Outlaws
Louisa Gagliardi, Shamiran Istifan, Yoan Mudry, Gina Proenza, Cally Spooner, Jonas Staal, Doris Stauffer

The annual group exhibition of the Istituto Svizzero in Rome is titled Outlaws. The project takes the concept of law as its point of departure, questioning its nature as a human convention that appears immutable yet is often subject to historical shifts and internal tensions. The works examine what – and whom – the law governs, and who instead positions themselves above or outside it. These questions unfold across different historical periods and stories, often set in Switzerland. They also engage with the poetic, formal, and sometimes humorous dimensions of legal structures, exploring how rules and diplomacy can shape social realities and open new imaginative possibilities for understanding social justice and human coexistence.

The works operate across multiple registers, drawing on figures that have pushed beyond normalised rules and conventions, or groups who have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to impose new orders on reality. Toi et ta bande by Gina Proenza (Bogotá, 1994; lives in Lausanne) looks at medieval trials against insects that took place in the countryside around Lausanne as a lens to tackle the arbitrariness of legal procedure and the construction of the common enemy in times of crisis. Jonas Staal (Zwolle, 1981; lives in Basel) presents an overview of his long-term project New World Summit, through which he builds alternative parliaments for organisations excluded from existing legal and political frameworks. WHAT HAPPENED!? A conversation with my Mother by Cally Spooner (Ascot, 1983; lives in Turin) draws a connection between the founding of the Mont Pèlerin Society in 1947 on Lake Geneva and her mother’s past as an educator through the pedagogical concept of „benign neglect“. The singing moka pots by Yoan Mudry (Lausanne, 1990; lives in Geneva) reproduce an anarcho-punk song about work that emerged from the squatter movement in the 1990s, while the work of Doris Stauffer (Amden, 1934 – Zurich, 2017) bears witness to the height of artistic and feminist disobedience in 1970s Zurich through the deconstruction of the patriarchal order and the rehabilitation of the witch as a pedagogical figure operating outside the law. The lease is almost up by Shamiran Istifan (Baden, 1987; lives in Zurich) engages with the forms of separation between groups of people, repurposing a fourteenth-century altarpiece to give shape to the absences of institutional memory. Finally, the painting Swamped by Louisa Gagliardi (Sion, 1989; lives in Zurich) evokes a post-apocalyptic yet hopeful scenario in which human laws cease to make sense and nature reclaims the human landscape.

Curated by Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti (Head Curator Istituto Svizzero)