The Milan Triennale and the Nicola Trussardi Foundation present La Terra Inquieta, an exhibition conceived and curated by Massimiliano Gioni, promoted by the Nicola Trussardi Foundation and the Milan Triennale Foundation, part of the program of the Triennale's Visual Arts Sector directed by Edoardo Bonaspetti.
The exhibition, which will remain open to the public until next Sunday 20 August, is the result of the collaboration between two institutions that have always placed the present in all its meanings at the center of their mission, paying attention to the most experimental and innovative languages of the art and contemporary culture and with the ability to give voice to phenomena leading to profound changes.
La Terra Inquieta – which borrows its title from a collection of poems by the Caribbean writer Édouard Glissant, who has always been fascinated by the problem of coexistence between different cultures – is therefore the sharing of an urgent and dutiful project which has the ambition of tell the present as an unstable and fibrillating territory: a polyphony of narratives and tensions.
Through the works of more than sixty-five artists from various countries of the world – including Albania, Algeria, Bangladesh, Egypt, Ghana, Iraq, Lebanon, Morocco, Syria and Turkey – and with an installation that extends inside the gallery on the ground floor of the Triennale and continuing upstairs, La Terra Inquieta speaks of the epochal transformations that are marking the global scenario and contemporary history, in particular by addressing the problem of migration and the refugee crisis.
With installations, videos, reportage images, historical materials and objects of material culture, La Terra Inquieta explores real and imaginary geographies, reconstructing the odyssey of migrants and the individual and collective stories of the desperate journeys of the newly damned of the Earth. The itinerary winds through a series of geographical and thematic cores – the conflict in Syria, the state of emergency in Lampedusa, life in refugee camps, the figure of the nomad and the stateless – intersected by works of strong impact: true and own visual metaphors and precarious monuments erected to commemorate our brief and unstable glimpse of the century.
La Terra Inquieta is the story of men crossing borders and – much more sadly – the story of borders crossing men. But above all, the exhibition is an exercise in empathy and an experiment in understanding and dialogue between cultures. As recalled by the plaque affixed to the base of the Statue of Liberty – portrayed in the video by Steve McQueen which concludes the exhibition – the mother of exiles welcomes the tired, the poor, the cold masses, the shaken by the storms and the miserable refuse of your beaches.
The La Terra Inquieta exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual catalogue, Italian and English, edited by Massimiliano Gioni. The volume, published by Electa with a preface by Clarice Pecori Giraldi and an introduction by Beatrice Trussardi, collects monographic texts and insights on all the artists featured in the exhibition, edited by Natalie Bell, Micola Brambilla, Juli Brandano, Gary Carrion-Murayari, Mira Dayal , Matthew Erickson, Margot Norton, Rachel Wetzler. Finally, the catalog includes a collection of essays and critical texts by Massimiliano Gioni, Tania Bruguera, Alessandro Dal Lago, TJ Demos, Giusi Nicolini.
The graphic design of the exhibition and of the editorial products is designed by Christoph Radl.
