Description
Ayreen Anastas & Rene Gabri, Michel Blazy, Amilcar Cabral, Andrea Caretto & Raffaella Spagna, Filipa César, Critical Art Ensemble, Brigitte de Malau, Emory Douglas, Frame Works Collective, Fernando García-Dory, Piero Gilardi, Daniel Halter, Adelita Husni-Bey, Bukta Imre, Norma Jeane, Emmanuel Louisgrand, Bonnie Ora Sherk, Claire Pentecost, Marjetica Potrcice, Géraldine Py & Roberto Verde, Joe Quercia, Rozo Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas, Marie Velardi, Ali Zaid
The volume documents the exhibitions and activities of the 2014 PAV Art Program: Show Food, Sic Vos Non Vobis and Vegetation as a Political Agent.
“The 2014 PAV program followed a precise line that, on several levels, investigated the relationship between political ecology and artistic practices. Through the well-established development of our internal seminars (moments of theoretical reflection conducted at the PAV in which we compare ourselves with different professionals on the theme that, year after year, characterizes the exhibitions and workshops), we have tried to put the question of common goods and the relational experiences of Bioart at the center.
In the first place, after the referendum successes against the privatization of water and the construction of nuclear power plants in Italy (1987 and 2011), it seemed to us that the discourse on common goods, compared to that heated and shared period, appeared to be problematic . The common good is in any case something that changes over time, therefore a flexible concept. At the same time, following the thought of the sociologist Guido Viale (Virtues that change the world, 2013), even the concept of value cannot be determined a priori. It is therefore possible to widen the mesh of the so-called commons. By extending the boundaries of what we can consider “good”, we are surprised to find elements and concepts, as real as they are abstract, which in the past we would not have questioned in their being inalienable. In the exhibitions and in the conduct of the workshops during 2014, the PAV thus traced a sort of map with respect to this semantic expansion, that is to say an extension and an opening full of meaning rather than an exclusive reflection on issues of lexical type. In this way, an attempt was made to identify those assets which, following the referendum of three years ago, had a close relationship with contemporary attitudes, phenomena or countertendencies. In addition to water, investigated in the Sic Vos Non Vobis exhibition curated by Claudio Cravero, the cultural and social dynamics of some foods and certain communities were analyzed, in particular those that traditionally share a food good in its intrinsic values. In the Show Food exhibition, curated by Orietta Brombin, elements such as rice, coffee and wheat have, as it were, redesigned a geography of the movements of those vegetables that historically accompanied the colonial thrusts in the conquest of new territories. In this direction, the investigation of common goods also took into consideration the plant world. Plants, in addition to constituting the organic matter for which we mobilize for the purposes of environmental protection and the preservation of biodiversity, have however been analyzed in their biological, social and political aspects. In fact, the exhibition Vegetation as a political agent, curated by Marco Scotini, made it possible to trace a social history of plants from the point of view of “disobedience”. Vegetation has had, and in fact still has, a political and social role within the biome in which we live and throughout the history of human civilization. For example, cereals and legumes were the protagonists of the Neolithic civilization whose structure of substantial power did not change until modernity. In more recent times, plants have been the protagonists of colonial oppression, with the black page of slavery and today, in the postcolonial phase, agricultural multinationals resort to genetic engineering to exercise control of seeds and, consequently, exploit agricultural populations. from all over the world. ” (from the introduction by Piero Gilardi)
