Helvetropicos: Time is on my side initiates a series of projects by Istituto Svizzero dedicated to showcasing the work of independent, artist-run initiatives. The series aims at highlighting the fundamental role of off projects and artist-run collectives in shaping the contemporary art landscape. Istituto Svizzero seeks to offer an institutional platform to these initiatives, inviting them to contribute to its programme in Rome, Milan or Palermo.

For the first episode in the series, Istituto Svizzero invites the collective Helvetropicos to curate a programme of screenings and performances at the Botanical Garden in Palermo. Titled Time is on my side, the programme features the work of nine artists who explore the phenomenon of migration, shifting the perspective from that of geography to that of the experience of time.

Helvetropicos is an artistic platform that gathers artists living in Switzerland who share a genealogy of affection with Latin America. The invitation to curate a project for the Istituto Svizzero in Palermo attempts to complicate preconceived notions of Swiss identity, fostering and multiplicating perspectives shaped by conditions of geographical displacement. Helvetropicos explores contemporary forms of mestizajes (miscegenation, crossbreeding), a term referring to the emergence of hybrid identities resulting from the encounter of different cultures and knowledge systems. Helvetropicos: Time is on my side invites us to challenge the assumed equivalence between notions of belonging and national identity, while negotiating the concept of “swissness” within the context of the institution’s presence in Palermo. 

Helvetropicos: Time is on my side calls into question the multilayered narratives of the site where the project unfolds: on one hand the botanical garden, a device whose history is deeply entangled with the invention of tropicality. Rather than referring only to climate or geography, tropicality is a cultural and ideological construct that underpinned European processes of domestication, classification, and control over so-called wilderness expropriated from colonised territories. On the other hand Palermo, a city that inhabits linearities and disruptions in relation to subjects central to Helvetropicos’ inquiry. A historical crossroad for migratory routes and, at the same time, of contemporary touristification processes, the city sits at the heart of complex processes of exoticisation, self-exoticisation and resistance – processes that produce echoes and frictions with the works presented.

The performances and films presented in Time is on my side address migration and displacement as phenomena that engage not only geographies, but also temporalities. The act of moving overflows fixed maps and linear chronologies, directly challenging contemporary rationalisations of space and time. A public preaching might become a poetic exorcism, invoking female deities and mythologies that have survived centuries of erasure. A long walk through the city may unexpectedly surface traces of its past, revealing suggesting that we are navigating both a physical route and a historical one. Time is on my side reflects on how we traverse the places we find ourselves, and how this can reshape our sense of belonging. “Do we inhabit countries or landscapes?” asks Helvetropicos, unhinging the concept of nationality to celebrate movement as a living form of history.