On Decay and Rebirth
23.03.2024 from 16:00 to 19:00
MARCH 23rd, 2024, h. 4 – 7 p.m.
CASTELLO DI RIVOLI MUSEO D’ARTE CONTEMPORANEA
Theatre, from 4 p.m.
Jardin Bois de Rose (16m 4s), 2022, and Terre Rouge (19m 31s), 2022
screening of Tabita Rezaire’s videos
Museum Atrium and First Floor, from h. 4.45 p.m.
TANGO!, 2024
performance by Benni Bosetto
Second Floor, Gallery 22, h. 6 p.m.
Lingua Ignota (Timeo, 2023)
reading by Huw Lemmey
Project Room, h. 7 p.m.
MERCURY + RED + MATRILINEAL, 2024
performative reading by Antonia Brown
During the week of the spring equinox, Castello di Rivoli hosts On Decay and Rebirth, a day dedicated to celebrating the generative power of art and nature. The Museum’s galleries, the theater, and the eighteenth-century atrium will come alive with contemporary artists and writers through screenings, performances, and readings focusing on metamorphosis, coexistence, and rebirth.
Having moved from Paris to French Guiana to study agriculture and land cultivation according to ancient traditions, Tabita Rezaire is an artist, healer, and yoga teacher whose work explores how the earth, societies, and people come together and intersect through agriculture. On the occasion of Vibrant Natures. On Decay and Rebirth, the theater of the Museum will host the screening of two videos by the artist addressing the meaning of traditional agriculture and ancient practices. Jardin Bois de Rose (Rosewood Garden), 2022, tells the story of a garden in French Guiana where various species of traditional medicinal and ornamental plants are grown. With this work, Rezaire opens a window into the local pharmacopeia. Terre Rouge (Red Earth), 2022, explores possible ways in which individuals can reconnect with the earth and ancestral practices related to traditional indigenous agriculture.
Benni Bosetto’s artistic practice has always focused on the transformation and deconstruction of the body. For the occasion of On Decay and Rebirth, the artist presents TANGO!, 2024, an unprecedented performance that unfolds in the exhibition spaces of the collection in three moments: from the melancholy of a solitary heart, an interspecies tango will invade different rooms of the Museum, culminating in a cathartic living carillon. The work aims to initiate a reflection on infatuation as a process of intoxication and on the corporeality of feelings, playing with clichés and archetypes associated with love.
A religious figure, writer, mystic, and theologian from 12th-century Germany, Hildegard of Bingen wrote treatises on medicine and botany regarding the medicinal use of herbs. Among her works is Lingua Ignota per simplicem hominem Hildegardem prolata, a text written in a language she invented for mystical purposes. Writer and critic Huw Lemmey interprets Hildegard’s vision in his text Lingua Ignota, addressing the themes of apocalypse, epidemic, and the regenerative power of mystical practices. For On Decay and Rebirth, Lemmey will read excerpts from his book, followed by a collective reading of the text published in Italian in 2023 by Timeo.
Visual artist Antonia Brown resides between Cape Town and Brussels. Her artistic practice extends through sculpture, writing, and performance, she posits how materials participate in the ongoing formation of bodies. Through a performative reading containing contributions by British author Kate Briggs, Brown meanders through the history of red, drawing on its particular relation to extraction and toxicity. MERCURY + RED + MATRILINEAL, 2024, investigates how color has been submerged in the politics of the body since antiquity to the present day: from Carmine, drawn from female parasitic Cochineal insects of the Nopal cactus in Mexico, to vermillion and its noxious entanglement with Mercury, to blood red. Brown thus evokes mercurial qualities to symbolise the stories and transmission of lineages of the feminine.
Vibrant Natures. On Decay and Rebirth’s final event will take place on Sunday, March 24th at 12 p.m. at Orti Generali, str. Castello di Mirafiori, 38/15, Turin, with Banchetto della rinascita (Banquet of Rebirth) curated by Debora Incorvaia and Paolo Bosca, involving the Orti Generali community. This will be followed by a poetry reading curated by the Ethereal Society of Poetry.
Vibrant Natures. On Decay and Rebirth is a project realized by Almanac Inn, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, and Orti Generali, with the support of Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo, Fondazione CRT and Regione Piemonte.
Vibrant Natures. On Decay and Rebirth is a project realized by Almanac Inn, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, and Orti Generali, with the support of Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo, Fondazione CRT and Regione Piemonte.
Vibrant Natures. On Decay and Rebirth is curated by Guido Santandrea for Almanac Inn and Marianna Vecellio for Castello di Rivoli.
BIOGRAPHIES
Benni Bosetto
(Italy, 1987) artist
Bosetto studied at the Brera Academy in Milan and at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam. Her practice encompasses drawing, performance, sculpture and installation, and investigates the body from an interspecies and gender perspective. She has recently deepened her study of ancient and contemporary healing rituals, the states of semiconsciousness characteristic of meditation and sleep. She has exhibited at MAMbo, Bologna, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Guarene, GAMeC, Bergamo and Quadriennale di Roma.
Antonia Brown
(South Africa, 1989) artist
Antonia Brown studied at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, and participated in residency programs at Fondazione Ratti, Como, Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, and Morpho, Antwerp. Her recent research investigates how medieval humoral medicine and botany have influenced our conceptions of the body and how this relates to a decolonial process of reimagining somatic relationships. She collaborates with writer and translator Kate Briggs.
Huw Lemmey
(England, 1986) writer, artist and critic
Author of Lingua Ignota (Timeo, 2023), My Corbyn Chemsex Hell (Montez Press, 2019) e Chubz: The Demonization of my Working Arse (Montez Press, 2014). He writes about gender studies, sexuality, politics and mysticism. He contributes to Frieze, The Guardian, Flash Art, Tribune, TANK, The Architectural Review, Art Monthly, New Humanist, Rhizome and Vogue. Together with Ben Miller, he hosts the podcast Bad Gays, from which the book Bad Gays. Crudeli e spietati: una storia omosessuale (Il Saggiatore, 2023) was published.
Tabita Rezaire
(France, 1989) artist, devotee, yoga teacher, doula and farmer
Rezaire lives in Cayenne, French Guiana, where she founded Amakaba, a center for the wisdom of earth, body and sky. She holds a degree in Economics and a Master of Research in Moving Image from Central Saint Martins, London. Rezaire is a founding member of the artist group NTU and part of the duo Malaxa. Her practice focuses on the relationship between technology and spirituality. She imagines network sciences (organic, electronic and spiritual) as healing agents. Rezaire has been exhibited at Centre Pompidou, Paris; Serpentine, London; MoMa, NY; New Museum, NY; MASP, Sao Paulo; Gropius Bau Berlin e Artspace, Sydney.
VIBRANT NATURES. ON DECAY AND REBIRTH
Vibrant Natures. On Decay and Rebirth is a project developed by Almanac Inn, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea and Orti Generali, curated by Guido Santandrea and Marianna Vecellio, in which the notion of decomposition, hybridization and toxicity meets that of rebirth.
Starting with the investigation of residual places and the transformation of matter, the project esplores how processes of decay can represent opportunities for change, metamorphosis and nurture, in which new forms of coexistence, alliance and stratification help to reimagine the existing and possible futures.
In the multiplicity of matter, bodies permeate, aggregate, and participate in a collective dimension capable of subverting the individual condition of existence and transcending the human-non-human binomial. At every moment, the form changes in a process of cyclical and perpetual reconfiguration to acquire a vital and mutable character, capable of liberating and redefining the bodies.
In an approach that places transdisciplinarity, ecology, and intersectionality at its center, the three partners will develop a program that, from February 3rd to March 24th, culminates in the week of the spring equinox, a symbol of harmony and a condition for transformative benefit.
Vibrant Natures consists of workshops, performances, talks, readings, walks, and installations to bring together nature and history, environmental studies and artistic languages, mysticism and poetry, inviting international artists and intellectuals to Turin and engaging them in a dialogue with its territory. Among the participants: Soukaina Abrour, Lucilla Barchetta, Paolo Bosca, Benni Bosetto, Antonia Brown, Filippo De Pieri, Ethereal Society of Poetry, Simone Frangi, Matthew Gandy, Allison Grimaldi Donahue, Debora Incorvaia, Huw Lemmey, Michele Lonati, Tabita Rezaire, Viviana Sorrentino, Noura Tafeche.
The program will unfold across the different venues of the partners involved: Almanac Inn, the exhibition and research space dedicated to showcasing and supporting the practices of young emerging artists; Castello di Rivoli, the first Italian museum dedicated to contemporary art; and Orti Generali, the urban agricultural spaces established in a residual area on the banks of the Sangone stream in Mirafiori Sud, strongly characterized by the social and environmental impact of the FIAT industrial plants that, in the sixties, led to a tenfold increase in the neighborhood’s population.
Vibrant Natures is a project made possible by the support of Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo, Fondazione CRT, and Regione Piemonte.