SOMATECHNICS
Transparent travelers and obscure nobodies
curated by Simone Frangi
DIPLAYED WORKS: Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz; Sophie Utikal; Ursula Mayer; Patrizio Di Massimo; Adelita Husni-Bey; Danilo Correale
PERFORMANCE and PUBLIC PROGRAM: Mercedes Azpilicueta; Marissa Lôbo; Muna Mussie
Opening: 24th May 2018
Museion
On occasion of the tenth anniversary of its new venue, Museion is turning the spotlight on its original mission, namely the idea of fostering dialogue between northern Europe and the Mediterranean area. Somatechnics offers a contemporary take on these elements, bringing together pieces by artists who work in Austria and Italy and explore the physical, administrative and symbolic borders of the two countries.
The proposal was selected from a pool of projects by eight curators under the age of 45. The jury which chose the winning project comprised: Massimiliano Gioni, associate director and head curator of the New Museum, New York, and artistic director of The Trussardi Foundation in Milan; Matthias Mühling, Director of the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich, and Letizia Ragaglia, Director of Museion.
Somatechnics is a multidimensional program dedicated to the complex relationships between racial and gender embodiments, visuality and mobility in Italy and Austria and in the borderlands in which these two nations intersect.
Taking its cue from the historical and geo-cultural peculiarities of South Tyrol, the project explores the processes of construction and artificial fabrication of bodily identity in its bonds to linguistic identity and to the multiple senses of belonging and inscription which abusively try to confine our bodies in specific territories.
In this sense, Somatechnics takes up the suggestion of activist, politician and writer Alexander Langer - who fought throughout the Eighties and the Nineties against the rise of nativism and ethno-nationalism in the region - to understand the ethnical conflicts in the locality of South Tyrol as a prism through which it was possible to read the actual and future challenges of the co-habitation of pluralities in contemporary Europe.
Bridging Langer’s critique of the politics of integration of minorities as a form of nationalistic assimilationism to the praise of linguistic queerness of Gloria Anzaldúa, Somatechnics proposes to move towards pragmatic alternatives to identiarian monolingualism and explores social and political bodily experience as a negotiated heteroglossia in which our “belonging” is produced performatively through engagement, antagonism, and trans-affiliations and not through a pre-given set of internalized identifications.
The project revolves around what Joseph Pugliese and Susan Stryker call somatechnics and the role they play in the construction of social and political asymmetries among subjects circulating in contemporary Europe. The somatechnical perspective suggests that our “material corporeality (soma) is inextricably conjoined with the techniques and technologies (technics) through which bodies are formed and transformed”. The project focuses in particular on those acts and habits of bodily profiling - put in place by the colonial project of whiteness in its intersection with sexism, classism and forms of stigmatizations linked to religious belonging - which target certain bodies on the basis of visual stereotypes about their race, gender, class, religion or sexual orientation.
In crossing the figure of the transparent traveller reconstructed by Rachel Hall and the figure of the obscure no-bodyproposed by Denise Ferreira Da Silva, Somatechnics reenacts the critique that Édouard Glissant precociously addressed to the western “requirement for transparency” imposed on social subjects in order to “understand” them without any residual ambiguity.
The cultural performance of transparency is inherently asymmetrical and tied to interlocked forms of discriminations that normalize “whiteness, able-bodiedness, and heterosexuality”. In this frame, subjects with non conforming genders, races, classes, sexualities, citizenship status, disabilities, ages, or religions are deemed obscure and presumed to be a threat. This slow violence based on the visuality of suspectness transform some bodies more that others in “strage” no-bodies. Bodies “out of place at home”: uncomfortable, exposed, noticeable, vulnerable and less mobiles.
The project looks at practitioners who have been analyzing, denouncing or subverting the processes of construction of the biased dichotomy between transparency and obscurity as well as at practices that have been praising for a “right to opacity” as an ethics of work. In the economy of the project, opacity emerges in fact as a non-binary interstitial force of resistance, opposing to the systemic reduction of our fractal bodily being to the obviousness of transparency and dichotomies in bodily expressions.
Exploring the diagnostic potential of different media (painting, installation, sonic research, video-based and performance-based practices), the project conveys practitioners that conceive critique both as a clinic and joyfully affermative activity and have employed affectivity as a powerful tool for deconstructing hegemonic imaginaries of race and gender.