The TECHNO HUMANITIES trilogy returns to enliven the spaces of the Museion in Bozen with its third chapter HOPE, an international collective exhibition that explores possible collisions between science and fiction. The multidisciplinary research project investigates urgent and existential questions as the meaning of citizenship in a globalized world, characterized by the present interconnection of ecology, technology, and economics. TECHNO HUMANITIES designed by the director of the museum Bart van der Heide, it is articulated in exhibitions, publications, and meditation programs and it is also the most extensive experience ever implemented by the museum. Currently, the experiment involves the staff members and the local stakeholders. Since its opening in 2008 Museion has often been described as an extraterrestrial architecture, like an UFO that landed in the historic center of Bolzano. HOPE reflects this symbolic image of the museum as a spaceship, a portal to another dimension.
The first and the second chapters of the trilogy treated the themes of freedom, exhaustion, and compression, investigating power relations and the criteria by which a body is defined as healthy or sick in our age, while the last chapter invites visitors to move between real and imaginary dimensions and timelines in order to explore alternative perspectives, beginning with the concept of Xeno (foreign). The exhibition itinerary starts from the fourth floor of the museum and then it expands throughout the exhibition space. The viewer finds himself in an observatory where, through various time capsules made by the artists, new visions of the terrestrial and celestial spheres are presented. The exhibition offers the possibility to investigate the Self and the Other, placing the spectator beyond the anthropocene, in a perspective that transcends humanocentrism. The audience will be immersed in a sci-fi atmosphere somewhere between the apocalypse and a new beginning that brings together technology, ecology, human sciences, and economics.
In the second step of the exhibit, on the third floor, the visitors will learn about this time with a sci-fi flavor through video games, installations, and immersive spaces between virtual and real, memory and oblivion, designed through world-building tools of the age of artificial intelligence and virtual reality.
While the second floor will present the archive of Afrofutrist myth Drexciya, in which DeForrest Brown Jr.'s reflections on the universe and history of techno collected in his book Assembling a Black Counter Culture (2022) take shape. Numerous techno tracks put in relation with AbuQuadim Haqq's digital paintings, formerly illustrations of historic electronic album covers, will occupy the rooms combined with sounds from the Detroit music scene. In parallel, it will be Brown's music that will be narrated with his album Techxodus (2023) and his mixes The Myth of Drexciya (2023) and Stereomodernism (2020). For the first time ever, Dj Veloziped / Walter Garber's record collection from Bozen will be listen in a museum, creating a space for a still neglected form of story telling and world building.
At the conclusion of the exhibition on the second floor the viewer will see a space-time tunnel - a reference to the cover painting of the exhibition by Haqq - a passageway that will be opened inviting the spectators to cross distant points in space-time, touching divergent eras and futures. A portal that serves as a bridge between the past and the future of the Museion as institution and art collection. At the same time, there will be a free space for discussion and listening focused on the issues and questions posed by the exhibition: where do we come from and where do we want to go?
The program created in partnership with Transart encourages a 360° approach, including the Italian premiere of a performance by the choreographer and dancer Trajal Harrell with the ensemble of Zurich's Schauspielhaus, as well as the solo shows of the artist Thomas Feuerstein, supported by NOI Techpark, and a varied mediation calendar that actively engages spectators in the research of some "spaces of hope and peace".
TECHNO HUMANITIES
September 29, 2023, to February 35, 2024 at Museion
Piazza Piero Siena 1, Bolzano (BZ)
Curated by Bart van der Heide and Leonie Radine in partnership
with DeForrest Brown Jr.
For further information: +39 0471 22 34 13
E-mail: info@museion.it
Official website: http://www.museion.it
List of artists:
Almare; Sophia Al-Maria; Ei Arakawa; Trisha Baga; Neïl Beloufa; Black Quantum Futurism; Tony Cokes; Irene Fenara; Michael Fliri; Petrit Halilaj; Matthew Angelo Harrison; AbuQadim Haqq; Andrei Koschmieder; Maggie Lee; Lawrence Lek; Nicola L. ; Linda Jasmin Mayer; Beatrice Marchi; Bojan Šarčević; Marina Sula; Suzanne Treister; Ilaria Vinci; LuYang, and works from the Museion Collection by Allora & Calzadilla; Shūsaku Arakawa; Ulrike Bernard & Caroline Profanter; Shu Lea Cheang; Tacita Dean; Sonia Leimer, Ana Lupaş and Riccardo Previdi.
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