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Young Curators Residency Programme
Every year since 2007 Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo promotes the Young Curators Residency Programme Torino. The project aims to support emerging curatorial practice while spreading knowledge of the Italian art scene on an international level.
Young Curators Residency Programme 2023. Coordinated by Michele Bertolino
I live in constant fear of the Western descent into . But I digress. [...]
When thinking of ‘political time’, what often comes to mind is a momentary convergence of bodies in a specific space: rallies, protests, uprisings, with stillness and quietude rarely treated as part of the same cycle. The latter states are often regarded as individualistic retreats from ‘politics’, when in fact they allow for various attempts at regrouping and organising. With oppressive power structures having effectively stripped active, assembled bodies of their potency—and even rest itself becoming co-opted to make capitalism more efficient—radical action is left as a hollowed-out site.
I live in constant fear of the Western descent into . But I digress. The club is bumping, the alcohol is flowing, everybody looks good. There is much pain in the world but not in this room. is a two-fold manifestation: an exhibition with six Italian artists centred around the re-eroticisation of (political) bodies, and a publication with texts and visual works by six other Italian artists focusing on a revitalisation of language through poetry.
The exhibition is situated within moments of quietude, in the valleys of political time. Embodied by a sense of dormancy, the artists find potentiality in exhaustion and see stillness charged with the prevailing hum of eroticism. They evade framing stillness as rest, refusal or inactivity, instead grounding quietude within the body—be it social, collective, machinic, of images—and envisioning it as a mode of resistance.
A collection of poems, essays, and other textual and visual interventions, the book expands on the revitalisation of language as a method of resistance to constant hegemonic appropriation. The structures of capitalism have reduced language to an exchange of information, stripping it of its affective—and therefore political—power and potential. The contributions to this publication frame poetic language as an “excess” beyond informational circulation and exchange, reinvigorating our social and political imagination.
Enrico Boccioletti considers tenderness and vulnerability between the digital and physical world. His work isolates intimate and accessible actions like stick-and-poke tattooing or a contentious figure dancing in an empty club to expose the soft underbelly of power structures.
Through her anthropomorphic sculptures—concrete limbs and skin-like structures—Sara Enrico locates the potentiality of exhaustion within the body. Although fragmented and unshackled, Enrico’s corporeal figures simultaneously resist coherence and collapse.
Stefano Faoro interacts with social habits formed from the tension between public and private spaces, as well as the peculiarities of daily interpersonal relations and exchange. The subjects of his paintings are evanescent, ghostly remnants of individuals stripped of their context and community, reduced to archetypes.
In her video works, Benedetta Fioravanti drifts through seemingly empty cities, familiar places from which she feels alienated. These works portray an in-between state, a blue hour that could be dusk or dawn, foregrounding both exhaustion and potentiality.
Rebecca Moccia explores the institutional structures that shape our emotive lives. By rendering them in intimate spaces, she underlines the illusion of their authority and exposes their tenuous formations. The specificity of news stories no longer holds, instead collapsing into sensory stillness and ambience.
Valentina Parati gives voice to machinic bodies. She places microphones on the surfaces of cars, surveillance cameras and office furniture and, through audio processing, translates their testimonies into sonic poetic language.
In conjunction with the exhibition, the book published by AXIS AXIS (Turin) will be celebrated with a public program on May 26th, at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin. The launch will feature readings by several of the book’s contributors. More information about the programme to follow.
Contributors include:
Riccardo Benassi, a video artist and poet whose work defines subjectivity through collective experience in the face of ubiquitous violence.
Giulia Crispiani, a writer who maps romance and embarrassment as vulnerable sites of political potential.
Ilenia Caleo, an artist, poet and activist advocating for the re-eroticisation of globally collective and interconnected bodies through convergence and poetics.
Sandra Cane, a writer investigating how the structures of language form and break down when grounded in the body.
Andrea Lo Giudice, an artist and community organiser whose poetic practice repurposes found language and reclaims authoritarian signage.
Flavia Tritto, a visual artist using concrete poetry to explore how human and non-human bodies converge.
Curators
Ariane Sutthavong
Ariane Sutthavong is involved in curation, writing and translation projects at the intersection of art and politics in Bangkok. She co-founded the ‘inappropriate BOOK CLUB’, an ongoing initiative centred around the collective reading and writing of texts, supporting a third view of contemporary art in Thailand beyond both the confines of the state and the interests of capitalism. She is also a member of the London-based collective ‘tent’, exploring practices and theories that re-envisage dominant structures through temporary and tentative configurations and solidarities.
Katherine Jemima Hamilton
Katherine Jemima Hamilton (@c.r.i.t.i.c.a.l.t.h.o.t) is a curator, writer, and educator born and raised on unceded Ligwilda’xw territory. In 2014, she moved to Treaty 13 territory, aka Tkaronto, to pursue a degree in art history at the University of Toronto, only to move again in 2019 to unceded Chochenyo Ohlone, then Ramaytush Ohlone territory, known by settlers as the Bay Area, to learn more about contemporary art and curating. She is grateful to have been a guest on these lands.
Her research interests include feminism and technology, craft and ritual in contemporary frameworks, repatriation and unsettling practices for colonial institutions, and exploring sound as a framework for making, working, and living together. She has held various positions at institutions such as Collecteurs, The Wattis Institute, KADIST, SFMOMA, California College of the Arts, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Art Metropole, and The Museum at Campbell River, to name a few.
Christy Eóin O’Beirne
Christy Eóin O’Beirne is a curator, writer and artist from Bradford, UK. Deeply rooted in his Irish heritage and dual cultural identity, O’Beirne’s work interrogates and rearticulates notions of diaspora through the lens of fragmentation, land, shibboleth, mourning and decay. His research unearths the debris of displacement and explores the ways in which intergenerational colonial trauma is inscribed into landscapes and topographies, with soil, seeds and plants acting as both witnesses to and archives of violence, migration and memory.
As Curatorial Assistant at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art (2021-22), O’Beirne curated Diamonds and Rust, Freya Dooley (2022), produced and edited a publication, If One Feather Falls… (2022), and assisted with several major exhibitions. O’Beirne previously worked as a Gallery Assistant at John Hansard Gallery (2019-20) and Lisson Gallery (2018-19), and as an Assistant Archivist for the restoration of Video Nation (2017). O’Beirne holds an MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths, University of London (2019-21) and a BA in English Literature, Art History & Visual Culture from the University of Exeter (2015-18).
Coordinator
Michele Bertolino
Michele Bertolino (he/him) is a curator and researcher living between Turin and Rome. He currently collaborates with Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo as coordinator of the Young Curators Residency Program. He is editing the publication Porpora – a photographic book of Lina Pallotta’s work. He curated exhibitions in several institutions, among those: MAMbo, Bologna; Last Tango, Zurich; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino. In 2020 he was visiting lecturer in the LAB.ZONE PETROLIO, class led by Lili Reynaud-Dewar at HEAD Genève. Between 2019 and 2021 he worked as assistant curator of the 2020 Art Quadriennale FUORI, held at Palazzo delle Esposizioni. In 2018-2019 he was Junior Curator at The Institute of Things to Come with which he continued collaborating in 2020-2021 as curator of the research project “Guerrilla against the Uncessing Hostilities of the Livings”. In 2016 he founded with Bernardo Follini, Giulia Gregnanin and Sebastiano Pala, the curatorial collective Il Colorificio. His writings have been published in Nero Magazine, Flash Art and other magazines. In 2022 he published Albe e tramonti in Praiano*, written together with Giulia Crispiani. He graduated in philosophy of art at the University of Turin and in 2015-2016 he participated in CAMPO15, a course of curatorial studies and practices of the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation.
Artists
- Enrico Boccioletti
Enrico Boccioletti (b. 1984, Pesaro) is an artist whose practice points at the contradictions of existing as a body mediated by algorithms and the consequences of technology encountering one’s intimacy. His work outputs in a variety of forms and formats, investigating structures of empathy existing in-between and beyond verbal communication, representation of the self in the digital realm, and the ghostly forces embedded in informational turmoil.
- Sara Enrico
Sara Enrico (b. 1979, Biella) is an artist whose interest revolves around the idea of surface and the notions of haptic, materiality, and corporeality. Combining pictorial, tailoring, and architectural aspects, analog and digital processes, and materials such as cement, pigment, and fabric, her sculptures explore transitory states and liminal interpretations of a body in relation to gesture and space.
- Stefano Faoro
Stefano Faoro’s (b. 1984, Belluno) conceptual practice is a sequence of traces left by cultural and social constellations in the objects and signs he addresses in his works. These systems of representation, or found artifacts, become material through arrangement, appropriation, and restructuring, but above all, they become incorporated models of an often fractured economy, especially in terms of its emptying and destabilizing violence, and its sometimes grotesque unfoldings.
- Benedetta Fioravanti
Benedetta Fioravanti (b. 1995, Ascoli Piceno) is an artist whose research stems from the observation of everyday life, experienced directly or mediated through the consumption of digital images. She mainly works with moving image or through site-specificity, using her personal archive of images to explore, juxtapose or compose new narratives.
- Rebecca Moccia
Rebecca Moccia (b. 1992, Napoli) is an artist whose transdisciplinary practice explores the materiality of perceptive and emotive states that can emerge from specific social and spatial characteristics. She is interested in creating situations that play with temporal and actual elements, medial atmospheres that surround the body but also traverse and interact with it.
- Valentina Parati
Valentina Parati (b. 1996, Bergamo) is a multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker whose practice explores the soundscape of rave, queer, and car culture in order to investigate fetish and relations between bodies and machines.
- Riccardo Benassi
Riccardo Benassi (b. 1982, Cremona) is a visual artist, poet, and essayist, who uses text, sound, and images to interrogate how technology, as a tool of power and to resist it, shapes the experience of our material and digital lives. The poetic language employed in his time-based installations, video essays, and spatial interventions lies at the very core of his artistic practice.
- Giulia Crispiani
Giulia Crispiani was born in 1986, Ancona, Italy. She lives and works in Roma
- Ilenia Caleo
Ilenia Caleo (b. 1974, Livorno) is a performer, activist and researcher. Since 2000 she has been working as an actress, performer and dramaturg in the contemporary scene, collaborating with various companies and directors. A philosopher by training, she deals with corporality, feminist epistemologies, experiments in the performing arts, new institutions and forms of cultural work.
- Sandra Cane
Sandra Cane (b. 1990, Milano) is a writer and independent researcher of queer studies and Palestinian contemporary culture. Through her research, she examines radical imagination and futurity as cultural practices of queering normative narratives of the present. She writes for magazines and online platforms.
- Andrea Lo Giudice
Andrea Lo Giudice (b. 1994, Roma) is a visual artist whose research focuses on the semantic redetermination of places and words. Through tools such as drawing, installation and performative action, he recontextualises the environment in which he intervenes by providing new poetic visions where the Subject blurs its boundaries until it merges with the Other and with the surrounding space.
- Flavia Tritto
Flavia Tritto (b. 1994, Bari) has participated in socially-engaged action and cultural production from a young age. This upbringing informed her university studies in political science and international law, before she embraced her artistic research, completing an MA in Fine Art at Central St. Martin’s, London, UK, in 2019. She is currently based in Bari where she runs VOGA Art Project.
Jury
Sepake Angiama
Sepake Angiama praxis stems from radical pedagogies, black feminist thought, rethinking human/non-human relations rooted in how we might reimagine and inhabit the world otherwise. Through continued and sustained dialogues and collaborations with artists she initiated under the mango tree – a gathering of artist-led schools centring unlearning, decolonising and indigenous practices. She has developed educational programmes for various institutions, including Tate Modern, documenta 14 and Manifesta 12. She is the artistic director of the Institute of International Visual Arts (iniva), dedicated to building community by making space for artistic research through radial education practices, collective study, residency, publishing and community-led commissioning that reflects on art and social justice.
Bart van der Heide
Bart van der Heide is an art historian, curator, and the director of Museion in Bolzano, where he initiated the multidisciplinary research project TECHNO HUMANITIES. The three-year project (2021-2023) includes exhibitions, publications, roundtable discussions, and art mediation programs. The exhibition series focuses on pressing existential questions concerning human beings at the intersection of ecology, technology, and economy. In TECHNO HUMANITIES, external international research teams delve into and develop the addressed themes, while simultaneously providing a platform for young talents to realize their aspirations. An important aspect of the project is the involvement of local initiatives.
The exhibition “Kingdom of the Ill” represents the second chapter of the three-year project that Van der Heide launched in 2021 with the exhibition “TECHNO” (September 11, 2021 – March 16, 2022).
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