The Invention of Europe. A tricontinental narrative (2024-2027) is a three-year curatorial programme in which exhibitions and public programmes critically reflect on the monolithic idea of Europe, starting from a multilingual territory—South Tyrol. Located between the “modern” Italy and Austria, its communities have over the centuries been criss-crossed by political and economic powers that, regardless of its actual existence, have alternated and challenged one another. The programme borrows from the formula The Invention of Africa by the Congolese philosopher Yves Valentin Mudimbe, which highlights how the idea of Africa is a modern invention, linked both to the European colonial vision—one that is exoticist and racist—and to the ideal projection of its global diasporas. Over a three-year period, from 2024 to 2027, Europe will be at the centre of reflections by artists—some European, some from Africa, Latin America or Asia—who will be invited to unveil and confront its identity, which has since the Renaissance been a construction of modernity: a perspective that will recall the decades of tricontinental networks forming alliances and solidarity during the period of decolonisation. The Invention of Europe highlights how the rigid and fictitious idea of Europe that the philosopher Samir Amin calls “Eurocentrism” (whiteness; religious, moral and intellectual superiority; progress and evolution) is at the same time a material reality based upon the economy of the American plantations, of mining and the unpaid labour of African slaves. An invention, Mudimbe would say, whose complex historical, social, religious and material matrix is to be highlighted together with the invited artists and the communities living in the complex—and European—territory of South Tyrol.
“La Linea Insubrica” (The Insubric Line) is the debut exhibition of the three-year curatorial programme The Invention of Europe. A tricontinental narrative (2024–2027). The collective exhibition brings together a group of artists connected to the African continent around the speculative image of the Insubric Line, a geo-point that runs through the city of Meran(o) and forms a seam in the Earth’s surface that emerged following the collision of the European and African tectonic plates. During the Jurassic era, Africa and Europe were in fact separated by the Tethys Sea: the following epochs saw the African plate move northwards towards the European plate, causing a gradual narrowing of the Tethys that culminated in the collision of the two plates. As the European plate slid under the African plate, the latter gave substance to the mineral material that today forms the Alps.
“La Linea Insubrica,” composed of the fusion of the “more-than-human” substances deposited along the edges of these plates, is a material metaphor through which to bring out the complexities that have constructed the present-day Europe. The narrative of European identity and purity is deconstructed from a geological reality: the orographic image of the line that, today visible as a scar, gives form to the complexity of a history that, in the case of the encounter between Africa and Europe, began 65 million years ago.
Curated by
Lucrezia Cippitelli and Simone Frangi
Participating artists:
Liliana Angulo Cortés, Sammy Baloji, Binta Diaw, Abdessamad, El Montassir, Ufuoma Essi, Alessandra Ferrini, Kapwani Kiwanga, Francis Offman, Vashish Soobah, Betty Tchomanga, The School of Mutants
at Merano Arte
until October 13, 2024