PALERMO LIVING PAVILION

Weaving commons out of time

STUDIO RIZOMA

Palermo. November 2021

Marcela Caldas

-Unchosen Immobility is the first violence done to a body-

Jazz. Koffi Kwahulé

After a week in Athens and the first exhibition of a selection of works at the Kyiv Biennale, the plat- form Room to Bloom transits to Palermo with Studio Rizoma, inviting 35 artists out of the 100 selected. A rich multiformat three-day program co-produced in collaboration with several selected artists, local cultural scene stakeholders, grassroots movements, and foreigners. Palermo, located at the center of the Mediterra- nean Sea, has been shaped by centuries of migration and colonization and holds a simultaneous condition of crossroads, insularity, southern periphery, and border of Europe. Such a unique scenario of stratified temporalities and rich contamination of cultures provides a fertile ground for compost and cross-pollination, prone to infinite transformation.

The proposal interrogates the notion of enclosure as a structural mechanism underpinning exclusion into a large spectrum of hierarchical static frames: ranging from national borders to class, race, and gender, in which the Pavilion embodies one of its spatial devices of power representation.

How to open space for alternative community bonding given the short time, the diversity and contrast be- tween a complex place and myriad realities?

‘Palermo living pavilion: weaving commons out of Time’ stands for a call for action to reclaim the public sphere, praising bodies in transit and motion to open room for encounter and exchange beyond the limits of institutionalized art space.

This curatorship argues that cultural institutions should promote infrastructures of care connecting the com- mon space instead of exclusive insularities; rather than protecting boundaries, allow the outside in, with- drawing from linear time logics of progress, commodified cultural extraction and co-narratives for tourism and gentrification.

We will explore movement as a strategy to identify tangible and invisible boundaries, intersecting multiple tensions, to blur and navigate them, challenging the static identities. Palermo’s rich palimpsest crossing a flux of trajectories, backgrounds, and languages allows us to re-center the potential for alternative relational space. Drift across margins and heterogeneous layered city fragments in a quest for proximity within the apparent distance, through relational artworks and laboratories, in an attempt to articulate new connections and new possible configurations where unseemingly there were none.

The itinerary bridges with the local cultural scene to intentionally articulate tangible and intangible resour- ces, share skills and, channel arts for oracling new readings: to re-examine narratives, and retrieve silenced stories by story-making. When it comes to decolonizing our gaze to engage actively intertwining art and life, unlearning and learning with/from others, out of competition, and eventually, clash when reclaiming porosity within institutions to bring exchange.

-The personal is always political-.

Room to Bloom advocates for consciously intersectional feminism, resisting gender, race, class, and non-human categories entrenched into binary exclusion between center-periphery, culture-nature, private and public. Speculative, posthumanist and queer perspectives will allow us to explore the bodily frontiers and their extensions where intimacy, desire, imagination, and affection are acknowledged, with non-disre- gard for conflict and failure. A tentacular organism that expands fields of action there when it resonates, and if not, it fragments or dissolves, leaving traces behind. Transform the space as been transformed, willing to provide room for alterity and, redefine our relationship to hegemonic collective memory devices.

- Our land is where our feet rest-

Molti volti

Critical HOSPITALITY

Molti Volti is a social enterprise that has had a significant impact in Ballarò’s district, the most diverse of Palermo City center, since its foundation. Central headquarters and home during their visit allowed the ar- tists to have daily insight into the association dynamics characterized by hosting newcomers within their business model programs of empowerment, fostering inclusivity. Shapoor Safari, its chef and a political re- fugee, will prepare an Afghanan meal for us with care. Moltivolti was also our meeting place for encounters, screenings, and conversations.

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN POWER AND DOMINATION?

Retrieving Danilo Dolci - a prominent Sicilian Sociologist from the XXth century- and his Reciprocal Maieutic methodology as he explains: ‘a process of collective exploration that takes, as a starting point, individual ex- perience and intuition’. The session was guided by Carmelo Pollichino and Dan Dolci, reflecting on power and dominance interplay for us to read whether violence or empowerment underlie any given relational dy- namic, offering a fundamental tool to navigate circumstances in life. While some participants were initially reluctant to participate in a workshop led by two men, it proved in the end that gender differences can stand as an ally and a safe place to learn from each other if horizontally engaged. Unveiling shared wounds despite our different trajectories and diverse backgrounds: delivering alternative forms to elaborate trauma beyond polarization and confrontation in a shared quest for insights.

PAVILIONS

Bodies from different contexts intersect in Palermo

The journey starts with Itamar Gov: -The Last Two Surviving Northern White Rhinoceroses- a sculptural and sound installation addressing the animal species disappearing in our world. The relational artwork evokes the tension from the void, the abyss, and the lament that sentences to extinction bodies as the only condition from the power device. Interrogating Europe’s colonial history, its fragmented notion of nature, self-serving extraction, and politics of representation, the journey begins at the private dancing room of Pa- lazzo Ajutamicristo, an XVI-century palace at the heart of the city center. Upgrading with presence-by-ab- sence the representational spatial frame, preserved as a national monument, shedding light on its hidden outcomes underpinning Western domination over the African continent. If once upon a time, a rhino was to be displayed for exotic narratives in a pavilion, today last two females are shipped as merchandise, circu- lating freely as information and finance do, as they no longer serve power representation: its centers have shifted location whereas the Mediterranean Sea has become the most deadly border for African bodies, captured by the ruling power time-space frame tensions at the core of the migration crisis of our time. The box will transit to meet the group at Palazzo Buttera cavalry entrance offering the public to interact.

Located at the city’s seafront and recently restored, Palazzo Buttera hosts Francesca Frua de Angeli and Massimo Valsecchi’s private art collection and home. On the first day, giving continuity to a long tradition of hospitality, it will host artists from 35 countries. Yet considered by some a white collection, it is precisely to open and contaminate these scenarios this proposal pursued to perform. Gathering with the ‘Room to Bloom’ advisory board where Valentina Karga and Rosario Talevi of Soft Agency studio (Germany), curators Muna Lobe and Ami Weickaane (2Heads Dakar), artist, writer Sonya Dyer (London), Joulia Strauss from (Russia-Athens) Kathya Erhardt (Germany) and, Rasha Shaaban (Sweden) to exchange different perspec- tives on their art practices as women, its challenges, and possibilities to carry out the program with the participants.

Produced additionally for the event, ‘an art group from the South’ oracle piece: -Fruits from someone else’s Labor- will ephemerally transform the palace XVIII-century library and archive, while Luca Frati sculp- ture work -Untitled (device to watch and to be seen)- preceded the courtyard waiting to be activated in a different location completing our journey.

DRIFTING: MOVEMENT AND PRESENCE AS AN EMANCIPATORY TOOL

What do these palaces, Ferdinando I King of the Two Sicilies hunting ground and Maria Carolina designed Pavilion, have in common with a botanical garden, a vegetable garden, a church, and an underground bar?

NON-HUMAN AGENCIES, PLANTS, AND WATER

The next day, we will cruise to the city margins to join Claudi Gulli Palazzo Butera’s art curator to guide us through his Palazzina Cinese reading on gender narratives. The exquisite interiors were designed by Maria Carolina, a woman that faced the radical epochal shift to modernity and capitalism as we know it. Sister of Maria Antoinette, forced to escape the French Revolution outbursts to survive. Located in the heart of Park La Favorita, today Palermo’s larger green public space, the fourth in Italy, is a border zone edging the moun- tain’s natural reserve and the sea. Formerly her husband Ferdinand the IIId Borbon King of the two Sicilies Kingdom hunting grounds, the park hosts the city’s most ancient tree and night-day shifting temporalities: civic and leisure life during the day and prostitution at night.

Following our drift, Alicja Czyczel hosted a collective bodily quest to explore: how can we learn from the infinite flow of plant experience? How can we, humans- animals create relationships and collective efforts with plants?

Marginal Studio will test for the first time its communal device Fulcrum constructed with Mohammed Che- rif, Mamour, Ebrima, and Hadim for a picnic: a mobile structure designed to take over public space, staging conviviality involving Palermo’s diasporic communities. After years they have been restricted from gathering and celebrating due to covid restrictions.

-Recognizing what lies in front of us and deciding what to do with it. -

Palermo-based collective Aterraterra will join us at a domesticated green spot called -nature-, using our senses and inhabiting it ephemerally to connect to the room that blooms nearby their cultivated gardens. Fabio Aranzulla and Luca Cinquemani shared their cultivation art practice which grows at the intersec- tion of science, collective experience, and creative learning. Drawing our attention to identify spontaneous plants and other forms of life surrounding us, in the attempt to interrogate the narrative constructions around certain plants and foods; highlighting their past, often categorized under a racism and colonial gaze.

A conversation around the transdisciplinary practice of artists and filmmakers Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson, (Paris-Palermo) and their work. Circumference of the Common Birds: through lichens, disa- ppearing languages and species, liminal spaces, under-commoning and possible ways of re-enchanting the world.

ACTIVATING ARCHIVES

The next day, we headed to the Botanical Garden, a dialectic representational colonial device and a space for care.

Palermo-based artist Irene Coppola invited us to reflect on the potential of physicality, senses, and peri- pheral vision compared to the flattened digital algorithm guiding voice -Cari corpi vivi- as a medium for perception. Exploring the Gymnasium, to next activate her archive to re-compose gestures and non-human fragments into new hybrid entities.

Among decolonial stories hidden in the Botanical Garden archive, she will highlight Ergot, a type of Rye dee- ply related to the film -I non sono Io- featuring imaginary scenes on Alicudi magic witchcraft stories. The an- cient Greeks ingested the cereal for mysterious rituals; likely to be introduced by British trade, the islanders have been dealing with an expanded perception of reality for years, becoming familiar with hallucinations and visions to the point of transforming reality.

POLYPHONY: Water frequencies

On another note, Francesca Mariano performed her site-specific -Water Transmission-: a collective ritual of gestures, voices, and prayers to re-appropriate through aquatic frequencies of collective digital space, unfolding water worlds and mythological memory. Around the central pond and fountain, the co-creation allowed them to rewrite their relationship with the water agency as a common repository, liberating frequen- cies beyond the normative colonial device. Water amplified a medium for connection while expanding the institutional potential as a space of care, conviviality, and creativity subverting its architectural power spatial regime. The event was appreciated by the participants, not without conflict in-house.

VOICING: Contemporary resonances, agency, and visibility

An evening to share feminist-situated practices and socially engaged art strategies revolving around vulne- rability, affection, solidarity, empathy, and togetherness: outlining intersectional feminism as a powerful ma- trix to intervene in our collective imaginaries and transform the world. Grassroot trans-feminist collectives in Palermo were our special guests: Non-Una di Meno, Palermo è Fimmina, SCUM, and Collages Femmi- nicidi Palermo at the time envisioning the upcoming ‘World Day on Gender Violence’ march. In open dialo- gue with Italian artist photographer Lucrezia Testa Iannilli (Italy), Jolanta Nowaczyk artist and pro-choice activist (Poland), with an ASMR sound piece: -When there were some questions for you, you didn’t even answer some of them-, denouncing abuse within academia hierarchical power. Finally, Margarita Valdivie- so (Colombia) at her turn with -Arde la Casa: On political violence, family and Exile- portrayed different dynamics of patriarchal violence in the South. Misogyny, abortion, war, sexual violence, gaslighting, political repression, and eroticism operating across different contexts were shared and discussed. More importantly, how art has been an effective medium for activism, community bonding, resistance, healing, reimagination, and visibility.

A street wall-posting intervention nearby completed the evening: an image from Lucrezia Testallini -So- rellanza 1522- channeling the voice of women who will silently disappear under the eyes of a public and political space that should guarantee their life, dignity, and safety. A movement recently born connecting a European network fighting femicides that had risen dramatically during times of the pandemic.

Additionally, two live radio broadcasts on Queer issues and feminist activism in collaboration with NUDM’s Radio Santa Rosalia were issued: a conversation between two Italian generations: Massimo Milani, foun- der of the first gay circle in Italy, and artist Luca Frati, sharing experiences on how LGTB gender activism has unfolded according to the different political and social contexts over the last decades. Secondly, Carlo- tta Casomai, assistant curator and part of NUDM interviewed the artists for the local RSR archive.

Lastly, Palermo è Fimmina collective conveyed hidden stories of great feminist Sicilian women, as they ex- plain: by retrieving the past, storytelling fosters the possibility to rewrite our present story and to shape our future; reflecting on the power of toponymy as a colonial tool for invisibilization, overriding local references and memory anchors from daily life. However, their proposal to rename the public streets of Villa Giulia as a tribute to exemplary women, the communality has refused to be implement .

SOUTHERN FEMALE AGENCY ACROSS TIME

Circular temporalities, expanded dialogue

Recognizing that peripheries and colonization processes are not exclusive to the outer space of European borders, we will open room for secular voices that prevail in the south of Europe despite the complex impe- rial projects, Christianity, and the patriarchal unfoldings. A polyphony expanded dialogue between shifting temporalities under the feminist southern gaze.

On the last evening, hosted by Église- Art, an ancient church repurposed into a cultural space, a ritual ope- ned by Mediterranean Ancient music followed by the collective ৺৺৺৺৺৺৺৺৺ -an art group from the sou- th- video piece produced by Room to Bloom. -‘Io non sono Io ‘-, screening a circular dialogue around the stories of the sorceresses from the Aeolian island of Alicudi, incorporating a collage of feminist voices from the archives of Italian feminist experimental cinema from the 1970s. The conversation with other times and spaces delves into the female mythology linked to the legends and history of Southern Italy to offer a femi-

nist interpretation. Dating to the early XXth century -Majare- women (witches) legend: were said to be able to fly and escape from the island at night to reach the mainland to have fun, seemingly due to Ergot consump- tion. Inspired by the self-consciousness explored by the historical groups of Italian feminists and through archive fragments of videos, the work attempts to construct a genealogy of feminist practices in Southern Italy intertwined with the footage and conversations recorded during the group meetings in the present. The methodology elaborates on spatiotemporal categories no longer according to canonical abstraction models but furthered from personal experiences and their relations to space, architecture, and landscape. The wit- ches - or Majare - actions and gestures are symbolic bearers of an alternative bodily ancestral knowledge, premonitory dreams, aquatic sensitivity, and stratified materiality entanglement.

The dialogue expanded to invoke nonlinear temporalities tracing the rituality and intimacy of a circuit of inner feminine insularity. Naples artist Raffaela Naldi Rossano -History from Us / Litanies for Sirens- portrays her quest on ancient Greek oracles and the mermaid’s secular voices. FrancoBritish filmmaker Beatrice Gibson based in Palermo will offer an intimate dialogue and tribute to her girlfriends with her film -Dear Barbara, Bette, Nina, 2021 ‘The Letters that Weren’t and also are’- an admiration and affectionate letter gathering memories and impressions out voiced from Sicily.

The circular entanglement brings forth hidden voices prevailing across time and space rooted in sisterhood, the time of myth, rituality, playfulness, and affection where to escape daily oppression: retrieving female magic of subversive intimacy embedded in nature where to replenish dreams, care, and freedom.

Finally, our journey brought us to Borderline, an underground scene bar crossed by a water stream flow. Luca Frati’s performance activated the sculptural object with -‘But in the night our eyes can see’- empowe- ring disruption and the notion of fugacity: appearance, surprise, and disappearance. Shift temporalities to inhabit nightlife as a space of boundless liquid freedom to explore the possibilities for the embodied desire to manifest. Voicing the secret poetry of the bodies entanglements that inhabit the margins, blurring norma- tivity, navigating an emancipatory field and, safe space the night offers: where intimacy, the performativity of otherness, and with others reveal hidden connections uncovered in each city in the world.

MICROPOLITICS OF CARE

What should be the role of institutions willing to leverage change? If Art and culture ought to be inherent to every aspect of life and an universal right for agency, one can argue it is to provide conditions for access and proactive creation: infrastructures serving collective care.

It is precisely awareness and visibility that stand for a safe space. To be open to otherness beyond precon- ceptions and to embrace vulnerability: to be seen and be heard. The program was a short-term deep dive into a complex reality and topics not for everyone easily digest and navigate. Redirecting to hold space for failure and conflict, confronting the duality of a state of empowerment and disempowerment when reality does not align with our expectations. Aware of the potential offered by uncomfortable friction and tension breaking the frames in various scenarios and life events, it was inevitable for conflict to arise and intersect our trajectory. Exposure to such a richness of impressions in a short period requires labor and space for digestion and elaboration to be useful for reflection and learning. However, to keep advocating for situated practices to evoke the subversive power of imagination, forms of socially engaged intelligence that go be- yond the self-referential art space: community as a counter strategy against precarity still upholds.

Cultural management requires a responsible alignment between discourse and action and the redistribution of resources put into play. To assert expanded art practices in nontraditional places intervening directly for mutual benefit, empowering affirmation, and creativity to strengthen community bonding. Artists are agents of change whose expertise can propel a shift of dynamics in a wide range of fields of action, with their ca- pacity to affect frames, speed, and scale for re-composing meaning. To reach through subtle languages of perception where language fails. Bodies are prone to cross-pollination where they go. From this perspective: what is it to be a migrant, feminist, or queer artist in a European space? What are one’s expectations? What are the singular potentialities? Is it to be endorsed by the local privilege regime, assimilating discourse to reinforce its mechanisms of exclusion? Or, is it to offer privileged alternative strategies to expand the limits of arts and its ground for it to circulate? Undoubtedly, these questions keep lingering in the managing team, the artist’s memories, and the host’s shared experiences in the hope that effort with limited time, space, and resources has brought better questions than certainties, tools for addressing contradiction, mutual learning for all, kinship and room for our singular inquiries.