Independent Curators International supports the work of curators to help create stronger art communities through experimentation, collaboration, and international engagement.

Independent Curators International supports the work of curators to help create stronger art communities through experimentation, collaboration, and international engagement.

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Curator Manuela Pacella developed this proposal during the 2013 Curatorial Intensive in Londonderry. 


Fragments: Identities under Construction takes as its starting point the idea of the constitution or reaffirmation of a personal and/or national identity through the selection of works that explore local events or legends, capable of giving a portrait––albeit partial––of a generation struggling with drastic social and geo-political changes.

It is no coincidence that, with the beginning of the new millennium, in various countries many artists have felt the need to retrace their own history, even the most strictly personal history, sensing an obligation to reconstruct starting from the most intimate memories. It is precisely through comparing works that explore personal memories or events handed down orally that a sincere portrait of an entire country emerges, made up of fragments safeguarding small memories.

The project will include works by nine artists living in Italy, Northern Ireland, and the Czech Republic. The itinerant collective exhibition will start in Belfast, pass through Prague, and end in Rome. It absolutely must not be a ‘closed’ exhibition. Instead, the show will come to life as evolves, as history does.

Italy has a relatively recent national history and the regional differences (from dialects to food) are many and often little tolerated. Northern Ireland, though it has put an end to the most painful period of its civil conflict, still has deep rifts, both physical and psychological. The Czech Republic can stand as an example of a country that has left behind the Communist regime and embraced capitalism and globalization too quickly, with all the contradictions and difficulties that this entails.

In each stage of the exhibition’s journey, local curators will be asked to collaborate: from the selection of artists to the curating of the project, which also envisages a brief period of residency (minimum one week) in which the artists will produce other material (visual, audio, multimedia). In addition to the selected works in the exhibition, there will be other material produced on-site and from direct contact with the local artists and the city that hosts them. To this end, workshops and meetings will be arranged.

The material could come together on a website in continuous growth, from which the users could download the catalogue or single projects, or add their own memories. This part will be administered by an independent publishing house, possibly Nero Magazine.

The Northern Irish performer Sandra Johnston (b. 1968) will be commissioned to give specific performances, and she will be the only artist to make works ad hoc.

The Czech artist Eva Koťátková (b. 1982) will present a series of collages, which the artist arranges as installations.

The exhibition will feature work by the Italian artists Invernomuto (a duo founded by Simone Bertuzzi and Simone Trabucchi in 2003 in Vernasca, PC, Emilia-Romagna). Invernomuto will exhibit the Negus (2013), a video installation that focuses on a local event that occurred in the 1930s in Vernasca. Coloured with meaning––not only historical and political but also religious––the work centers on the Ethiopian figure of the King of Kings.

Emiliano Maggi (b. 1977, Rome) will present Messina ad hoc (2013), a work made up of a video and a series of photographs taken during a performance in Sicily. In this piece, the artist invited three local musicians to improvise on the theme of the tragic Messina earthquake of 1908, utilizing their personal memories.

Moira Ricci (b. 1977, Orbetello, Tuscany) will exhibit the trilogy Da buio a buio (From Darkness to Darkness, 2009), a series comprising video, and photographic and audio elements themed around three regional Maremma legends to which the locals subscribe: The Boar Baby from 1940; The Werewolf, sighted in the mid-sixties; and The Stone Man, witnessed in the Maremma fields in the eighties.

 

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To learn more about this proposal please email Manuela Pacella at manuelapacella@gmail.com. To learn more about the Curatorial Intensive email info@curatorsintl.org.