in art vocabularies and interactions between art and politics in specific historical conditions” will include contributions by Nadim Abbas (artist and musician; Hong Kong), Petra Bauer (artist and filmmaker; Stockholm), FX Harsono (art critic, artist and founding member of Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru; Jakarta), Max Jorge Hinderer (writer, researcher, cultural critic, curator of The Potosi Principle; Berlin), Ana Janevski (art critic, writer and Associate Curator, MoMA; New York), Hsu Ming-han (art and film critic, curator, chief editor of Who’s afraid of Ai Weiwei? and co-founder of Gaze – Contemporary Art Online Magazine; Taipei), Rabih Mroue (actor, playwright, director and artist; Beirut and Berlin), Shabbir Hussain Mustafa (writer, researcher and curator at National University of Singapore Museum; Singapore), Marc Siegel (writer, researcher and co-founder of the art collective CHEAP; Berlin), Enin Supriyanto (writer, editor and independent curator; Jakarta), and Anthony Yung (writer, curator, researcher at Asia Art Archive and co-founder of Observation Society, Guangzhou; Hong Kong).

Para Site is Hong Kong’s leading contemporary art space and one of the oldest and most active independent art centres in Asia. It produces exhibitions, publications, residencies and discursive projects aimed at forging a critical understanding of local and international phenomena in art and society.

Live streaming at www.para-site.org.hk.