Michele Ciacciofera – Mardin Biennal 2024

Where can we turn our gaze to find the possibilities of coming out from the structure surrounding us in the concentrations that impede our freedoms and to look at the globalized past of societies?

We are going through a period in which we think we have surpassed it but which re-enters an identitarian state within the open cages that grip us tightly. How can we transform the post-colonial and feminist, intersectional struggle against nature, culture (Anthropocene and capitalocene), plants, animals, other people, ethnicities, nations, classes, regions, and struggle against racism in the context of decolonial deconstruction into “coexistence”?

Without denying any of these and consistently struggling with them, How can we overcome these problems by going through them without getting tired and giving up the struggle? And how can we imagine more ‘’further’’ by transcending them? How can we organize the changes and transformations in family relations (single-parent families, multiple marriages, and families with many children born from them, increase in non-biological family relationships) and technology (artificial intelligence, terrestrial, robotization, and informatization) in societies today?

In particular, How can we get out of the existing global scenario, and how can we communicate a “deliberative democracy” (between humans and also other living things as in the concept of “The Parliament of Things”) among living things?

The 6th Mardin Biennial will focus on these issues as a proposal to observe, think and create artistically. How can we think of going through these problems and transcending the period we live in by aiming further on the lands to be walked step by step?

The artist Michele Ciacciofera will take part with the installation TERRA MADRE (2024) that imagines a renewed vision of Planetary Citizenship, democratic and intercultural, for a turning point of the current state of the planet, which seems today to be increasingly headed towards a regressiveness without a future.
An alternative worldview, based on the centrality of nature and universal values of sociality, solidarity, active participation and protection, both of human health and of biodiversity, is now more necessary than ever to envision a positive future for the universe that concerns and surrounds us.