Living Museum | Erratic Bodies | October 12, 2024
12.10.2024 from 15:00 to 18:45
Two days of activities for the public with the presence of artists Mohammad Al Faraj, Moza Almatrooshi, Matilde Cerruti Quara, Ufuoma Essi, Lamin Fofana, Invernomuto, and Lea Porsager.
Saturday, September 28, 2024 – Erratic Bodies I
Saturday, October 12, 2024 – AMACI Giornata del Contemporaneo | Italian Contemporary Art – Erratic Bodies II
Castello di Rivoli
FREE ACCESS
Castello di Rivoli presents two new autumn dates of Living Museum. The program promotes experimental approaches that bridge various disciplines, where visual art intersects with other contemporary languages, such as cinema, dance, and music. The project explores the dual nature of the word ‘live,’ emphasizing the inseparable connection between art and audience participation within the Museum’s spaces.
The events will take place on Saturday, September 28, and Saturday, October 12, 2024 – AMACI Giornata del Contemporaneo | Italian Contemporary Art– offering to the public a series of activities featuring international artists. The two events are dedicated to the theme of Erratic Bodies – a title borrowed from the glacial erratics in the morainic landscape of the Val di Susa – and are curated by Giulia Colletti.
Transported by Alpine glaciers to the valley floor during the Ice Age, these masses, deposited in unexpected locations across the Piedmont region, often became objects of worship and sacred rituals, leaving traces in local folklore. Composed of sediments distinct from their surrounding environment, glacial erratics serve as witnesses to an unusual journey. They thus embody a state of being ‘out of place’ in their context, prompting reflections on contemporary issues of migration and transition for both human and non-human bodies, as well as the challenges posed by past and present climate changes.
The artists featured over the two days are Mohammad Al Faraj, Moza Almatrooshi, Matilde Cerruti Quara, Ufuoma Essi, Lamin Fofana, Invernomuto, and Lea Porsager.
The program blends social rituals, immaterial archives, and various cultural languages and approaches, exploring, over the two days, the significance of collective memory—not as a mere sum of individual experiences, but as a process of shared narrative that cements a common identity. By promoting the convergence of transdisciplinary research, the events highlight how performing arts, as well as living bodies, do not exist within a confined space but take shape and meaning in their erratic existence, continually shifting direction and drawing from the overcoming of geographical, disciplinary, and imposed classifications.
The schedule includes various artistic interventions addressing both individual and collective challenges related to the erasure and rehabilitation of historical narratives. The focus is on movement, both physical and imaginative, with research exploring transitions, boundary crossings, and the imagination of other worlds, embracing a state of personal and collective metamorphosis.
Living Museum
Erratic Bodies I
September 28, 2024
In the morning and early afternoon, the public is invited to actively participate in PALINSESTO, the first chapter of Matilde Cerruti Quara’s intervention at Castello di Rivoli. The artist encourages visitors to interact with her body by writing freely on it in response to the question ‘WHO ARE YOU?’. By dissolving her artistic identity and viewing the performer as a channel for receiving and transmitting a universal message, Matilde offers herself as a blank page and mirror for collective thought, prompting reflection on the multiple layers that make up the narratives we tell ourselves. The performance draws inspiration from the history of Castello, which in its own way is an ultimate palimpsest, particularly from the inscriptions found on its walls left by soldiers during the Second World War.
The afternoon continues with a preview of Lea Porsager‘s Rosy-fingered Dusk (2023) and Clockwork C.O.W. (2024), two 90-second flicker film loops accompanied by texts and pictograms. Both works reference the so-called Doomsday Clock, created by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists as a way of tracking how close humanity is to a global catastrophe. The closer to midnight, the closer to total collapse. In the short loops, subatomic particles known as muons (or, in cow-speak, “moo-ons”) move sleepily and erratically through impossible, impassable expanses.
At sunset, the public is invited to participate in REALISMO MAGICO, an immersive poetry performance that concludes Matilde Cerruti Quara’s intervention. For this occasion, she has written new texts reflecting on memory, intergenerational trauma, and the cathartic power of community. Exploring the human paradox with its dance of light and shadow—especially in times of war—the performance aims to offer the audience a poetic ritual as a means of collective reconnection.
Lamin Fofana will present a new performance designed to explore, through the rituality of sound, the notion of the extension and fluctuation of time.
Living Museum
Erratic Bodies II
October 12, 2024
On October 12, Castello di Rivoli will present Living Museum as part of AMACI Giornata del Contemporaneo | Italian Contemporary Art.
Mohammad Al Faraj will present a participatory action titled What it Will Take to Flock the Wings of Freedom Again? The audience will join the artist in awakening the bird of prayer, wishing for a better tomorrow, using palm leaves as wings and words and poetry as the wind.
Inspired by Toni Morrison’s text The Site of Memory, Ufuoma Essi’s film Half Memory will be presented for the first time in Italy at Castello di Rivoli, featuring a live soundtrack by Shamica Ruddock. The film is a profound meditation on memory, isolation, and contemporary narratives, oscillating between years, cities, and evolving images, exploring the present as an artifact of the past.
The museum’s café will offer special aperitifs, providing an opportunity to enjoy a drink and food. The special aperitifs are conceived by artist Moza Almatrooshi and prepared by the museum café. Almatrooshi’s artistic and culinary practice draws on ancient and modern mythologies of the Arabian Peninsula, influencing both her recipe creation and her political research on food in the region.
Invernomuto will present Black Med for the first time at Castello di Rivoli. This project was initiated as a digital archive of sounds collected from various sources, inspired by the insights of scholar Alessandra Di Maio on the Mediterranean Sea. Based on the identification of this fluid space marked by migratory crises, BlackMed leverages themes of mobility, intersection, and exchange that are constants in its history and present.
For the presentation of BlackMed at Castello di Rivoli, there will also be a special afternoon visit to the Cerruti Collection, hosted at Villa Cerruti and guided by art historian Fabio Cafagna. The visit will focus on the various representations of the Mediterranean over the centuries, starting with the 17th- and 18th-century atlases from Francesco Federico Cerruti’s collection. It will also offer an opportunity to reinterpret some works from the Collection from an alternative perspective, highlighting the connections between the regions bordering the Mediterranean.
PROGRAM
The programme might be subject to slight variations
In case of rain, the program will take place inside the Castello building
Erratic Bodies I
September 28, 2024
12:00 PM – 4:00 PM
Sala dei Continenti
PALINSESTO, performance by Matilde Cerruti Quara
6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Teatro Castello
Rosy-fingered Dusk and Clockwork C.O.W., screening of the films by Lea Porsager
7:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Atrio Castello
REALISMO MAGICO, performance by Matilde Cerruti Quara
6:00 PM – 10:00 PM
Café
Aperitif with menu conceived by Moza Almatrooshi
Cost €10
9:00 PM – 10:00 PM
Atrio Castello
The Open Boat, live sound performance by Lamin Fofana
Erratic Bodies II
October 12, 2024
3:00 PM – 3:30 PM
Manica Lunga Garden
What it will take to flock the wings of freedom again?, performance by Mohammad Al Faraj
4:00 PM – 4:45 PM
Castello Theatre
Half Memory, screening of Ufuoma Essi’s film with live sound design by Shamica Ruddock
4:00 PM
Villa Cerruti
Special visit featuring works from the collection related to the Mediterranean
SPECIAL Ticket €10
4:00 PM – 6:00 PM
Cafeteria
Special aperitif with a menu conceived by artist Moza Almatrooshi
Cost €10
6:00 PM – 6:45 PM
Castello Theatre
Sound performance Black Med by Invernomuto
BIOGRAPHIES
Mohammad Al Faraj is an artist, director, and writer who explores the complex relationships between humans, animals, and mythological creatures. He is deeply influenced by the oral traditions and legends of the Saudi collective imagination, drawing inspiration from social practices and architectures, both urban and rural, of everyday life.
Moza Almatrooshi experiments with culinary recipes and forms of collective storytelling. She uses literary fantasy to analyze gender dynamics and geopolitics. Her practice is distinguished by the symbolic use of food in narrating alternative stories, stemming from the erasure of Arab polytheistic practices.
Matilde Cerruti Quara is a poet, performer, actress, and writer. Her artistic practice flows between experimental theater, text-based works, and immersive installations. Rooted in the magical realism of language and narrative, her work interrogates themes of singular and collective identity, exploring archetypes, belief systems, natural forces, spirituality and rituals, as well as sexuality and power dynamics.
Ufuoma Essi primarily works with film and moving images, as well as installation and sound. Her research focuses on feminist epistemology and the reconstruction of lost histories. The archive is a fundamental tool through which Essi seeks to examine and fill the silences and gaps produced by political and historical narratives.
Lamin Fofana is an electronic music producer, DJ, and artist whose repertoire ranges from instrumental electronica to experimental music, ambient, and techno. In his practice, Fofana explores identity, diaspora, and migration, reflecting his translocal experience from Sierra Leone and Guinea to the United States. His artistic vision is deeply influenced by the various sounds and cultures he has encountered along his journey.
Invernomuto is the name under which Simone Bertuzzi and Simone Trabucchi have been operating since 2003. Invernomuto tends to think openly, developing different projects that take the form of moving images, sounds, performative actions, and editorial activities, within the context of a practice defined by the both dispersed and precise use of different media.
Lea Porsager intertwines fabulation and speculation with a variety of expressive means, including film, sculpture, photography, and text. Her works embrace themes such as science, politics, feminism, and esotericism.