Agenda

First event in the new series: Art Ecologies
Silver Rights: Art and Resistance against Neo-Colonialism

Speakers:
Elena Mazzi (artist) 
Camilla Salvaneschi (Iuav University of Venice)
Sandro Muraro (Associazione Ya Basta! Êdî bese!) 

Chair:
Cristina Baldacci (DFBC and NICHE)
Emiliano Guaraldo (NICHE)

Abstract:
Silver Rights is a research project by artist Elena Mazzi in collaboration with Mapuche spiritual leader, silversmith, and activist Mauro Millán, and Argentinian artist Eduardo Molinari. The project explores the resistance of the Mapuche people against neo-colonialism, focusing on the ancestral bond between the communities and their land (mapu). This bond has been eroded and denied by colonizing forces that have mutated over the centuries, gradually establishing themselves in recent decades through neo-extractivist practices, which are the result of a settlement process stemming from the convergence of investment policies and commercial agreements between South American governments and foreign multinationals, including the Italian company Benetton.

The work specifically responds to the narrative proposed by the Leleque Museum, an anthropological museum opened in 2000 on lands owned by Benetton. The museum’s operation is problematic, as it portrays the Mapuche people as an extinct culture rather than one that is alive and active in the disputed territory, effectively ‘musealizing’ their memory and material culture.

Mazzi addresses this conflict by engaging in dialogue and supporting the dense network of relations that the Mapuche community has been consciously curating for many years. This approach involves building and maintaining relations between different political and cultural subjects while also being implemented in their cosmovisions as a form of radical mediation between land, human, and more-than-human beings.

Silver Rights will be related to Poc and Encounters, two new video works by the artist on view at Ca' Pesaro, in the context of the series of solo exhibitions "Italian Polyphonies," curated by Camilla Salvaneschi and Angela Vettese.

The event will be held in Italian.

>>> Please register here to reserve your seat, places are limited <<

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Zoom link:
https://unive.zoom.us/j/82757787107?pwd=bTdQZFZRN0N1MG8rZ3ltUHlPaitJZz09

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