L’école des mutants #2: Ruines et Futurs

The Visible project (Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto/Fondazione Zegna) was commissioned by the Public Art Agency Sweden to conduct research on the relationship between theory and socially engaged artistic practices, and Collectively Annotated Bibliography: On Artistic Practices in the Expanded Field of Public Art is the result of such research. Compiled and edited by Judith Wielander

When we ask: how do raw materials travel, it is a natural jump from there to: what is travel? What does it mean to travel? Why do some people travel first class while others die trying to cross the Mediterranean in flimsy boats? 

The strength of this project lies in the creation of horizontal, rhizomatic spaces, both in the artworld and in the rural and economic system. These spaces, set in two fragile areas like Akwa Ibom and Athens, welcome people affected by the effects of our capitalist society.

Museum of Contemporary African Art is the catalogue of the eponymous exhibition that was presented at Tate Modern in 2013 by artist Meschac Gaba. We could also have started this note by saying that it was an artwork in itself, since the artist deployed a museum infrastructure at the very heart of Tate’s museum display. In fact, not being able to project himself within these walls, he made sure that the space adapted to his needs rather than settling for denying his own reality. This echoes the feeling of evolving inside a culture that is not one’s own, while still wishing to find one’s place within it. It also echoes the fact that art history, in many respects, makes invisible the bodies that could be described as ‘unsanctioned’. Museums as places of display often echo this negation. However, and since Meschac Gaba has shone in one of the places of conceptual legitimation which defines what we commonly call ‘contemporary art’, the door is today truly open to us. 

Àsìkò is the result of an itinerant annual pedagogical programme for artists and curators initiated by the late curator Bisi Silva, promoting the movement of artistic and curatorial knowledge on the African continent. The first two programmes took place in Lagos, Nigeria, in 2010 and 2012 and from 2013 moved to Accra/Kumasi, Dakar, Maputo, ending in Addis Ababa in 2016. The book documents how its participants and faculty spent five weeks in each city, as well as their interventions into pedagogical models that are based on research-on-the-move and how these methods created interactive social spaces. Visiting, critically discussing and responding to postcolonial public monuments in each city as one of the ways of thinking through what it means to be ‘postcolonial’ is impressively articulated in the book by some of the Àsìkò participants.