The third edition of Hidden Histories includes a series of workshops, installations, performances and crossings to rethink Rome in a decolonial key.
Hidden Histories, the programme of site-specific performative practices for the city of Rome, curated by Sara Alberani and Marta Federici with Valerio Del Baglivo, is back. Hidden histories are not simply ‘hidden’ stories, but deliberately invisible narratives; a past yet to be realised that concerns the coloniality of cultural production. Instead, the project resurfaces the repressed, activating paths of deconstruction starting from the cultural heritage that surrounds us.
“This is the declaration of love we are making to our city,” commented Valerio Del Baglivo in one of our interviews, “we are trying to redefine some of the places of the Urbe outside the hegemonic rhetoric. It is also a way to bring the local community closer to complex issues, starting with the places they already know, trying to look at them from another perspective’. Also for the summer of 2022, Hidden Histories maintains this principle, promising a series of events to critically rethink Roman public space from a decolonial perspective.
Hidden Histories 2022: Finding the words/Finding the words
Public space in Rome is closely connected to the notions of heritage, conservation, restoration, monumentality, and includes collections, archives, and objects that are still read and valued within a partial and exclusive canon. Here, artists and artists open up paths of re-proposition and re-signification of places in the city from which communities have been estranged. In different ways, they detect and analyse processes of invisibilisation and trace marginalised stories and voices to bring them out into the public space.
The subtitle of this latest edition Finding the words / Finding the words takes its cue from an expression of feminist theorist Sara Ahmed. In Living a Feminist Life, Ahmed focuses on the linguistic dimension, to be understood as a fundamental space in which to act in order to declare what is not visualised and recognised within society as violent, racist and sexist. As stated in the text, finding words therefore means naming the problems we are confronted with and “allows things to acquire a social and physical density, gathering in a tangible form what would otherwise have remained scattered experiences”.
Hidden Histories is organised by Mariana Trench Associazione Culturale, promoted by Roma Capitale – Assessorato alla Cultura, is winner of the Public Notice “Estate Romana 2020 – 2021 – 2022”, curated by the Department of Cultural Activities and is realised in collaboration with SIAE. All events are free of charge.
The Hidden Histories calendar: part one
It starts on 6 and 7 June with the workshop Attivissimə by Colombian artist and director Ivan Argote. The initiative involves a group of children from the after-school programme of the San Donato Parents School Association, a point of reference in the Esquiline area for initiatives that encourage and consolidate relations between the neighbourhood’s different communities. Through a playful interpretation of language, public space is reconstructed as an interactive place: what do we like, what don’t we like? What is an event? Do we do it collectively or personally? These are the questions proposed to them, before a walk accessible to all in the afternoon of 7 June, with a procession from the San Donato school to the Piazza Vittorio gardens. The event is in collaboration with Associazione Genitori Scuola Di Donato and Villa Medici – Accademia di Francia in Rome.
On 19 July, the New York artist Autumn Knight will present a site-specific performance inside Palazzo Altemps. The artist confronts Italian culture in a work that critically explores the all-native concept of ‘dolce far niente’, using the body, text and sound as means to explore the political and creative meanings of the phrase. To do this, Knight chooses two specific locations: the Church of Sant’Aniceto and the Theatre, which over time has been transformed from a performance venue to a cinema and finally a piano bar. Two contexts linked in different ways to moments of suspension from daily activities, between leisure and rituality, which perfectly match the theme investigated by the artist.
Appointments in September
In the second part of the Hidden Histories events, we return to the Museum of Civilisations with the Italian-Libyan artist Adelita Husni-Bey, who will lead a workshop from 12 to 15 September, accessible by appointment. The workshop will involve walking through rooms and museum storerooms, as well as the most significant urban locations in the EUR district. The aim is to apply cooperative pedagogical methods to reflect on the museum concept as a colossal mirror in which Europe has constructed and represented itself, also through the reflection of the image of other cultures, creating canons of outlook and hierarchies of knowledge. The MuCiv is not new to collaborations with Hidden Histories: we still remember the workshop Phantom Museum by Leone Contini that you can catch up on in the episode of our podcast “polemichette”, with an interview with the artist.
The month of September thickens with the work I libri sono corpi (can be dismembered) by artist Dora Garcia, for the spaces of the Casanatense Library. The complex project revolves around a selection of books that were censored, deleted, dismembered from the library’s collection, due to the subversive potential they were recognised as having. Special attention is paid to Apocalypsis Nova, written in the late 15th century by Blessed Amadeo da Silvia, which bears witness to a frightening change of times, censured for his prophetic visions. The text will be shown in manuscript copies in the Bramante’s Tepietto, part of the Real Academia de Espana in Rome.
The programme includes: on 7 September there will be the opening of the installation in the Salone Monumentale of the Biblioteca Casanatense, with a performance by Dora Garcia; on 21 September the presentation of the project with the artist, and a reading group at the Tempietto del Bramante; on 28 September a performance in the Reading Room and Archive of the Library and finisccage. The project is realised thanks to the support of Real Academia de España en Roma and Acción Cultural Española (AC/E), in collaboration with Biblioteca Casanatense.
Text by Yasmin Riyahi
