Observatory Bormida Valley

The installation presented at the exhibition Our Rivers Share a Mouth in Guarene is my first attempt at a public restitution. It contains various elements such as archive material from the Associazione per la Rinascita della Valle Bormida, the Valley activists and the Valle Bormida Pulita newspaper office (posters, banners, newspapers, leachate bottle, furniture, audio tracks); a phenolic resin rotary phone modified with Arduino: each number from 0 to 9 corresponds to an audio track of telephone interviews selected from audio cassettes found in the newspaper office; a violet room diffuser; a mural of the Bormida river flanked by a poem from the book Bormida by Patricia Dao published in 2012; two large drums with a hand-sown garden meadow on top; a small drum with a monitor on it that publicly broadcasts for the first time in Italy the documentary Inside the Poison trade recorded in the Bormida Valley in 1989 by British journalists Alan Hayling and Nick Davison for Channel 4; a military trunk from the early 1900s with personal archive material from the fascist and colonialist period inside, with particular reference to the use of chemical weapons in colonial campaigns.

It is aimed at creating a space for criticism and decontamination from past and current systemic violence induced for profit by corrupt patriarchal entities, and to connect and generate different narratives and geographies of resistance, both human and non-human.

More information about the research can be found in the text I wrote for the publication of the exhibition 𝐎𝐮𝐫 𝐑𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐒𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐌𝐨𝐮𝐭𝐡