On the summer solstice weekend, Archive Milano opens its doors to Muna Mussie’s solo show የቦሎኛ ጎዳና | شارع بولونيا | Bologna St. 173. The August sun, high in the sky, beats down. Conceived and built over the course of Muna Mussie’s residency at Archive (29.01–31.03.2021), the exhibition is part of Archive’s research stream (re)memberings and (re)groundings(2020–2022). The exhibition will run until August 27, 2021.
6.00 pm
Exhibition opening and performance by Muna Mussie
A phantasmagoric body covered with Netsela from the waist up, prepares popcorn. The sound and the matter shooting out from it glides in the space, and drags with it the billowing-trailing-body. A prechosen point will be the base from which the arm of liberty emerges, the body abandons the molt and escapes into the uncovered open. There are small rites that accompany the life of all peoples. That of popcorn in Eritrea is a rite that finds space inside parties, birthdays, weddings, dances; but rather than something to be eaten, the popcorn here is thrown, made to fly in the air as if it were carnivalesque-confetti-snow and then flung to the ground, scattered as to mark an area of joy where thrift gives way to the sign of abundance and of the ephemeral. By design, popcorn is the result of small explosive reactions that translate into something particularly spongy and soft, both to touch and to view. The sound generated by this reaction, recalls that of shooting: fireworks or firearms. On this sonorous ambiguity plays the action of PF DJ: where the struggle for independence advances between gunfire and bombardment; at dusk – during the week of the Bologna Congresses – music and dance take over, revealing the more tender, recreational, crackling and playful phase of the struggle. (MM)
8.00 pm
Communal dinner
Food by Mosobna
9.00 pm
Sound performance
by Plethor X
Plethor X is a duo from Milan who make experimentation and musical research an absolute stylistic blueprint. From James Brown to Fela Kuti, to this day. The sounds that most characterize the sound of Plethor X are of Eritrean and Ethiopian influence, such as tigryna, Eritrean folk music, and the masinko, an instrument typical of Eritrea and Ethiopia. Without roots, neither musical nor territorial: everything blends under the name of Plethor X, which therefore symbolizes the presence of a mass, of a mixture of intents, of a crowd without name, without label, irrecoognized but real and anxious to express themselves.
3.00–6.00 pm
Diasporic Saturday School
Storytelling through and with fabrics
by Saidou Ndiaye and Chiara Figone.
The Diasporic Saturday School is a porous space for youth with diasporic backgrounds, a site where to practice an encompassing understanding of self, a laboratory of imagination, a space where the importance of community and conviviality are central. It is vital for children and young people to embrace differences, to unsettle the limits constructed by monolithic articulation of identity, it is essential to listen to the many stories and forms of knowing that can be part of their expecience of being in the world and build their world(s). As a space of co-learning, the social, emotional, intellectual balance of each child is of the utmost importance. The Diasporic Saturday School is initiated by Seydou Ndiaye and Chiara Figone.
4.00 – 7.00 pm
Deep Listening session with Kirykou collective
Kirykou is a collective formed by Jermay Michael Gabriel Yhonnas Cappellin, Leila Bencharnia, Ismael Condoy, Giuliano Pascoe, and Ronke Oluwadare. A cultural and diasporic project born in October 2019 in Milan. Through music, art and literature, Kirykou embraces the differences between bodies and cultures. Kirykou’s music is a vindication, contaminated and powered by diversity, a sonic force that crosses and transcends boundaries. Ismael Condoy plays on the mix of Andean and electronic sounds, Jermay Cappellin with those of Ethiopian rituals, Giuliano Pascoe aka Dj Droven builds on the sonorities of Western music, and Leila Bencharnia incorporates Berber sounds into classical music. Ronke Oluwadare is the wordsmith of the collective
Opening hours: Wednesday to Saturday, 3–7pm
Or contact us at milano@archivesites.org to book an appointment.
Covid-19 safety measures: We are looking forward to welcoming you, safely, in our space. Please wear a maskandregister at the entrance. Thank you all for your collaboration.
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7pm
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. The artist’s compilation of research, interviews and discussions in this bilingual German-English volume are enriched by contributions by the Namibian performance artist Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja, the German Doreen Mende and the Finnish writer Olli Löytty. Initially an exhibition project and film screenings shown in Berlin, Freiburg i. Br., Malmö, Helsinki and Windhoek, Horelli and the curator Heidi Brunnschweiler put together a volume that celebrates and critically reflects on art as a process.
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“The concept of trespassing is close to me because it relies on my roots-uprooted. I belong to a feeling of de-construction, of non-belonging that is the filter with which I look, live, and operate; the constant search for aesthetic cohesion is my daily, salvific exercise.”
—Muna Mussie
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.
23.02.2021
Undercommons. Pianificazione fuggitiva e studio nero is the first book of the series Ante-politics published with Tamu Edition. In this essential book, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten draw on the theory and practice of the black radical tradition as it supports, inspires, and extends contemporary social and political thought and aesthetic critique.
Wild tongues* is a recurring space for reflection and dialogue concerned with many kinds of borders – borders between nations, cultures, classes, genders, languages. This long-term research endeavor will stretch across various geographies and temporalities and will manifest itself in multiple forms. While addressing the complexities of the borderlands, of diasporic politics, physical and internal displacement, cultural dislocation and hybridity, production of Otherness, and the violence of border regimes – Wild tongues intend to establish a space to enact and rehearse forms of togetherness, radical care, and conviviality. The project draws from a genealogy of feminist writers, amongst them Gloría Anzaldúa whose work inspired the title, Cherríe Moraga, María Lugones, Chela Sandoval, Mariana Ortega, Emma Pérez. Wild Tongues will be launched in 2021.
* “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” in Gloria Anzaldùa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 1987.
