On the occasion of the 14th Gwangju Biennale Soft and Weak Like Water, I was part of the curatorial team of the Italian Pavilion: Che Cosa Sogna l'Acqua Quando Dorme?, curated by Valentina Buzzi. The exhibition presented five Italian artists - Camilla Alberti, Yuval Avital, Marco Barotti, Agnes Questionmark and Fabio Roncato, all using the metaphor of water to rethink a more sustainable relationship between humanity and nature.
Che Cosa Sogna l'Acqua Quando Dorme? seeks to abandon our anthropocentric perspective to enter a new realm of possibilities that are whispered by the dreaming water, asking us to reflect on the symbolism that nurtures our imaginative vocabulary, nudging us to look at the conceptual architectures of our present and future.
Through a suggested immersive path, we learned of the ways in which the act of becoming is reflected in several aspects of our current world and embodied in our worldviews - sometimes it is a slow process of erosion, other times it is a revolutionary uprising. At times, in order to transform we need to allow a period of static distance, acknowledging the current status of things, absorbing the results of previous decisions, other times we take action through our imagination, and the future appears with new shapes and hybrid possibilities. Change, and the question/equation of its feasibility, was thus embraced by the artists as a fundamental concept of evoking new genealogies and ecologies, born through both a careful and attentive investigation of the local ecosystem of Gwangju in its historical, cultural and natural aspects, and of a wider act - emphasizing how water is a connector of humans and all things living across generations and geographies, linking the local to the universal.
Curatorial Text by Valentina Buzzi
ARTISTS: Camilla Alberti / Yuval Avital / Marco Barotti / Agnes Questionmark / Fabio Roncato