CRONÒTOPIA _ Trace the past into the present was conceived by three artists, Valerie Tameu, Teresa Noronha Feio and Annalisa Cannito, in the framework of the Officin&Ideali artists residence’s program from which we were separately selected. After a first encounter and a round of presentation of our artistic researches and practices, we felt the need to enter in dialogue and critically deepen some of the themes covered in our three processes of investigation. The common vision was that of an intersection between our personal trajectories through a path of contamination of knowledges, perspectives and artistic practices, with the intent to develop a shared and participatory project.
CRONÒTOPIA, from the Greek words chrónos – time and tópos – place, conceptually proposes an investigation on the temporal and spacial traces of a past that we find in our present, looking at the future’s potential.
During the residency we investigated and tried to deconstruct some phenomena that despite their specificity we consider connected to each other by Western colonial history. An heritage that has been distorted, removed or in some cases glorified through history books, family stories, collective memory, at school, as well as in the urban spaces we walk across.
It is from a radical re-articulation of this hegemonic cultural and semantic legacy that we can contribute to unmask the colonial traces still rooted in our minds, looks, attitudes, languages, embodied privileges.
Ours is meant to be an attempt to translate this complex plot through a multidisciplinary artistic practice, poetic and political at the same time, contributing to build resistant narratives and rebellious alliances.
CRONÒTOPIA
Via Cirenaica
Torino
July
2020
(video stills)
Etiopia_Rassegna illustrata dell’impero XV (Archival material Annalisa C.)
Even though the project has experienced many challenges through out the year, we kept working with regularity and adapt to the circumstances. The work was developed through on-line platforms, except for a week we spent working in person in Turin (July 2020), where we all met for the first and only time. The on-site residency (Quartucciu/Cagliari) has been postponed and finally cancelled. Nevertheless we gave a first restitution about our long process through a dislocated live virtual performance on the 21st of December 2020. It includes different elements we experimented during the year starting from a sort of autobiographical investigation (sound recording) to trainings in the public space, precisely where the streets recall the ghost of the past, with the intent to recognize the coloniality around before making it recognizable for others. We imagined to built temporary architectures with the bodies and reveal narratives that have been traditionally marginalized. The body as vehicle and vector of a memory. The body as a monument, anti-monument, monument of resistance, liquid monument, monument in ruins, monument in action, falling monument, precarious monument, silent monument, sound monument. The actions that we would like to practise in the future, in coalition with other bodies, are moments of re-appropriation of these spaces, the making of a collective body for a shared re-construction of the public space.
CRONÒTOPIA virtual live performance 21st December 2020
Our concern was also the one of leaving a trace in the present which could provide a critical framework to look at this specific historical period. Therefore we created a pilot action through which we left a Qr-code on the street sign of Via Asmara in Torino.