From a draft by Marco Scotini, NABA Visual Arts Department Head, with Andris Brinkmanis, BA in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies Course Leader – Milan Campus, and Caterina Iaquinta, BA and MA of Visual Arts Area Course Leader – Rome Campus.
Curated by the NABA Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies MA students: Angela Bosin, Elisa Caggiula, Marilia Fara, Camilla Ferrone, Giulia Fiore, Alice Giuntini, Sofia Gonzales, Elif Nur Gozaydin, Mirko Ibahi Bahis, Francesca Leonetti, Barbara Lo Presti, Giorgia Magrin, Alessandra Martina, Eleonora Sacco, Kamil Sanders, Marco Scirè, Francesca Senatore, Claudia Spoto, Qu Weili.
Artists: NABA BA in Painting and Visual Arts and of the MA in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies students Rosha Ajdadi, Giulia Allegrone, Isabel Amado, Milena Ayllon, Marta Baggio, Edoardo Bonacina, Giorgia Borgogno, Benedetta Cerea, Sara Cerrito, Floriana Celiento, Ludovica Corona, Anna de Toni, Alessandra Di Rito, Yasmeen Fekak Osman, Valerio Gelsomini, Erica Graziani, Kristel Gualdi, Giulia Guarnaccia, Hinrik Leonard Ingolfsson, Martina Lomascolo, Alessandro Macciardi, Sofia Martinoli, Davide Mingolla, Marta Molinari, Rebecca Momoli, Daniela Noviello, C. Sidonie Pellegrino, Caterina Perego, Giulia Pistoso, Chiara Porzio, Samuel Price, Patrizia Rayo Delos Reyes, Carlota Rel, Morgane Rinaldi, Silvia Santoro, Azzah Salwaa, Chengcheng Sheng, Majorn Schirripa, Jan Sura, Nicolò Tacmeanu, Simone Trapani, Maria Violato, Xuan Xu, Damini Yadav, Jiani Yang.
Exhibition coordinator: Alessia Riva, Alberto Navilli / Exhibition set up: Nicolò Colciago / Visual identity: Giordano Cruciani.
Notes on Becoming was created with the aim of investigating the dense network of relationships existing between memory, the body and migration. Considering the archive—the main custodian of memory—as a space of transformation (Michel Foucault, The Order of Discourse, 1969), the very notion of memory is shaped from the movement of the body in space. A movement that is never solely physical: territorial displacement is also configured as a self-knowing journey, an endless game of mirrors, where the migrant tries to reconstruct his place of origin, traditions, rituals, and food. The body thus finds itself involved in a repetition that is not an end in itself: not only a personal archive, but also a political territory in which experiences, tensions and possibilities are inscribed.
Boundaries become mobile, identities fluid, and normative conceptions of belonging are subverted. It is precisely this tension between migration and reiteration—body and memory—that constitutes the cipher of an open relationship between present and identity. A choreographic experience of memory that, radically, renews past, present and future. The multiple becoming constitute lines of escape from the fixed categories of identity and form; movements that, in this openness, give rise to unpredictable relations and new subjectivities that oppose the stable and predetermined order. Virtual and potential, the body transfers its personal affective constellation to the outside, turning the mapping of its experience into an emotional geography.
Investigating the declinations of migratory phenomena, the exhibition becomes the threshold of access to a fluid and nonhierarchical space. The viewer is invited to relinquish his or her centrality, to rediscuss his or her position, to participate in this eternal reshuffling as in a dance. In this endless flux, becoming—a connection between temporalities, places and memories—is presented as an eternal readiness for change, a generating principle of freedom and liberation, and perhaps, the only possibility of habitation.
Notes on Becoming opening will take place on May 22 at 6:30pm.
On May 29 at 3pm a panel dedicated to the exhibition will be held in NABA campus in Rome, via Ostiense 92. The conference will give voice to the exhibition concept expressed by the curatorial team of students along with Marco Scotini, Caterina Iaquinta, writer and NABA lecturer Igiaba Scego and Lorenzo Romito, artist, curator, architect and NABA lecturer. The panel will be live streaming on NABA’s YouTube channel.
The exhibition sees the involvement of the students from both NABA campus in Milan and Rome, from the BA in Painting and Visual Arts and from the MA in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies. Notes on Becoming is the third act of the exhibition project started with (Im)possible Ecologies, held at the Botanic Garden of Rome Polo Museale Sapienza, and continued with Voicing the Archive held in Triennale Milano.
By means of its undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, NABA Visual Arts Department focuses on visual arts, display, theory, art markets, publishing, curatorship and writing as crucial aspects of contemporary art professions. It addresses contemporary art as a methodology that enables interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approaches, beginning with an in-depth investigation into the aesthetic, social and economic contexts. The themes and research areas that have characterised the Department over the years, reconsidering artistic production by means of a number of interdisciplinary vectors, are therefore memory and archive, history, feminist and post-colonial narratives, ecology and the social dimension.
NABA Visual Arts Department is composed by the BA in Painting and Visual Arts, the MA in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies, both active in Milan and Rome campus, the Academic Masters in Contemporary Art Markets and in Photography and Visual Design, and the new Academic Master in Art and Ecology, all available in Milan.
NABA, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti
NABA is an international Academy focused on arts and design: it is the largest Academy of Fine Arts in Italy, and the first one to have been recognised by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR), back in 1981. As a recognised Academy, NABA offers in its two campus in Milan and Rome academic diplomas equivalent to first and second level university degrees in the fields of design, fashion design, graphics and communication, multimedia arts, new technologies, set design, visual arts, as well as PhD and Special Programmes. The Academy was founded by Ausonio Zappa in Milan in 1980 with the involvement of Guido Ballo and Tito Varisco during a first phase, later attracting to its faculty artists such as Gianni Colombo and many others, the idea being to abandon rigorous academic traditions and instead introduce new visions and languages based on contemporary artistic and professional practice. NABA was selected by the QS World University Rankings® by Subject Art & Design as the Best Academy of Fine Arts in Italy and among the top 100 universities in the world, by Frame to be included in the Masterclass Frame Guide to the 30 World’s Leading Graduate Design, Architecture and Fashion Schools, and by Domus Magazine as one of Europe’s Top 100 schools of Architecture and Design.