The orchestras of transformation

new artistic imaginaries for the 2030 Agenda
  
 

COOKING SECTIONS | JASMEEN PATHEJA | JOHANNE AFFRICOT (GRIOT)
 

curated by
Sara Alberani, Valerio Del Baglivo (Locales),
Matteo Lucchetti, Judith Wielander (
Visible project)
 
 
project manager
Francesca Abbado
 
 
 

The Orchestras of transformation - new artistic imaginaries for the 2030 Agenda, curated by the collectives Locales and Visible, is a project that combines contemporary artistic imagination with new action strategies for achieving the SDG objectives of the 2030 Agenda in the medium term. The themes of gender-based violence, regenerative actions for the climate emergency and underwater life, and the overcoming of social inequalities, are at the center of this edition for the city of Rome.

 

Initiated on the occasion of the 2020 Rome Charter launch, and commissioned by Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, the project Orchestras of transformation invites three international artistic and curatorial perspectives from Cooking Sections, Jasmeen Patheja and Johanne Affricot (GRIOT) to rethink artistic methods of intervention in the public sphere that implement paths of change and promote alternative imaginaries. Moreover,  due to the current pandemic situation, the team of the Orchestras has developed a multiform method of artistic presentation which includes establishing collaborations with local and international actors, developing social-media campaigns and podcast palimpsests with a powerful mediatic impact and aimed at a wider audience.

 

Starting from ongoing research and projects, each artist’s project addresses a different SDG, with the aim of working towards the implementation of new forms of awareness and generating new learning paths on urgent issues. Indian artist Jasmeen Patheja (SDG 5: Gender equality) in collaboration with feminist and and LGTBQI+ associations, will develop a podcast to reflect on the theme of gender-based violence. The British duo Cooking Sections (SDG 2: Achieving Food Security and Better Nutrition; SDG 13: Acting for the Climate; SDG 14: Life Underwater) will conduct a multifaceted campaign to raise public awareness on the impact of food production and consumption on the climate emergency. Lastly, with Exercises for the Imagination of a Space (SDG: 10), cultural producer and curator Johanne Affricot will be working on the theme of space by launching a series of conversations with Africans and Afro-descendants both locally and internationally. This will be done in order to build, map and amplify regenerative acts and practices within the realm of artistic and cultural production.

 
 
 
  

 artist profiles: Jasmeen Patheja, Cooking Sections, Johanne Affricot (GRIOT)

 

Portrait: Jasmeen Patheja (2016)
Photo credit: Arvind Rajan

 

Jasmeen Patheja is an artist and human rights activist living and working in Bangalore. Her artistic practice focuses on the development of socially engaged actions, bringing issues related to gender-based violence to public attention. Patheja is the founder and facilitator of the Blank Noise project, a growing community of Action Sheroes, Heroes, Theyroes: citizens and people, committed to ending sexual and gender-based violence. Patheja started the Blank Noise project in 2003, in response to the media and social silence on street harassment and verbal gender-based assaults. In 17 years she has designed a wide range of public interventions, using different forms of media to raise public awareness and build forms of civil responsibility on the problem. The project, through paths of listening to testimonies of sexual violence, also provides legal advice in case women necessitate compensation for the sexual harassment received. Phateja also works on a political level with victims' associations to formulate stricter laws against gender harassment.

 

Jasmeen Patheja, I Never Asked for It, Blank Noise, dal 2003. Photo credit: Jasmeen Pathejaa
 

In 2019, Patheja received the prestigious Visible Award for Socially Engaged Art Practices. She recently received the Jane Lombard Fellowship from the New School's Vera List Center For Art and Politics, New York. In 2015 he received the International Award For Public Art, as part of the Talk To Me (Blank Noise) project. Finally she was the beneficiary of Awesome Without Borders, from the Harnisch Foundation. In 2019 the BBC included her among the 12 artists who are changing the world. Patheja is a TED and TED speaker and Ashoka Fellow. Her work has received numerous media mentions including The Atlantic, New York Times, The Guardian. He is currently a resident artist at the Srishti Institute of Art Design and Technology.


 


 


Portrait: Cooking Sections
Photo credit: Lourdes Cabrera

 

Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual & Alon Schwabe) is an artistic duo living and working in London. The duo was created to explore the systems that organize our contemporary societies through food. Using installations, performances, mapping and video, their research practice explores the boundaries between visual arts, architecture, ecology and geopolitics. Since 2015, they have been working on CLIMAVORE, a site-specific project which explores how the food system is changing due to climate change. In 2016 they opened THE EMPIRE REMAINS SHOP, a platform to trigger a series of critical debates on the implications of the colonial past. Their first book on the project was published by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City.

 

Cooking Sections was part of the exhibition at the United States Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale 2014. Their work has also been exhibited at the 2019 Los Angeles Public Art Triennale; Sharjah Architecture Triennial and 13th Sharjah Biennial; Manifesta12, Palermo; Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, Columbia University of New York; Serpentine Galleries, London; Atlas Arts, Skye; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Storefront for Art & Architecture, New York; Peggy Guggenheim Collection; HKW Berlin; Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Oslo Architecture Triennale 2016; Brussels ParckDesign; the artists were in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, California; and The Politics of Food at Delfina Foundation, London.

 

Cooking Sections, Climavore: On Tidal Zones, dal 2005, Isola di Skye - Scozia. Photo Credit: Colin Hattersely
 

Upcoming solo shows will be held at Tate Britain, SALT Istanbul and Bonniers Konsthall Stockholm, as well as a new commission for the New Orleans Triennial P.5. They conduct a study course at the Royal College of Art, London, and are visiting professors at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich.

In 2019 they received the Future Generation Special Art Prize and were finalists for the Visible Award for socially engaged practices. Daniel Fernández Pascual received the Harvard GSD Wheelwright Prize 2020 for the research project Being Shellfish.
 


  


Portait: Johanne Affricot
Photo credit: © Marco Brunelli

 

Johanne Affricot is an Italian-Haitian-Ghanaian culture curator, born and raised in Rome. She is the founder and artistic director of boutique media platform GRIOTmag and nomadic space SPAZIO GRIOT which—powered by an eponymous collective—platforms and fosters experimentation, exploration and discussion through arts and culture. Driven by the need to create a space of representation that amplifies underrepresented voices in the Italian and international artistic and socio-cultural landscape, she founded GRIOT in 2015. She is also a member of the GRIOT Collective, alongside writer, artist and music producer Celine Angbeletchy, known by the stage name of EHUA, and Eric Otieno Sumba, a writer, social theorist and critic.

 

In 2015 she curated the discussion panel Afroitalians in the Arts Today within the exhibition Nero su Bianco (Black on White) at the American Academy in Rome. She produced and directed the documentary series The Expats. The Untold Stories of Black Italians Abroad (2016-2017) and Motherland > (2017 - present). Between 2018-2019, she was the artistic director of Mirrors, a contemporary dance and video art performance designed for the Italia, Culture, Africa program of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation which travelled from Rome to Addis Ababa, Johannesburg and Dakar. For the Futura Memoria/Contemporaneamente Roma festival (2019) she curated (Memorie) In Ascolto (Listening Memories), a reading performance and a video installation at a market hall. In 2020 the international organization of contemporary photography Der Greif invited her to curate an online exhibition titled Guest Room.

 

Affricot is one of the ten women selected by the Italian Ministry for Foreign Affairs that represent Italian culture, creativity, and language around the world, and was featured in the video series Portraits of women on the online portal “Italiana” in 2021.

 

 


 

 
LE ORCHESTRE DELLA TRASFORMAZIONE 
is a project by

Locales e Visible (Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto / Fondazione Zegna)
 

 

LOCALES is a curatorial platform founded in Rome by Sara Alberani and Valerio Del Baglivo to reflect on the role of art in the redefinition of the public sphere  in the post-lockdown world. Through a series of site-specific and situated programs that include commissions of new artistic works, explorations in public space, moments of learning and performance, LOCALES addresses the complexity of contemporary urgencies starting from the political and social history of symbolic places in Rome  and communities that inhabit them.

In the city of Rome, LOCALES constitutes  a geography of places, institutions, cultural organizations with whom  collaborates and realizes  its programs: German Academy Rome Villa Massimo, Spanish Embassy in Italy, Casanatense Library, British School at Rome, Circolo Scandinavo, IILA - Istituto Italo Latino Americano, Museo delle Civiltà, National Roman Museum, NABA - New Academy of Fine Arts, Real Academia de España en Rome, RomaEuropa Festival, University of Roma Tre - Department of Architecture.

 
 

 

Visible (Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto / Fondazione Zegna) is a multiform project that since 2010 has been researching, supporting and producing contemporary artistic practices engaged on the most pressing societal issues, curated by Judith Wielander and Matteo Lucchetti. From 2011 to 2019 Visible has organized the Visible Award, the first European prize for socially engaged art, connecting more than 200 projects from around the world, collaborating with more that 150 curators, and inventing the format of the Temporary Parliament. An inclusive event of democratic participation in the decision-making process for assigning the award, involving prestigious institutions such as the Tate Modern, Serpentine Galleries, Van Abbemuseum, and the Queens Museum in New York, as well as real parliaments such as the Hotel de Ville in Paris and the City Council of Liverpool.

From 2021 Visible has launched a new fellowship program in collaboration with multiple public and private entities dedicated to socially engaged projects in progress, and based on the contexts and needs of these, to offer support to artists who dedicate their artistic work to experiment ideas and actions that have an impact on society. Visible has also produced exhibitions, performances, conferences, screening programs and study courses in collaboration with the following institutions: Creative Time, New York; The Venice Biennale; The High Line, New York; Kunsthaus Graz; Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco; Center for Historical Reenactments, Johannesburg; Statens Konstråd / Public Art Agency, Stockholm; Curatorlab at Konstfack University, Stockholm.