Istituto Svizzero presents SPEAKING NEARBY, the closing event of the 2023/2024 Fellows. Curated by Piersandra Di Matteo
A DJ set with Qursarina will close the evening.

PRACTICAL INFORMATION

21.06.2024 H18:30-24:00
Istituto Svizzero
Via Ludovisi 48, Rome
Free entry, register here

Food and drinks will be available to purchase on site.
The event is also the occasion to see the group show On Love, on view within the spaces of Villa Maraini.

SPEAKING NEARBY is a concertation of theoretical postures and artistic gestures staged across the various spaces of Villa Maraini throughout the extended time of a long afternoon into the night. The title, borrowed from a conversation with the filmmaker, composer, and theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha, implies an indirect mode of speaking to allow other voices to be heard, to operate artistically in order to make space, and to engage in an intra-action with bodies, sounds, and other matters. Intended as an operational framework to explore an expanded notion of proximity, the researchers and artists in a 10-month residency at Istituto Svizzero present punctual emergences of their researches, revealing how ideas and things navigate through different protocols of encounters, the attunements with certain environments, the orientations connected with their own positioning, and the transformations that resonate within situated processes, enabling something to happen.

SPEAKING NEARBY is a device of coexistences, resonances, and interferences. It’s a journey amidst breaths emerging from sculptures blowing into the water, whispers close to concepts, bodily humors linked to shame and archives of pleasure, statements of feminist artists inquiring the dynamics of social reproduction. It’s an attunement with sonic grottos, with piano compositions by an Ethiopian mystic with a colonial history, with the Neo-pagan theories devoted to Olympic deities in the heart of the Middle Ages, and with voices entangled within the realms of law and the divine. It’s an encounter with ancient traditions invented out of thin air in an uncertain present and bored customs that move on their own, while elsewhere silkscreen prints interrogate clothing codes through the standardization inherent in every uniform.
It’s a dialogue with excrescences made of paper, glue, and other materials, in symbiosis with the façade of the Villa, with references to a peculiar funerary monument of a woman in 16th century Naples, with the obsolescence of neon advertising sign reshaped by artificial intelligence, with the random flickering of public lights in the nights of the Eternal City.

Download the final event map here