Meetings with artists, guided tours and explorations outside the walls
A special series of visits to the Botanical Garden of Naples led by artist Maria Thereza Alves with botanists and historians is planned
In March, the Madre museum will offer a free public program organized as part of the exhibition Rethinking Nature, curated by Kathryn Weir with associate curator Ilaria Conti: meetings with artists, guided tours and urban explorations through which to explore the themes of the exhibition. A busy schedule of collective learning activities, taking place both in-person and remotely, will follow the exhibition’s approach, which highlights how contemporary art is contributing to a series of cultural and political processes capable of collectively rethinking the ethical foundations of existence in the world, shedding light on the forms of interconnectedness that bind the entire planet.
A special series of visits, organized in collaboration with the Botanical Garden of Naples, will be led by artist Maria Thereza Alves and a group of botanists and historians, delving into issues related to the processes of nomenclature and classification of botanical species considered by Alves’ Decolonizing Botany / Jevy Jejapo-pyra Temitī-tyre work, commissioned for Rethinking Nature.
For the meetings, admission to the museum will be free, while guided tours of the exhibition will be included in the cost of the ticket.
The first scheduled meeting will be held on Friday, March 4, at 6 p.m. at Madre: Spanish artist Fernando García-Dory, founder of the INLAND collective, created to collaboratively rethink the relationship between rurality and culture, will present the project Aero.sol – shelter. An apiary for the Inland Village, commissioned for Rethinking Nature, along with the activities and management of symbiotic ecologies conducted by INLAND in a village in the Cordillera Cantabrica in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula. The meeting will be in English, and admission will be on a first-come, first-served basis; admission to the museum will be free.
The work presented at Madre is an installation composed of a soundscape in which the sound produced by bees is interwoven with a chorus of women engaged in the cultural practice of telling bees about family bereavements. The work is accompanied by a series of silkscreens referencing ancestral stories of collaboration between bees and humans.
The Campania Regional Museum of Contemporary Art will also host, from Friday, March 4 to Sunday, March 6, several seminars of the INLAND Academy, a new postgraduate course focusing on rurality, art and collective learning strategies, dedicated to 20 students from diverse backgrounds. After the Naples stop, the INLAND Academy will then continue in June 2022 at Documenta 15, Kassel.
On Saturday, March 5, at 11 a.m., the series of guided tours at the Botanical Garden of Naples will be inaugurated. The first tour, in which artist Maria Thereza Alves will be in discussion with Bruno Menale, a researcher in ethnobotany and systematic botany in the Department of Biology at Federico II University, will focus on the curative and magical-religious uses of plants in the rural communities of central and southern Italy.
On Monday, March 14, at 5:30 p.m., Madre, in collaboration with the University of Naples L’Orientale, presents the lecture Two Clans | Weather Reports by Elizabeth A. Povinelli. The English-language meeting, which will be accessible subject to availability (free admission to the museum) and will also be streamed on the museum’s social channels, will be introduced by Tiziana Terranova, with talks by Kathryn Weir; Vivian Ziherl (Kunstinstituut Melly,Rotterdam, NL/Monash University, Australia); Miguel Mellino (Università L’Orientale, Naples)
On Thursday, March 17, at 6 p.m., there will be a guided tour of the Rethinking Nature exhibition led by Madre Museum artistic director Kathryn Weir. A tour in which the connections between the different artistic practices on display, the themes underlying the project and the articulation of experimental creative vocabularies aimed at producing alternative forms of knowledge and social practice centered on political ecology will be highlighted.
Saturday, March 19, at 11 a.m., second appointment with the series of visits to the Botanical Garden: Maria Thereza Alves will offer a reinterpretation of the history of the Botanical Garden and the formation of its collection, narrated by Professor of Systematic Botany of the University of Naples Federico II Paolo Caputo, in conversation with Iain Chambers.
On Sunday, March 20, at 11 a.m., a new opportunity for the discovery of the works and reflections in the exhibition through a visit led by assistant curator Pietro Scammacca, to the Rethinking Nature exhibition, which includes more than 50 works created by more than 40 artists and collectives from 22 countries, including 15 new productions presented as international premieres.