Gathering Into The Maelstrom | the exhibition
curated by Institute of Radical Imagination and Sale Docks

The exhibition presents works largely produced during a three-day workshop at Sale Docks led by Taring Padi, Powernotte, and the Climate Justice League. The result was a series of cardboard puppets and a 15-meter long wooden fish that were used for a water demonstration against the presence of big cruise ships in the Venice lagoon. These objects reject, in practice, any rigid definition, blurring the distinction between artworks and activist props. The exhibition itself reclaims an uncertain status, more the documentation of an action than a display of discrete objects to be contemplated. Alongside the props made for the No Cruise Ships action in the Lagoon and for a climate justice march in Milan, the exhibition features two films by Oliver Ressler (one documenting the 2019 Venice Climate Camp, the other reflecting on the occupation of the Hambach forest), and a series of banners, paintings, and prints by Taring Padi. “Gathering Into The Maelstrom” is also the title of a four-day program that took place at Sale Docks (April 17-20, 2024). The program featured assemblies, screenings, and book launches mainly focused on art and ecology. It also included talks with Palestinian artists and participation in an action in solidarity with Palestinian people during the Israeli attack on Gaza.

Artists

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).

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 seminars Saperi che liberano curated by Laura Fregolent, Annalisa Sacchi and the Student’s Senate organized by Dipartimento di Culture del progetto info annalisa.sacchi@iuav.it, laura.fregolent@iuav.it

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)

Photos by Rebecca Legnaro

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)

with the support of FfAI Foundation for Arts Initiatives & L’internationale online

The book is published by bruno

To purchase the publication please contact bruno, Venice

Photos by Rebecca Legnaro

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. 

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.

Photos by Rebecca Legnaro

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.

Photos by Rebecca Legnaro

The 25th of May is the date we have been waiting for, is finally approaching! We set off from Zattere, a symbolic place in the fight against large cruise ships, heading towards Porto Marghera, where the cruise ships thought they would be undisturbed. Despite a first important victory in 2021 when, after 10 years protests, cruise ships were finally banned from Venice, the struggle is not over. Indeed, the unwelcome presence of cruise ships, still threatens our Lagoon. The idea of the companies, the port, the municipality, the region, and the
government is to make the Marghera docks (in the Venetian mainland) permanent. Not only that, they want to bring the ships back into the city by moving millions of tonnes of toxic sludge, through
massive dredging, further tampering with a part of the Lagoon already historically strained by a century of unsustainable industrial policies. Moreover, this is an illegal plan, against what was
established by the Draghi Government, which indicated the construction of an offshore port as the definitive solution. As our history shows, the city and the Lagoon are made of the same substance. You cannot defend the former and leave the latter at the mercy of speculators and their greed for profit. The fight to defend
the social biodiversity of the city is no different from that to defend the biodiversity of the water city. Thanks to the contribution of Taring Padi and Powernotte who worked with dozen of activists at Sale Docks last April, the parade will be led by a large aquatic creature, a spirit animal and a protector of the Lagoon. The artists also produced a series of large cardboard puppets and masks that will ply the
waters together with activists.

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, May 25th. 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 May 25th 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.