The Invention of Europe. A tricontinental narrative (2024-2027) is a three-year curatorial programme wherein exhibitions and public programmes critically replicate on the monolithic thought of Europe, ranging from a multilingual territory—South Tyrol. Situated between the “trendy” Italy and Austria, its communities have over the centuries been criss-crossed by political and financial powers that, no matter its precise existence, have alternated and challenged each other. The programme borrows from the system The Invention of Africa by the Congolese thinker Yves Valentin Mudimbe, which highlights how the thought of Africa is a contemporary invention, linked each to the European colonial imaginative and prescient—one that’s exoticist and racist—and to the best projection of its world diasporas. Over a three-year interval, from 2024 to 2027, Europe can be on the centre of reflections by artists—some European, some from Africa, Latin America or Asia—who can be invited to unveil and confront its identification, which has for the reason that Renaissance been a development of modernity: a perspective that can recall the a long time of tricontinental networks forming alliances and solidarity throughout the interval of decolonisation. The Invention of Europe highlights how the inflexible and fictitious thought of Europe that the thinker Samir Amin calls “Eurocentrism” (whiteness; spiritual, ethical and mental superiority; progress and evolution) is on the identical time a cloth actuality primarily based upon the economic system of the American plantations, of mining and the unpaid labour of African slaves. An invention, Mudimbe would say, whose advanced historic, social, spiritual and materials matrix is to be highlighted along with the invited artists and the communities residing within the advanced—and European—territory of South Tyrol.

“La Linea Insubrica” (The Insubric Line) is the debut exhibition of the three-year curatorial programme The Invention of Europe. A tricontinental narrative (2024–2027). The collective exhibition brings collectively a gaggle of artists related to the African continent across the speculative picture of the Insubric Line, a geo-point that runs by way of town of Meran(o) and kinds a seam within the Earth’s floor that emerged following the collision of the European and African tectonic plates. In the course of the Jurassic period, Africa and Europe had been in truth separated by the Tethys Sea: the next epochs noticed the African plate transfer northwards in direction of the European plate, inflicting a gradual narrowing of the Tethys that culminated within the collision of the 2 plates. Because the European plate slid beneath the African plate, the latter gave substance to the mineral materials that in the present day kinds the Alps.

“La Linea Insubrica,” composed of the fusion of the “more-than-human” substances deposited alongside the sides of those plates, is a cloth metaphor by way of which to deliver out the complexities which have constructed the present-day Europe. The narrative of European identification and purity is deconstructed from a geological actuality: the orographic picture of the road that, in the present day seen as a scar, provides kind to the complexity of a historical past that, within the case of the encounter between Africa and Europe, started 65 million years in the past.

Curated by
Lucrezia Cippitelli and Simone Frangi

Taking part artists:
Liliana Angulo Cortés, Sammy Baloji, Binta Diaw, Abdessamad, El Montassir, Ufuoma Essi, Alessandra Ferrini, Kapwani Kiwanga, Francis Offman, Vashish Soobah, Betty Tchomanga, The Faculty of Mutants

at Merano Arte
till October 13, 2024