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)
Elizabeth A. Povinelli is a critical theorist and filmmaker. She is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University and a founding member of the Karrabing Film Collective.
The installation Weather Reports (2021), commissioned for Rethinking Nature, consists of wall drawings that summarize five centuries of history to evoke the dramatic ecological and cartographic upheavals by which Europe asserted its control over the fate of territories, lands and peoples. These cartographies illustrate a landscape stretching from today’s Italian Alps to the salt marshes of today’s Australian Top End region of the Northern Territory to tell the effects of this history on two “clans” belonging to their respective territories, the ancestors of Povinelli and the ancestors of Karrabing Film Collective members. The histories of these two clans are also presented in parallel through the juxtaposition of the film The Inheritence (2021), which situates the dispossession suffered by the Povinelli family in Trentino-Alto Adige in the broader context of European immigration to the United States, and the two-channel video The Mermaid, Mirrorworls (2018), which presents a picture of the possible futures that will result from industrial toxicity in the ancestral lands of Karrabing members.
Povinelli’s work includes eight books, including Geontologies (2016), and the illustrated memoir, The Inheritance (2021), as well as more than eight films made with the Karrabing Film Collective. Together, they attempt to theorize and artistically represent the foundations and ends of late neocolonial liberalism.Between Gaia and Ground: Four Axioms of Existence and the Ancestral Catastrophe of Late Liberalism (2021), by Elizabeth Povinelli, which feeds into the conceptual foundations of “Rethinking Nature,” theorizes climate, environmental, viral, and social catastrophe as an ancestral catastrophe that has afflicted indigenous and colonized peoples for centuries.
