Six years ago, the team members of Hedwig Fijen, director of the traveling biennial of art and culture founded in 1993, knew that Palermo would be the cradle of the 2018 edition of Manifesta 12 with the subtitle The Planetary Garden. Cultivate Coexistence. What they perhaps did not imagine is how current the choice of that place in the deep south of the peninsula would prove to be at this precise historical moment. “Palermo represents the profound complexities that contemporary society is facing,” comments the team.
Manifesto 12, passed through the most beautiful cities in Europe from Rotterdam to Luxembourg to Frankfurt, is on stage in Palermo - the Italian capital of culture for 2018 - from 16 June to 4 November 2018 to address two fundamental issues: migration and climate, and to explain the impact these have on the life of the city and the people.
Ever since the first edition, in Rotterdam in 1996, the aim of the event has been to narrate contemporary society and its crises. “In 2016 we were in Zurich for this: through art we wanted to denounce the excessive power of money and finance, the title was What People Do for Money, what people do for money – explains Fijen -. In St. Petersburg, the gateway between East and West, we were in 2014 and it was an edition of great civil commitment, especially on the part of the artists. We are now witnessing the disintegration of Europe: Brexit and perhaps who knows, even Italexit. This is why we find ourselves in Palermo, a crossroads of three continents, a hub for flows of people, traffic and goods”.
The places of Manifesta 12 are, among others, the Botanical Garden of Palermo, the main source of inspiration for the project, Palazzo Forcella De Seta, one of the most significant examples of 12th-century Palermitan eclecticism in architecture, and ZEN, the social housing district located in the VII district of Palermo. The mayor of the city of Palermo comments proudly: “Having Manifesta 2018 in Palermo in 12 is a fantastic opportunity for the city to strengthen its local and international identity. It is an opportunity for Europe to appreciate the significance of its Mediterranean and Middle Eastern dimension and identity: Palermo has brought Manifesta to the Mediterranean and the Mediterranean to Europe. Manifesta XNUMX is an opportunity to celebrate Palermo in its essence: a laboratory for art and culture. The city is capable of renewing itself and building its own future”.
Peoples from the Mediterranean and North Africa have arrived in Palermo over the centuries and each of them has written the history of the city in its own way: contaminations, occupations, stratifications today allow the Sicilian capital to be chosen to tell even new ones. The Manifesta 12 project was curated by the Oma architecture studio which developed an urban study called “Palermo Atlas”, an interdisciplinary analysis of the city which sets itself the virtuous objective of exploring its architecture, archeology, anthropology, historical archives such as personal histories and its media.
Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, creative curator of Manifesta 12 and Partner of Oma, said: “Ours was a work on the past and present city, a collection of models, stories and testimonials. Conducted by artists and professionals from Palermo, we walked through the city visiting over one hundred sites that have strong historical, cultural, civil and social significance". The project was also curated by Bregtje van der Haak, Dutch journalist and director, Andrés Jaque, Spanish architect, artist and scholar, and by Mirjam Varadinis, Swiss curator.
Palermo, understood as a crossroads of peoples in the heart of the world and because it has always been a protagonist, fully embodies the place in which to better investigate changes, international mobility and the prospects for the future of our time, leaving nothing to chance, but knowingly intervening in the determination of the development policies of contemporary society. Sometimes letting go with the flow teaches more than fighting the flow.
