SUSTAINING ASSEMBLY | PAV, Torino

SUSTAINING ASSEMBLY
Pratiche artistiche per una transizione ecologica dal basso

is the show curated by Marco Scotini and Piero Gilardi at PAV (Parco Arte Vivente), Torino with participaion of Maria Thereza Alves, Mao Chenyu, Fernando García-Dory, Michele Guido, Karrabing Film Collective, Alessandra Pomarico / Free Home University Collective, Yasmin Smith, Bouba Touré e Raphaël Grisey, Zheng Bo.

The contribution of FHU for Sustaining Assembly partakes two different moments, which recall practices and methods that emerged from free home university experience of building circular learning communities.

In collaboration with the AEF of the PAV, assemblies with the local community will be held next autumn, which will find formal restitution in the exhibition itinerary, tracing a process of meeting, listening, witnessing requests, desires, and collective creation.

Free Home's installation at the Sustaining Assembly (fragment)

The installation in the space of Pav proposed by FHU’s co-curators Alessandra Pomarico and Nikolay Oleynikov, is an assemblage that contextualizes and trace back some of the investigations of Free Home University in Castiglione d'Otranto: the visual poetry of artist Babi Badalov in the Refugees Will Come session (2019), with interventions by participants; the banners for a new toponymy made by artists Luigi Coppola and Isabella Faggiano with the women of the Maghreb and Syrian communities (2019); didactic posters on Food Cycle by Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri (2018); and Bodies Will be Back with the lyrics by LaToya Manly Spain of Schwabinggrad Ballet | ARRiVati (2017) the textile works of Chto Delat and Nikolay Oleynikov (2014-2020) and the sessions’ time capsules, sketches from Constructlab hands-on building sessions (2014-2017), campaigns of artists and illustrators, posters, some texts of reference, the seeds of ancient cereals reproduced by Casa delle Agriculture, the flours of their Community Mill - small affective finds, notes of the teachings received, gestures of care, struggle, friendship and reproduction of a common horizon.

Babi Badalov: Kontadini, 2019

Inside the museum, the screening of the film Gente di Farina, Sale e Acqua / People of Flour, Salt, and Water poetically responds to the questions raised by the exhibition Sustaining Assembly, evoking the consequences of neoliberalism on the lives of people and territories, on a global scale. Created by the Chto Delat collective, the film portrays a session in Castiglione d'Otranto, a small village in the extreme southeast of the Apulian region, where Free Home University has been collaborating with the activists of Casa delle Agriculture since 2014.

A group of young asylum seekers, artists, farmers and change makers become all co-authors and protagonists of the story. Chto Delat, revisiting the Brechtian didactic tradition of learning plays, and guiding the process through somatic exercises, story telling, story-placing and life in common- realize a learning film in which the making of the work becomes a learning process in itself, and a device for a plural knowledge production