Our Rivers Share a Mouth / I nostri fiumi condividono una bocca
curated by Aigerim Kapar, Andria Nyberg Forshage, Jiayue He
final exhibition of the 18th edition of the Young Curators Residency Programme coordinated by Michele Bertolino
Artists: Maria Giovanna Abbate, Annalisa Cannito, Liryc Dela Cruz, Adji Dieye, Derek MF Di Fabio, Grace Martella, Genny Petrotta, Sandra Rilletti, Noura Tafeche, Valerie Tameu
Our Rivers Share a Mouth gathers ten artists situated in Italy to reflect on the meaning of solidarity and sharing, across and with respect for differences in the plural and the singular. A rivermouth is where a river meets another, while the mouth is figured as the source of speech. Their juxtaposition speaks to the differential yet fluid relations that connect bodies with environments, sedimenting histories into archives, moving between lands, from rivers to seas, memories to emotions, and from the personal to the political.
In their diverse practices, the artists gathered in the exhibition deal with questions of collective memory, environmental justice, agentive bodies and community solidarity actions. Through re-membering, activating archives, and performing rituals of care and desire, the artists address ongoing legacies of imperialism and colonial infrastructures and how they mirror in multi-layered postcolonial realities. To face these realities entails reckoning with the ongoing destruction of lifeworlds and ecosystems through exploitation, extraction, and violence, affecting human and more-than-human conditions for life.
By suggesting imaginative ways to shift – to queer, to trans, to abolish, to repair, to affect – dominant narratives, artists contribute to an understanding of how local, global, social and personal struggles are interlinked across territorial borders and migrations of knowledge.
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On white sheets of silk, Adji Dieye uses photographic materials selected from Senegal’s national archives and her personal archive, recalling what is missing between colonial realities and individual memories, questioning the formation, experience and representation of diaspora identities.
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On the occasion of the exhibition, a publication serves as an alternative space, an open rivermouth, for sharing and collecting materials. These include ongoing artistic researches, poetic writings, images relating to the artworks, personal documents, and further curatorial discussions, inviting the readers to negotiate their own understandings with encountered realities and connect thoughts beyond the physical exhibition space.
