Palazzo Ducale and the Castello D'Albertis a major exhibition of traditional African art to propose a different and more complex visual perspective "primitivistic" or "emergency". Masks, figures, altar, ritual objects and everyday objects are collected in very different contexts Italians who come here exposed to evoke experiences may be less distant than we think
The year 2010 was the year of 'Africa. They celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of decolonization (although few have been noticed), and were also held the World Cup in South Africa. In Genoa, it closes this year, "African" and the new one opens a major exhibition that seeks to offer another vision of the continent through the arts.
The exhibition brings together a large number of important works of African art in private collections typically found Italian, many of which have never before been exhibited. Masks, figures of the altar, "fetishes," funerary poles, ritual objects and use everyday, all works of great aesthetic value able to take us straight to the heart of sub-Saharan African cultures, their customs and ways of life: from Mali Congo, the Ivory Coast to Cameroon.
opportunity to discover a wealth often misunderstood, long-and unfairly placed under the label of "primitive art". And this especially in our country where the visual arts have become a traditional African market and its recognition only in relatively recent times. Also an opportunity to seize the role that objects play in bringing together people and companies in Africa and elsewhere. In fact the objects move and migrate from one place to the A lter, have a life and tell their stories. Meetings but also cause a collision. Sometimes calling in Italian collections.
The exhibition offers the opportunity to participate in the adventure of aesthetic and existential collectors, sharing the curiosity and passion and making a spy reports that the O ccidente and Italy in particular have had with Africa. Collecting it is much more than pick up objects, is a way of shaping the world a glimpse of the Other, to build a microcosm of real and imaginary that there is much talk of others as one of us: if the arts are African collection are Italian. On display will be the one to the other. So it happens that in talking about Africa, we are also talking to us, a way of seeing things and the world. Hundred and fifty years in the Unification of Italy can be another way, unexpected and unpredictable, to look in the mirror.
look back to Africa through art is not the same thing as looking through the lens of the famine, tribal wars and humanitarian emergencies: there is a whole cultural and human richness that in extreme conditions, and dehumanization deculturalizzate refugee camps (what usually appears on television in Africa) can not be seen. It is doubtful that this is a less steeped in prejudice: if what is sought is an aesthetic pleasure, it tends to remove all that ugly and evil, or simply annoying, it can get dirty.
The same value that the artistic avant-garde of the early twentieth century (Derain, Matisse, Picasso, etc..) Made of the 'black art', has led the African arts at the center of CAUTION, pinning, however, a very limited period of history Western African masks in still continue to search the faces of the Demoiselles d'Avignon.
However, because contemporary art continues to shape our visual perception, the editors, Ivan and Jeanne Bargna Parodi da Passano, anthropologists and specialists in African art, wanted to be involved in the design of the exhibition, the artist Stefano Arienti: not to repeat the usual and a bit 'Discount references between modernism and primitivism, but to understand how certain contemporary artistic practices, brought into play in the A llestimento the exhibition will help us to evoke, in sensitive and specific experiences that are different but perhaps far less than we think.
The exhibition is not limited then to propose works fine but neither wants to flood out of context the visitor of ethnographic information, presenting objects as documents of the cultures that created them. In the middle are the objects and their stories, and the report they have had with people, both here as in Africa. From this point of view the practice of "collecting", that is to collect the items stored in a specially designated area, sometimes exposing them to the view that it is a living in Milan or a sanctuary of Benin, became the thread along which investigate the similarities and differences between cultures.
The exhibition space also leaves it open to multiple looks at different ways of presenting, staging, and live mentally cataloging objects: the collectors with their autobiographical inclinations and the footprint of their collections, but also with a taste socially defined, that of anthropologists who try to return or to evoke the aesthetic experience of Africans that have produced these works, what the Africans themselves. All this in an immediately usable by any visitor allowing readings and interpretations at various levels.
The exhibition is divided into two autonomous parts, but connected, based in the Ducal Palace and the Museum of Culture in Castello d'Albertis. The section presents the works of Palazzo Ducale in a rather "classical", revisiting the ways in which African objects are placed in our homes and galleries as well as in our imagination (as when we speak of "male" and "fetishes") and then remove them: so the visitor will be conducted through the very structure of the exhibition (ie no heavy equipment education) to question on the look that brings on objects and experience he is doing. The
this section of the exhibition at the Castello D'Albertis, itself a collector's home, instead propose, through special facilities, a path that will have as its theme the 'authenticity', so that the objects of the cultures they come from, for reflect on the ghosts of the "purity" and "contamination" that animate our desires and fears. In Network Connections
"Palazzo Ducale in Genoa
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