address Tolentini – Santa Croce, 191, 30125 Venice.
free entry
Françoise Vergès is a political scientist, activist, historian, film producer and public educator. She is the author of A Decolonial Feminism, A Feminist History of Violence and the forthcoming A Programme of Absolute Disorder. She is also a senior research fellow at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation, UCL.
In the framework of Raising Care Platform inciated by Insittute of Radical Imagiantion – Raising Care Acts of Qestioning bring together a group of artists, curators, activists and citizens committed with autonomous care and support networks, is gathering at Sale Docks around questions on the politicization of care, autonomous healthcare strategies and the philosophy of “buen vivir”.
with Sara Buraya Boned, Elena Bleza Cabéz, Pablo García Bachiller, Jesus Carrillo, Theo Prodromidis (Institute of Radical Imagination) with Luciana Cappellari, Basso Carlo, Angela Di Biase, I-Chen Zuffellato (Ambulatorio Sociale di Caracol Olol Jackson, Vicenza), Elisa Adami (Laboratorio Salute Popolare, Bologna)
Panel with contributors: Françoise Vergès, Manuel Borja Villel, Ashley Dawson, Oliver Ressler, Raluca Voinea, Ovidiu Tichindeleanu, Francesco Martone, Andreco, Maddalena Fragnito, Federica Timeto,, Emanuele Braga, Marco Baravalle.
The book Art for Radical Ecologies (manifesto) (forthcoming bruno, Venice 2024) is the second volume of the IRI Series whose aim is to produce knowledge in common and around commoning situated at the intersection between art, pedagogy and activism for a transition towards post capitalism.
The Art For Radical Ecologies Manifesto was co-written in a series of assemblies between 2021-2022. Art is a powerful tool for imagining different types of ecological relationships beyond the anthropocentric paradigm. At the same time though, our manifesto states the importance of positioning ourselves as art workers within the struggle for climate justice, starting by refusing the use of art as greenwashing and the sponsorship of oil and fossil fuels companies. Our manifesto tries to look beyond the current neoliberal regime of the arts, with its ties to class, gender, race and species forms of oppression. The book features the voice of artists, museum directors, scholars and activists who address the link between art and ecology from different perspectives: class, decoloniality, transfeminism and antispecism.
Contributors: Léna Balaud , Marco Baravalle, Mike Bonanno The Yes Men, Manolo Borja-Villel, Emanuele Braga, Andrea Conte Andreco, Ashley Dawson, Isa Fremeaux & Jay Jordan: The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, Oliver Ressler, Francoise Vergès in conversation with Maddalena Fragnito and Marco Baravalle, Tiziana Terranova, Federica Timeto, Ovidiu Țichindeleanu & Raluca Voinea, Rosa Jijon & Francesco Martone in converstaion with Boloh Miranda, Anamaria Garzón, Sofía Acosta Varea.
Edited by: Marco Baravalle, Emanuele Braga, Gabriella Riccio, Federica Timeto (Institute of Radical Imagination)
Taring Padi– The Institute of People Oriented Culture Taring Padi was founded in 1998 by a group of progressive art students and activists in response to the Indonesian socio-political upheavals during the country’s reformation era. As such, Taring Padi’s artistic practice is always part of and contextualised within their socio-political and cultural solidarity and action. Street protests, woodcutting workshops, art carnivals, and exhibitions in unorthodox spaces are typical of Taring Padi’s practice of producing collective and individual works. Diverse ad hoc political alliances, farming and fishing communities, as well as their own localities are places where Taring Padi work and learn together. Banners, woodcut posters, and wayang kardus (life-sized cardboard puppets), as well as the ever popular Dendang Kampungan music group are Taring Padi’s artistic formulas to agitate, educate, and organise themselves, their community, and diverse solidarity actions they are involved in. In 2002 Taring Padi became a collective in order to further inclusivity and to facilitate personal dynamic of its members, whilst maintaining its progressive and militant character in realising the potential of art as a tool for social change.
Climate Justice League – A generative co-creation of eco-warriors icons front for climate justice. The Climate Justice League will be present in the form of big cardboard puppets, ready to enter the street and march around the planet. The Climate Justice League has been launched by the Institute of Radical Imagination during the 2023 edition of the World Congress for Climate Justice,with the complicit participation of Andreco, Andrea Natella, Noura Tafeche, Serpica Naro and Dirty Art Department (Jerszy Seymour, Theo Dietz e Rosa Meulenbeld), Institute of Radical Imagination (Marco Baravalle, Emanuele Braga, Maddalena Fragnito, Gabriella Riccio, Federica Timeto) and Le Alleanze dei Corpi.
Powernotte – Was conceived in 2020 in Venice, Italy by two artists : Davide Salmaso, Rocco Cacciari and a product manager : Giuseppe Bateato. The concept was an artisanal fusion of home design and contemporary art using the mediums of sculpture and painting. The work is an investigation of the animal world within their ecosystems. And there is special attention paid to the totemic value – even amongst the smallest. Each piece is artisanally crafted, hand-made and one of a kind. This slow production, with an attention to artistry is a pushback on the mainstream production model that harms our planet. Our products cannot be identically replicated or mass produced. They are each perfectly unique.
Screened films by Oliver Ressler
Ancestral Future Rising, 4K video, 20 min., 2023
The Desert Lives, 4K video, 55 min., 2022
Not Sinking, Swarming, 4K video, 37 min., 2021
Oliver Ressler is an artist and filmmaker who produces installations, projects in public space, and films on issues such as economics, democracy, migration, the climate crisis, forms of resistance and social alternatives. Ressler has had solo exhibitions at Berkeley Art Museum, USA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade; Centro Cultural Conde Duque, Madrid; Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum, Egypt; The Cube Project Space, Taipei; Kunsthaus Graz, Graz and comprehensive solo exhibitions at Wyspa Institute of Art, Gdansk; Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo – CAAC, Seville; SALT Galata, Istanbul; MNAC – National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest; and Cultural Centre of Belgrade. Ressler has participated in more than 400 group exhibitions, including Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven; MASSMoCA, North Adams, USA; Centre Pompidou, Paris; the biennials in Prague (2005), Seville (2006), Moscow (2007), Taipei (2008), Lyon (2009), Gyumri (2012), Venice (2013), Athens (2013, 2015), Quebec (2014), Helsinki (2014), Jeju (2017), Kyiv (2017), Gothenburg (2019) and Stavanger (2019), and at Documenta 14, Kassel, 2017 (exhibition organized by EMST). Ressler has completed forty-two films that have been screened in thousands of events of social movements, art institutions and film festivals. A retrospective of his films took place at Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève in 2013. In 2002, Ressler won the first prize at the International Media Art Award of the ZKM in Karlsruhe and he is the first prize winner of the Prix Thun for Art and Ethics Award in 2016. For the Taipei Biennale 2008, Ressler curated an exhibition on the counter-globalization movement, A World Where Many Worlds Fit. A travelling show on the financial crisis, It’s the Political Economy, Stupid, co-curated with Gregory Sholette, has been presented at nine venues (2011-2016).2019–2023 Ressler has directed Barricading the Ice Sheets, a research project on the climate justice movement, funded by the Austrian Science Fund. Configurations of the project were solo exhibitions at Camera Austria, Graz (2021); Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb (2022); Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), Berlin (2022); Tallinn Art Hall, Tallinn (2022); LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Gijón (2023); The Showroom, London (2023).
The workshop aims at creating props, puppets, banners and images to be used during a No Grandi Navi (No big Ships) demonstration on Saturday, April 20th. The Committee against big cruise ships of Venice (Comitato NO Grandi Navi) fights for the defence of the Lagoon of Venice from extractivist projects and the presence of unsustainable mega cruises. On Saturday the 20th, a demonstration on the water will leave Venice, pointing towards an island of the Lagoon, with the goal of temporarily occupying it, as a symbolic act of liberation from cruise ships and all the linked projects tampering with the fragile local ecosystem. All the props and images produced during the workshop will empower the demonstration and will lately be part of an exhibition at Sale Docks.
Taring Padi– The Institute of People Oriented Culture Taring Padi was founded in 1998 by a group of progressive art students and activists in response to the Indonesian socio-political upheavals during the country’s reformation era. As such, Taring Padi’s artistic practice is always part of and contextualised within their socio-political and cultural solidarity and action. Street protests, woodcutting workshops, art carnivals, and exhibitions in unorthodox spaces are typical of Taring Padi’s practice of producing collective and individual works. Diverse ad hoc political alliances, farming and fishing communities, as well as their own localities are places where Taring Padi work and learn together. Banners, woodcut posters, and wayang kardus (life-sized cardboard puppets), as well as the ever popular Dendang Kampungan music group are Taring Padi’s artistic formulas to agitate, educate, and organise themselves, their community, and diverse solidarity actions they are involved in. In 2002 Taring Padi became a collective in order to further inclusivity and to facilitate personal dynamic of its members, whilst maintaining its progressive and militant character in realising the potential of art as a tool for social change.
Climate Justice League – A generative co-creation of eco-warriors icons front for climate justice. The Climate Justice League will be present in the form of big cardboard puppets, ready to enter the street and march around the planet. The Climate Justice League has been launched by the Institute of Radical Imagination during the 2023 edition of the World Congress for Climate Justice,with the complicit participation of Andreco, Andrea Natella, Noura Tafeche, Serpica Naro and Dirty Art Department (Jerszy Seymour, Theo Dietz e Rosa Meulenbeld), Institute of Radical Imagination (Marco Baravalle, Emanuele Braga, Maddalena Fragnito, Gabriella Riccio, Federica Timeto) and Le Alleanze dei Corpi.
Powernotte – Was conceived in 2020 in Venice, Italy by two artists : Davide Salmaso, Rocco Cacciari and a product manager : Giuseppe Bateato. The concept was an artisanal fusion of home design and contemporary art using the mediums of sculpture and painting. The work is an investigation of the animal world within their ecosystems. And there is special attention paid to the totemic value – even amongst the smallest. Each piece is artisanally crafted, hand-made and one of a kind. This slow production, with an attention to artistry is a pushback on the mainstream production model that harms our planet. Our products cannot be identically replicated or mass produced. They are each perfectly unique.
Taring Padi, founded in 1988, is a collective based in Yogyakarta Indonesia “that uses art as a tool for political expression and education for all.” Against an individualistic and market oriented conception of art, “Most Taring Padi works are created collectively and can be divided into four categories: billboards or banners, posters, puppets and popular booklets titled “Terompet Rakyat” (The People’s Trumpet)”.
Taring Padi, who was part of the documenta fifteen lumbung, will present its work and discuss their practices at Sale Docks, in conversation with Charles Esche, director of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven.
with Filipa Cesar, Oliver Ressler,Massimiliano Mollona in the framework og Cinema as Assembly platform iniciated by Institute of Radical Imagination
In On the Emergence of an Ecological Class (2022) the late Bruno Latour and Danish sociologist Nikolaj Schultz, sketch an ecological manifesto, which envisions the coming together of different class constituencies against the toxic effect of planetary capitalism. A similar argument is made by Matthew Huber for whom the emergence of a transnational alliance of energy workers, is a fundamental step towards ecological justice.
But how would such intersectional class alliance look like in the real world? And can suchemphasis on ‘class’ and ‘justice’ avoid being too narrow or Eurocentric, and capture not just the structural relation between pollution and colonialism (Liboiron, 2023) but also differentunderstandings of the environment, not just as a precious resource, but as a living being?
Departing from Fanon’s claim that all decolonial struggles are as much material as they are struggles for self-representation, this workshop interrogates how cinema addresses ecological justice, in conversation with filmmakers Oliver Ressler and Filipa César.
The two filmmakers’ long-established engagement with environmentalism and the issue of political representation, follow slightly different strategies. Ressler, directly engages with specific environmental issues, collaborating with diverse climate justice movements and communities, and opening a space of poetic prefiguration of grassroots political processes; César casts a broader view of ‘the environment’, intended as a polyphonic space loaded with political, ancestral, material, and poetic resonances, developing long-term collaborations with the community of Malafo, in Guinea Bissau, whereby filming is a process of consolidating relatedness – a form of cine-kinship.
These two approaches interrogate in different ways the power of film as tool of counter-information and of production of new imaginaries of struggle.
Film excerpts from Oliver Ressler’ following films will be screened:
Ancestral Future Rising, 20 min., 2023
The Desert Lives, 55 min., 2022
Not Sinking, Swarming, 37 min., 2021
Film excerpts from Filipa César’s following films will be screened:
Resonance Spiral,92 min., 2024.
Mangrove School,35 min., 2022
Spell Reel,96 min., 2017
Filipa César iBerlin-based artist and filmmaker. She is interested in the fictional aspects of documentary, the porous borders between cinema and its reception, and the politics and poetics inherent to moving images. Her praxis takes media as a means to expand and expose counter narratives of resistance to historicism. Since 2011, César has been looking into the origins of cinema in Guinea-Bissau as part of the African Liberation Movement and its imaginaries and cognitive potencies, developing that research into the collective project Luta ca caba inda. She was a participant of the research projects Living Archive (2011-13) and Visionary Archive (2013-15) both organised by Arsenal—Berlin. Selected film festivals include Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen; Curtas Vila do Conde; Forum Expanded-Berlinale; IFFR, Rotterdam, and Cinéma du Réel. Selected exhibitions and screenings include: SFMOMA; São Paulo Biennial; Manifesta 8, Cartagena; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Jeu de Paume, Paris; Kunstwerke, Berlin; NBK, Berlin; Hordaland Art Center, Bergen; Futura, Prague; Khiasma, Paris; Tensta konsthall, Spånga; Mumok, Vienna; MoMA, New York; Harvard Film Museum, Boston.
Oliver Ressler is an artist and filmmaker who produces installations, projects in public space, and films on issues such as economics, democracy, migration, the climate crisis, forms of resistance and social alternatives. Ressler has had solo exhibitions at Berkeley Art Museum, USA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade; Centro Cultural Conde Duque, Madrid; Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum, Egypt; The Cube Project Space, Taipei; Kunsthaus Graz, Graz and comprehensive solo exhibitions at Wyspa Institute of Art, Gdansk; Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo – CAAC, Seville; SALT Galata, Istanbul; MNAC – National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest; and Cultural Centre of Belgrade. Ressler has participated in more than 400 group exhibitions, including Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven; MASSMoCA, North Adams, USA; Centre Pompidou, Paris; the biennials in Prague (2005), Seville (2006), Moscow (2007), Taipei (2008), Lyon (2009), Gyumri (2012), Venice (2013), Athens (2013, 2015), Quebec (2014), Helsinki (2014), Jeju (2017), Kyiv (2017), Gothenburg (2019) and Stavanger (2019), and at Documenta 14, Kassel, 2017 (exhibition organized by EMST). Ressler has completed forty-two films that have been screened in thousands of events of social movements, art institutions and film festivals. A retrospective of his films took place at Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève in 2013. In 2002, Ressler won the first prize at the International Media Art Award of the ZKM in Karlsruhe and he is the first prize winner of the Prix Thun for Art and Ethics Award in 2016. For the Taipei Biennale 2008, Ressler curated an exhibition on the counter-globalization movement, A World Where Many Worlds Fit. A travelling show on the financial crisis, It’s the Political Economy, Stupid, co-curated with Gregory Sholette, has been presented at nine venues (2011-2016).2019–2023 Ressler has directed Barricading the Ice Sheets, a research project on the climate justice movement, funded by the Austrian Science Fund. Configurations of the project were solo exhibitions at Camera Austria, Graz (2021); Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb (2022); Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), Berlin (2022); Tallinn Art Hall, Tallinn (2022); LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Gijón (2023); The Showroom, London (2023).
Museum of the Commons Climate Assembly on April 19th on the role of L’Internationale art and cultural institutions in the present environmental and geopolitical crisis with participating institutions MSU (Zagreb), Museo Reina Sofia (Madrid), MACBA (Barcelona), M_HKA (Antwerp), MSN (Warsaw), Salt (Istanbul), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), with Institute of Radical Imagination (Naples), tranzit.ro (Bucharest, Cluj and Iaşi) HDK Valand (Gothenburg), NCAD and IMMA (Dublin).
Museum of the Commons. This is the fourth cooperative project led by L’Internationale, focusing on the themes of climate, translocal cooperation, and artistic strategies of healing and repair. Museum of the Commons weaves together three transversal thematic threads corresponding to key challenges contemporary societies are facing: Climate tackles issues of the current planetary climate crisis, the sustainability of institutional, artistic and cultural practices and processes, and the urgency of transforming our politics, societies, cultures and ways of life. Situated Organisations queries the role of museums and art organisations as actors in complex social networks and ecosystems, to seek new ways of democratizing institutions and to render them more open, inclusive and useful. The final thread, Past in the Present, focuses on the crucial roles our local and shared histories hold in constituting contemporary identities, politics, societies and cultures, investigating the persistence and long-lasting impact of historical and current environmental and colonial violence. In doing so, the confederation seeks to mobilise art and culture as strategic tools in processes of healing, reconstruction and repair of damage that has been inflicted.
L’Internationale
What: L’Internationale is a European confederation of museums, arts organisations and universities, founded in 2009. It takes its name from the 19th century worker’s anthem written by Eugène Pottier
Why: L’Internationale was founded to offer an alternative model to globalising art institutions that replicate the structures of multinational powers and their centralised distribution of knowledge. Believing in the power of art to be a platform for the discussion of a renewed social contract, we advocate for a new internationalist model that challenges exclusivity and emphasizes common heritage through interconnected archives and constituent-led approaches, fostering individual and collective emancipation.
Who: In its current configuration L’Internationale brings together eight major European art institutions: HKW (Berlin, Germany); MSU (Zagreb, Croatia); Museo Reina Sofía(Madrid, Spain); MACBA (Barcelona, Spain); M HKA, (Antwerp, Belgium); MSN(Warsaw, Poland), Salt (Istanbul, Turkiye), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, the Netherlands), with Institute of Radical Imagination (Naples,Italy), tranzit.ro (Bucharest, Cluj and Iasi, Romania),and VCRC (Kyiv, Ukraine). L’Internationale has three academic partners: HDK-Valand (Gothenburg, Sweden), NCAD (Dublin, Ireland) and ZRC SAZU(Ljubljana, Slovenia) and three associate organisations IMMA (Dublin, Ireland), MG+MSUM (Ljubljana, Slovenia) and WIELS (Forest, Belgium).
How: L’Internationale’s principle funder is the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. The current EU funded programme, ‘Museum of the Commons’ runs from February 2023 – December 2026 and includes a €2m grant that is match funded by the partners of the programme. The confederation works across programming (exhibitions, seminars, schools, residencies, public programmes) research and publishing (through L’Internationale Online), and communication.
This talk will go through different examples and practices from Palestine that have been actively trying to produce affirmative critique of the structures of funding and the financialization of the cultural economy. What structures can be built, what infrastructures can be used, how collective work can be imagined, and how to work between theory and practice.
Yazan Khalili is a visual artist, architect, and cultural activist. Khalili’s photography is detailed, reflective and full of intent. Using photography and the written word, Khalili unpacks historically constructed landscapes. Borrowing from cinematic language, images become frames where the spectator embodies the progression of time and narratives. He weaves together parallel stories over the years, forming both questions and paradoxes concerning scenery and the act of gazing, all of which are refracted through the prism of intimate politics and alienating poetics. In particular, he focuses on the effect of geographical distance on our rendering of territory, and its ability to heighten or arrest our political and sentimental attachments.
Born 1981. Works in and out of Palestine, currently based in Amsterdam, Netherlands, where he is a PhD candidate at Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of Amsterdam. He is an architect, visual artist, and cultural producer. His works have been exhibited in several major exhibitions, including among others: Documenta fifteen 2022, KW, Berlin 2020, MoCA Torento 2020, New Photography, MoMA 2018, Jerusalem Lives, Palestinian Museum, 2017, Post-Peace, Kunstverein Stuttgart 2017, Shanghai Biennial 2016, Sharjah Biennial 2013. In 2020 he co-founded Radio Alhara, and in 2019 he co-founded The Question of Funding collective.
Yazan Khalili received a degree in architecture from Birzeit University in 2003 and in 2010 received his MA degree from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmith’s College, University of London, and in 2015 his MFA degree at Sandberg Institute, Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam. He was one of the founding members of Zan Design Studio (2005-2010). He was the production coordinator for Sharjah Biennials 9 & 10, and the technical director of the inaugural exhibition of the Palestinian Museum “Jerusalem Lives” (2017). He co-curated Young Artist of the Award (YAYA) 2012, The City | The Image symposium with Goethe Institute, Ramallah 2012, The Long Journey exhibition, the UNRWA Audio-Visual archive for Palestine refugees, in 2013, and Debt exhibition at KSCC in 2018. In 2015, he co-organized Walter Benjamin in Palestine workshop and symposium, and Marx: The Ultimate Contemporary in 2018.
He is the winner of Extract V young artist prize 2015. He has been the artistic director of Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre between 2015 until end of 2019, he was the Co-Chair of Photo discipline at MFA program at Bard College, NY, till 2022, and guest artist in residence at Rijksakademie, Amsterdam till 2022.
Using the props created during the workshop with Taring Padi, Powernotte and the Climate Justice League, No Grandi Navi (No big Ships) demonstration on Saturday, April 20th. The Committee against big cruise ships of Venice (Comitato NO Grandi Navi) fights for the defence of the Lagoon of Venice from extractivist projects and the presence of unsustainable mega cruises. On Saturday the 20th, a demonstration on the water will leave Venice, pointing towards an island of the Lagoon, with the goal of temporarily occupying it, as a symbolic act of liberation from cruise ships and all the linked projects tampering with the fragile local ecosystem. All the props and images produced during the workshop will empower the demonstration and will lately be part of an exhibition at Sale Docks.
The committee No Big Cruiseship (Comitato No Grandi Navi) The battle for the expulsion of large ships from the San Marco Basin and the lagoon must be participatory and involve as many movements and citizens as possible, from Venice and Mestre. For this reason, the coordination of the associations that has restarted the battle in recent years have decided to change their skin, to give a precise signal of novelty and discontinuity with the past.
The movement changes its name: it is now called “No Grandi Navi Committee – Lagoon Bene Comune”, where the reference to the lagoon is a precise choice of content, because Venice does not exist without a healed and balanced lagoon that defends it. For this reason, it is not enough to be satisfied with not seeing the large ships in the San Marco Basin or with seeing half of them: cruise tourism must be expelled from the lagoon to allow the start of real hydrodynamic and morphological recovery interventions; The movement was born on a common platform of analysis and requests, summarized in the “What We Ask” page. For further information, we recommend reading our “White Paper”. Each individual member of the Committee will maintain their own autonomy of initiatives, as long as they do not conflict with the freely accepted common platform.
Gathering into the Maelstrom in Venice at Sale Docks is a four-days program curated by Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI) and Sale Docks in the framework of Museum of the Commons, a cooperation project by L’Internationale a European confederation of museums, arts organizations and universities.
Our world is warming up causing immense turbulence: the historical moment we are living in is a frightening vortex. War is at the center of the vortex, a black hole from which we can no longer escape. Gaza represents a point of no return in history, claiming for the end of colonial processes that have been going on for centuries. Capitalist extractivism has brought the planet to the brink of collapse, causing energy crisis, massive migratory processes, and a fascist and xenophobic crisis in those communities on the belief they have some form of privilege.
It is within this maelstrom that Institute of Radical Imagination and Sale Docks launched back in 2021 the Art For Radical Ecologies Platform, an international community of artists, academics, and art workers who came together and wrote a manifesto by engaging in discussions with eco-activists from around the world and participating in struggles.
Since the moment of its foundation the Institute of Radical Imagination has tried to offer itself as a platform for those forms of resistance, and to think about their possible intersections with art. The same goes for Sale Docks, a space that was occupied in Venice in 2007 and that has, since then, become a reference for international art workers’ struggles and local activist groups, having developed an institutional model alternative to the typical neoliberal art institution and its links to mass tourism and toxic philanthropy.
The Gathering into the Maelstrom – from 17th to 20th of April in Venice at Sale Docks Dorsoduro 265 – is an invitation to learn to inhabit this vortex, rooting artistic production in ecological struggles, and transforming the field of contemporary art into a political territory. To generate a Museum of the Commons we can not avoid questioning the toxicity that permeates institutions and, at the same time, building non-capitalistic, non-colonial, non-patriarchal, and non-anthropocentric alliances. Opening on Wednesday 17th, the first three days of the program present talks by representatives of decolonial thought like François Vergès and Yazan Khalili, screenings of films by Oliver Ressler, the launching of Art for Radical Ecologies Manifesto book, Museum of the Commons Climate Assembly, and an exhibition of props realized in a workshop with Taring Padi, IRI and Powernotte. The fourth day features an action on the water in collaboration with Comitato No Grandi Navi (the local Committee Against Big Cruise Ships). The goal of the action is to temporarily occupy an island in an area where Cruise Ships transit and dock, posing a serious threat to the fragile ecosystem of the Lagoon and to a city like Venice already overwhelmed by mass tourism.
Gathering Into The Maelstrom is part of EU project Museum of The Commons internationaleonline.org
Co-Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
