Teatrum Botanicum at PAV Turin
TEATRUM BOTANICUM
Fourth Edition
13-14 September 2019
Opening Friday, September 13 at 7pm
PAV – Parco Arte Vivente
Via Giordano Bruno 31 – 10134 Turin, Italy
Teatrum Botanicum is a festival dedicated to emerging artists and curators whose inquiry is in the interstitial space between artistic and ecological practices and reflections at the core of contemporary art.
The program of this fourth edition of the festival is mainly oriented towards performing languages and the moving image, and will take place in the evenings of Friday and Saturday, 13-14 September 2019.
Among apocalyptic, integrated and confident critics, contemporary art has generated a plurality of readings in the attempt to overcome the nature\culture dichotomy, trying to understand a contemporaneity in which time is punctuated as much by the speed of the Internet and tech companies as by the deadlines imposed by climate change.
Certainly, the most useful and vital narrations are not found in US and European art school courses, but rather in the proximity of remote ecosystems, which are habitats for human and non-human animals that do not respond to the concept of humankind appointed as universal – yet historically determined – by Western, white, bourgeois, cisgender, heterosexual males. Perhaps, to determine the extent to which contemporary art can claim the right to imagine alternative worlds is a task beyond our reach. Nevertheless, it encourages us to recall the words Rosi Braidotti shared with the audience of the Fridericianum Museum, in Kassel; there, she defined artists as bridge builders, non-academics par excellence who historically assumed the right to build bridges in between systems of thought and disciplines conventionally condemned to not comunicate, to not intersect with each other.
Trying to focus on a local level, although following Bridle in thinking culture as being “nonlocal and […] inherently contradictory”,[1] we like to think that the research of the Italian artists who take part in this edition of Teatrum Botanicum reflect on the logic of narrating the contemporary age and its environment, and on the possibility of continuing to read and imagine worlds.
Storytelling is a term already charged with a range of different meanings, a word we would rather not employ today. We would prefer to talk of forms of non-linear narrations that present, again following Bridle[2] (who is an artist and not a marketer), a high degree of attention that is not narcissistically serving the so-called processes of self improvement, nor aimed at casual escapism, but instead prone to understand – and take action – right here, where we are.
Now in its fourth edition, Teatrum Botanicum persists in taking on a posture quite different from that of a curated exhibition – not to regardlessly oppose the most classic of exhibition formats, but because we believe that in order to attempt to interpret annually, especially through a generational lens, the Italian scene of emerging art would be at least an unnecessary exercise. An exercise that is certainly not suitable for a contemporaneity that, rather than creating a taxonomy of the present, challenges us to think of extremely complex networks and building bridges. It is therefore only after the selection of artists that the common thread emerges between different modes of narration, with which a small cross-section of the contemporary art scene can hazard contemporary stories. A small cross-section that, like every year, is inevitably partial, contingent, accidental but nevertheless tries to respond to emergencies so extemporaneous as vivid, honest and, we hope, shared.
In collaboration with Altalena, Dario Bassani e Nelle Gevers, Derek MF Di Fabio, Alessandro Di Pietro, Donato Epiro, Marco Giordano, Isabella Mongelli, Gianmarco Porru, Giovanna Repetto, Jacopo Rinaldi, Caterina Erica Shanta, Luca Staccioli, Natalia Trejbalova e Bellagio Bellagio, Francesco Venturi.
[1] J. Bridle, New Dark Age (Verso Books, 2018)
[2] J. Bridle, Phenomenological Mismatch, in Becoming Digital (a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and Ellie Abrons, McLain Clutter, and Adam Fure of the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.)
by Droste Effect
in News
Sep 12, 2019