Indigenousness. Dialogue between Environment, Art and Identity

24 September 2022. 17:00 (Italian Time). A talk curated by Chiara Bozzato and Virginia Padovani will be taking place at the Archivi della Misericordia (Fondamenta de l’Abazia, 3548, Venice) on the theme “Indigenousness. Dialogue between environment, art and identity”. The talk is part of the Pera+Flora+Fauna collateral event of the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia – organized by PORT, the cultural agency of the state of Perak, Malaysia.

The panelists:

Stefano Cagol, an Italian artist invited to the Malaysian pavilion with the work “Far Before and After Us” (2022), explores the relationship of man – and the indigenous – with the environment and the attempt to enter into symbiosis with the latter, continuing his reflections fueled by contact with the indigenous Sami population during his residency in the Arctic. The project emerges from the research “The Time of the Flood (Beyond the myth through climate change)”, Postmediabooks, 2021, where the artist faces the imbalances of our relationship with nature inspired by the archetypal image of the Universal Flood.

Professor Franca Tamisari, professor of Anthropology at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, has been conducting research among the Yolngu people in Australia since 1990. She is interested in the aesthetic, artistic, and performative dimensions of indigenous people, as well as the concept of care related to relations of kinship. On the subject she published the paper “Yolngu Country as a Multidimensional Tangle of Relationships How ‘Everything is Linked to One Another'” within Lagoonscapes, Venice Journal of Environment Humanities, vol. 2 – Num.1, June 2022.

Pengpeng Wang is a Chinese artist and curator who lives between Florence and Salerno, where he is currently a Ph.D. student in Aesthetics and Art History, jointly with MARA University in Malaysia. He is writing his Ph.D. thesis on the national participation of Malaysia in the Biennial Art of Venice, deepening the political-art link, from the moment when Malaysia participates in 2019 for the first time, after great internal political changes. Pengpeng Wang will virtually intervene with a prerecorded video contribution related to his research.