dig.ni.fy Summer 2024 | Page 69

Disobedience Archive, a project by Marco Scotini, which has been developing a video archive since 2005, focusing on the relationships between artistic practices and activism. The section is divided into two parts especially conceived for our framework —

diaspora activism and gender disobedience — and will include works by thirty-nine artists and collectives made between 1975 and 2023.

•The International Art Exhibition also features Nucleo Storico, which includes works from twentieth-century Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Much has been written about global modernisms and modernisms in the Global South, and three sections feature works from these territories.The Nucleo Storico encompasses three sections, featuring one work by each artist, including mostly paintings, but also works on paper and sculpture, from the years 1915 to 1990.

•Portraits includes works by about a hundred artists from Algeria, Aotearoa—New Zealand, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Ghana, Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Korea, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mexico, Mozambique, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Singapore, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tunisia, Turkey, Uruguay, Venezuela, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe. The selection shows how the human figure has been explored in countless different ways by artists in the Global South. Most of the artists in the Nucleo Storico are exhibited in the International Art Exhibition for the first time. A third section in the Nucleo Storico, titled Italians Everywhere, is dedicated to the worldwide Italian artistic diaspora in the twentieth century: Italian artists who travelled and moved abroad, developing their careers in Africa, Asia, Latin America, as well as in the rest of Europe and the United States.

Themes/Locations

As stated by Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, President

of La Biennale di Venezia, two themes have arisen organically from the curated exhibition: “an explicit desire to focus on works that adopt the language of textiles; and the blood kinship that connects several of the artists on show.” This, claims the host and curator, provides a return to the ‘corporeal res extensa and to visceral human relationships, understood as a repository of tradition and the transmission of knowledge, in an age dominated by the immaterial and the depersonalization of form and content.”

Artists exploring the theme of textiles are explored in many ways, from …

key historical figures such as Bona Pieyre de Mandiargues and Gianni Bertini in Italians Everywhere and Olga de Amaral, Eduardo Terrazas, and Monika Correa in Abstractions in the Nucleo Storico, to many artists in the Nucleo Contemporaneo, including Agnès Waruguru, Ahmed Umar, Anna Zemánková, Antonio Guzman and Iva Jankovic, the Bordadoras de Isla Negra, Bouchra Khalili, Claudia Alarcón and Silät, Dana Awartani, Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, Güneş Terkol, Kang Seung Lee, Liz Collins, the Mataaho Collective, Nour Jaouda, Pacita Abad, Paula Nicho, Sàngódáre Gbádégẹsin Àjàlá, Shalom Kufakwatenzi, Susanne Wenger, Yinka Shonibare, as well as the Chilean arpilleristas.

These works reveal an interest in craft, tradition,

First of all, that wherever you go and wherever you are you will always encounter foreigners—they/we are everywhere. Secondly, that no matter where you find yourself, you are always truly, and deep down inside, a foreigner.

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