Room to Bloom arrives to Palermo: The Living Pavilion
Following our workshop in Athens and the ongoing video program at Kiev Biennale, Room to Bloom transnational and intercultural platform reaches Palermo on November 19th -23th. A second training and exhibition will take the shape of The Palermo Living Pavilion curated by Marcela Caldas. A call for action aims to promote collaborative learning by doing an approach fostering exchange between artists, art professionals, institutions, and communities beyond frontiers. The online and site-specific program works as an organism aiming to leverage art practices from a transfeminist, post-human, queer, and decolonial standpoint. The relational device overfloods and delves into borderlands and institution walls with counter-narratives reshaping art practices into a motion site-specific laboratory committed to examining processes. By retrieving and activating archives aiming to re-center peripheral narratives into inclusive spaces of radical difference and care.
The three-day multi-format festival will spatially explore many forms of enclosure that underpin colonial and patriarchal binary mechanisms of exclusion of Capitalism configuring subaltern otherness as gender, class, race, and wilderness. Simultaneously we will be operating within multiple tensions across borders and politics of display building room for a less hierarchical and more horizontal collective agency, reclaiming time and space to re-imagine newer softer porous forms of otherness and togetherness.
‘The Living Pavilion’ navigates daily Palermo’s public space through relational artworks and training led mainly by Room to Bloom network artists produced in collaboration with the local art scene in events hosted by artists, associations, collectives, and activists. Evenings will offer screenings, performances, and discussions with our invited artists in different venues open to the city’s general public, art students and will be streamed online to our extended network.
On-site and online radio streamed episodes will announce and expand a follow up of the outcome and afterlife of this 4 day collective artwork in order to promote interaction with local communities seeding a long-lasting ecosystem of interconnectedness across borders, time, and distance for us to cultivate thresholds holding space for a sense of agency, cross-pollination, and belonging.
Objectives
Unchosen Immobility is the first violence done to a body
Movement and Agency
Drifting Palermo living archive and politics of display, to examine borderlands and mechanisms of enclosure, exclusion and insularity by reclaiming agency and space. The quest for agency identifying conditions for possibility able to bring a transdisciplinary intersectional collaboration approach seeding new forms of togetherness.
Narrative
To re-examine narratives, retrieving silenced stories by re-centering the self – narrative into situated storytelling that enables reenchantment and radical imagination through Art as a form of Oracling.
Hierarchy
To focus on horizontal processes, hospitality and practices of care aiming to critically dismantle insular and hierarchical conditioning of art production. We will re-examine tensions of the intimate and the public, re appropriating embodiment, language and movement as operational tools. To promote equally a shift from the genius fiction of the autonomous individual towards the collective authorship and interdependence beyond the human.
Time
To disrupt the linear logics of time of Capital embedded in notions of progress and consumption reclaiming the southern time of myth embedded in Palermo’s living complex multilayered archive. Cycles, rituals and repetition will serve to rediscover a sense of history rendering visible the entanglements that configure our present operational frame.
Commons and Care
To co-create common space for experimentation overflooding institutional walls expanding space for care, solidarity and hospitality that fosters the potential of radical difference and encounter through exchange. An active search to morph art practices with life beyond the normative space.
