November 21, 2021
From that disordering rupture, may, perhaps, come repair. A methodology for repair has been theorised by Anawana Haloba within an exhibition-artwork, titled, How to re(pair) my grandmother’s basket. An experimental opera (2021), open at Archive Milan till 28 November 2021. In this work, the artist proposes along with the poet and scholar Harry Garuba that decolonialism (or repair) can only happen if the needs and interests of the epistemologically disenfranchised can be put at the forefront of knowledge production. The idea of repair and healing, exceeds restitution, to seek how we narrate objects. The shorthand for Haloba’s method is to ‘(re)pair’, to pair together again, to bring a comparative, double-view to any knowledge. To pair any fact of history, with that from another episteme. If the museum needs to be repaired, it must be paired with other historic examples of the museum as it functions in other geographies, at other times. To repair opera, Haloba proposes we read it as a plural form, present in cultures around the world. In pairing knowledge, we non-violently, and movingly, break the epistemological foothold. (ZC)
Archive fellow, artist Alessandra Ferrini, curates the first section of the study day with artistic interventions and discussion with invited speakers Lucrezia Cippitelli, Benjamina Efua Dadzie, and Jermay Michael Gabriel. Their session is followed by interventions by local, recently formed artist collectives Ambaradan think tank and Poly Marchantia. The study day closes with a screening of a video by Chihying Musquiqui and an intervention by Anawana Haloba. Read more
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September 24, 2021
Departing from the pages of the largest feminist periodical in the mid 1970s in Turkey, Kadinlarin Sesi / Women’s voice, Pinar Öğrenci, artist and filmmaker, and Övül Ö. Durmusoglu, curator, writer, and educator will experiment and open up strategies of collective readings and library activations. While reading the archival materials, they will make connections between the experiments of former women generations and today’s artistic and cultural practices. Read more
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Blackcoffee_pdc and Kirykou are pleased to present Blackn[è]ss fest, a three-day festival taking place at Archive Milano from October 1st to October 3rd, 2021.
With Silvia Rosi, Luca Neves, Ronke Oluwadare, Ariman Scriba, Alberto Boubakar Malanchino, David Blank, Emmanuelle Maréchal, Leila Belhadj Mohamed, Khadim Loum, Daphne Di Cinto and more, Blackn[è]ss fest will feature a diverse range of cultural events addressing the politics of representation of Black and POC people in Italy.
Blackn[è]ss fest wants to simultaneously celebrate Blackness and expose how Black and POC people are subjected to systemic discrimination and violence. In Italy, Black lives are perpetually framed by a Eurocentric gaze. Such a gaze contributes to the erasure of the complexities and nuances that form the Black and POC communities. Read more
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Opening
September 15, 2021
6.00 pm
How to (re)pair my grandmother’s basket is an experimental opera by artist Anawana Haloba, drawing from African philosophy and operatic traditions. The opera is grounded in Ubuntu, the African humanist philosophy of encounter to create a non-hierarchical method by which to interrogate rootedness and empathy.
Haloba’a opera is created and composed borrowing from operatic conventions, knowledges and sensibilities outside the European tradition, mainly from Southern Africa, such as Chiyabilo/Kuyabila and Budima from Zambia. The opera is a dialogue among non-gendered characters who transverse geographies, cultures, and societies, composed for these times. It engages with questions of environmental racism, the rise of nationalism in the western world, and the plight of immigrants. Her experimental libretto and composition are an extension of her doctoral exhibition at Bergen University and teaching practice, in particular a course she taught at KHiO University in Oslo, based on a comparative approach. (Re)pair opens many possible readings: repairing the basket as a new pairing of histories side-by-side, as much as the idea of recovery, or reparation (though the basket, or history, may not be ever retrievable). Read more
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Invocations
September 17–18, 2021
Archives – the fragile, vulnerable ones we are addressing here – are not silent per se. They do have a voice, but one that can be silenced. They do have a voice, but one whose potent airing might not be listened to. In this project – initiated by Savvy Contemporary – we collaborate with archives and organizations that engage in strategies of alternative history writing, dissent, self-organization, and participation via practical solidarity. The project Vulnerable Archives understands vulnerability as a method, with the potential of continuous recreative sources of knowledge.
Since 2020, the work of Vulnerable Archives has been taking place in Germany with research partners and communities in Turkey, Italy, and France. The aims of the project is to build dialogues among the communities that have been silenced and denied from archival practices in order to make visible the overlooked efforts and unconventional ways of storing collective memories.
In the frame of the Invocations taking place on September 17th and 18th – whose aim is to enhance archival networks and infrastructures through workshops, readings, discussions, performances, screenings and more – Archive Berlin will introduce a body of materials tracing feminists publishing practices in Turkey and its diaspora as part of Archive Inventory and a performance by Muna Mussie staging the archaeology of one’s body, a corporeal archive, repository of historical practices, fragments, and traces.
Sunday, September 5, 2021
12.30 pm – 11 pm
On the occasion of the closing of Muna Mussie’s exhibition Bologna St. 173, Archive Milano organized a study day featuring conversations with Fiori Berhane, Medhin Paolos, Angelica Pesarini, Alessandra Ferrini, Dagmawi Yimer and Filmon Yemane; the screening of Asmarina (documentary-film by Medhin Paolos and Alan Maglio); a communal dinner by Mosobna; a multipart listening session by Plethor X and a new performance by Muna Mussie. Read more
21.11.2021
Archive fellow, artist Alessandra Ferrini, curates the first section of the study day with artistic interventions and discussion with invited speakers Lucrezia Cippitelli, Benjamina Efua Dadzie, and Jermay Michael Gabriel. Their session is followed by interventions by local, recently formed artist collectives Ambaradan think tank and Poly Marchantia. The study day closes with a screening of a video by Chihying Musquiqui and an intervention by Anawana Haloba.
30.04.2021
Gaia Giuliani presenta il suo ultimo libro Monsters, Catastrophes and the Anthropocene: A Postcolonial Critique, (Routledge: London, 2020), in un percorso che esplora gli immaginari occidentali su disastri naturali, migrazioni di massa e terrorismo secondo una lettura postcoloniale, dalla quale emerge lo sguardo europeo su mostruosità e catastrofi.
10.04.2021
Changes in Direction – a Journal provides multivocal and transnational African-European statements to current decoloniality debates from different perspectives. The Finnish-German artist Laura Horelli engages with the traumatic and complex histories of colonialism and international solidarity between East Germany, Finland and Namibia, staging micro-historical interventions in public spaces. Her films transform the archive into a space – and publication – of reflective engagement.
30.05.2021
Mes nouveau plafonds is the title of one of the first photographic series conceived by artist Georges Senga (Lubumbashi, RDC, 1983, based in the Netherlands). The series was focused on the ceilings of family houses that Senga photographed in his home city Lubumbashi, second city of the Democratic Republic of Congo and capital of the rich minerary Province of Katanga. The work is a survey on the way people inhabit and experience daily life in the city and a way to narrate the massive economical and social transformations of the last decades.