One of the most popular exhibition events of the Art&TheCity circuit, the collateral program of the 19th edition of ArtVerona, was the opening weekend of the exhibition “TOMORROWS – A Land of Water”, a project by Fondazione Cariverona with Veronafiere S.p.A. – ArtVerona, Contemporanea – Università di Verona and Urbs Picta. The exhibition, open until November 10, 2024, is located in the suggestive medieval fort at the top of Colle San Pietro, one of the most appreciated panoramic points of Verona for the breathtaking view of the bend of the Adige river crossed by the Roman Ponte Pietra. The project, which for the second consecutive year allows access to an iconic place otherwise closed to the public, arises from the dual desire of the Foundation to enhance its architectural containers by returning them to the citizens and to trigger transdisciplinary research projects in synergy with its collection in which art becomes a tool for reflection on issues of pressing universal relevance. If last year with the exhibition “Notes on the future of the Earth” the focus was on the relationship between art and environmental issues, the topic addressed by this second edition of the “TOMORROWS” format is the global water crisis, considered both from an ecological point of view and from that of the political and social dynamics related to it. The exhibition features the works of four international artists: DAVRA research collective (Saodat Ismailova, Madina Joldybek, Zumrad Mirzalieva), Lina Dib, Elena Mazzi and Alberta Whittle, who share their political commitment as the driving force behind their research and the fact that they use, in various senses, the moving image as their privileged medium.
Elena Mazzi, “The upcoming Polar Silk Road”, 2021, installation view, “TOMORROWS – A Land of Water”, 2024, ph. Nicolò Lucchi, Castel San Pietro, Verona
The exhibition opens with the video “The upcoming Polar Silk Road” (2021) by Elena Mazzi, the result of her recent residency in Iceland aimed at documenting the complex intersection between economics, geopolitics, ecology and commercial circulation that weighs like a heavy mortgage on the fate of the Arctic region since the melting of the ice caused by global warming has given rise to new hypotheses for the exploitation of these previously inaccessible territories. For years, world powers have been investing billions to build outposts, most of which are still uninhabited today, which should favor the possibility of settlement in these areas, in whose subsoil 20% of the planet’s global resources are preserved, including oil, gas, uranium, gold, platinum and zinc. The retreat of the glacier, in addition to making it possible to start mining activities (with the imaginable consequences on an ecosystem already in emergency), has suggested the project of the so-called “Polar Silk Road”, an alternative maritime route capable of connecting Europe, Russia and China in considerably shorter times than the current ones. The video features a seamless succession of impeccable images of the Arctic landscape, captured in its metaphysical clarity, and shots of interiors that are equally supernatural for the abstract purity of shapes and colors. A persuasive voice-over tells of the bright future of the new commercial hub at the service of globalized consumerism, magnifying its advantages in terms of local employment, improved quality of life and international collaboration. The aseptic and ambiguously objective connotation of the words amplifies the propagandistic utopia inherent in this proposal for a radical upheaval of the territory, revealing how the artist’s perspective is deeply critical of this announced devastation and, more generally, of a globalized system driven solely by the logic of profit. The video is completed by an installation of archive documents and a tapestry, whose graphic layout is derived from cartographic maps showing the dense intersection of naval routes across the poles.
DAVRA collective, “Taming Women and Waters in Soviet Central Asia”, 2024, installation view, “TOMORROWS – A Land of Water”, 2024, ph. Nicolò Lucchi, Castel San Pietro, Verona
The itinerary continues in the room dedicated to the multimedia installation “Taming Women and Waters in Soviet Central Asia” (2024) by the research collective DAVRA, represented for this project by Saodat Ismailova, Madina Joldybek and Zumrad Mirzalieva, with the collaboration of Ruxsora Karimova for the embroidery. The group was founded by Saodat Ismailova, a filmmaker and artist belonging to the first Uzbek generation of the post-Soviet era who is currently the protagonist of an exhibition at the Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, as a permanent laboratory engaged in the analysis of the dynamics relating to the colonial and post-colonial exploitation of natural resources in Asia from a female perspective. The installation, presented this year at the Prague Biennial, is re-staged here in an edition transformed in its iconographic and textile apparatus. The work analyses the complex relationship between the depletion of water resources and women’s work in Central Asia during the Cold War, recalling the emblematic case of the diversion of the Syr Darya River to promote intensive cotton monoculture. The impressive undertaking, carried out in just forty-five days by thousands of workers hired by the Soviet regime, dramatically reconfigured the lush landscape around the Aral Sea, transforming it into an arid expanse, and consequently the life of the local populations, who were prevented from traditional cultivation and fishing activities. An environmental structure in double-faced fabric, alluding in its colour and sinuous shape to the diverted river, hosts on one side a collage of black and white archive photographs that traces the process of territorial transformation induced by the works in the context of the regime and on the other some images that document and dramatize the current physiognomy of the bed of the now dehydrated watercourse alternating with fabrics with revisited traditional embroidery. The work, effective in visually condensing a multiplicity of facets (historical, social, propagandistic, economic, ecological) in poetic form, highlights the contradictory nature of the female role within an ideology, such as the Soviet one, which promoted the emancipation of women by showing how they were alternatively employed as hoes on a par with men and as dancers to entertain their male colleagues in their moments of rest.
Alberta Whittle, “Between a whisper and a cry”, 2019, installation view, “TOMORROWS – A Land of Water”, 2024, ph. Nicolò Lucchi, Castel San Pietro, Verona
This is followed by the film “Between a whisper and a cry” (2019) by Alberta Whittle, an activist filmmaker born in the Antilles and based in Scotland, who in her work reflects on the long-term effects of colonization on her homeland and the populations that inhabit it, starting with the slave trade that between the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 19th century redesigned its geopolitical balance with the deportation of over 500,000 African slaves to French properties in the Americas, mainly in the Antilles. Visionary, animist, lyrical and documentary at the same time, the film combines the effects of the environmental crisis with the long-term effects of post-colonization on fragile populations who are now experiencing a new season of migration. A popular nursery rhyme sung alternately by choirs or soloists traces the seasons of the year marked by the onset of hurricanes, whose increase in frequency and intensity in the southern hemisphere can be traced back to climate change caused by the aggressive production dynamics implemented in the rich hemisphere. The preparations of the landscape and its vulnerable inhabitants to face the monthly onslaught of hurricanes here become a performative ritual in which the spectator is also invited to participate by following specific breathing and vocal emission instructions that flow like subtitles, an explicit invitation to an active assumption of responsibility repaid by the interpenetration with an infinite and mysterious beauty.
Lina Dib, “Threshold”, video still, 2017, projectors, cameras, sound, custom software, Galveston Arts Center, 2018, Texas, photo courtesy the artist
This sort of initiatory journey towards awareness of the future that awaits us if we are not able to learn from our past and present is concluded by the interactive audiovisual installation “Threshold” (2017) by Lina Dib. A twelve-meter-long marine horizon calls us from afar with the enchantment of the sunset and the inviting splash of the waves breaking on the shore, but as soon as we get closer to fully immerse ourselves in this liberating illusion, the waves blacken until they evaporate, their movement stops and a dull noise replaces the familiar one. The work, part of a larger series of aestheticizing toxic landscapes, in its tendency towards self-destruction to react to our presence is a powerful metaphor for the human effect on the earth’s ecosystem, the immediacy of which leaves us with no possibility of reply.
Info:
AA.VV. “TOMORROWS – A Land of Water”
11/10 – 10/11/2024
curated by Jessica Bianchera and Marta Ferretti
Free admission
Free guided tours on Saturdays and Sundays at 10:00, 14:00 and 16:00
Castel San Pietro
Piazzale Castel San Pietro, Verona
www.artverona.it/tomorrows
Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
NO COMMENT