The Convention of Restorative Anatomy and Prosopopeia

curated by Valerio Del Baglivo 

Mohamed Abdelkarim, Melanie Bonajo, Pauline Curnier Jardin, El Palomar, Quinsy Gario, Goda Palekaitė, Francesco Ventrella, Arnisa Zeqo

Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo hosts The Institute of Things to Come 2020, an itinerant art programme aimed at investigating forms of imaginative speculation as cultural strategies and methodologies for critical positions. Founded in 2017 by curator Valerio Del Baglivo, each year The Institute focuses on a different theme, inviting artists to present works that interact with other disciplines.

Titled The Convention of Restorative Anatomy and Prosopopeia, The Institute of Things to Come 2020 programme discusses the category of alterity in opposition to recent years globally-expanded populist politics and their discourses and positions of identity monoculture and distinction. In 2020, The Institute will be transformed into a laboratory for experimental anatomy, where modes of bodily regeneration, metabolic transformation, personification, and physical/mental prosopopeia occur to question whether it is possible to contrast politics of sovereignty, belongings, heteronormativity, and identitarianism. The invited artists engage with forms of embodiment that play between authenticity and imagination, to question the above mentioned political issues exploring with bio-political fiction, gender materiality and counter forms of biographism. 

The 2020 program combines exhibitions, public programs and an associates programme supporting new productions for emerging practitioners. It starts with The First Conference On Transcorporality & Prosopopeia—a two days program addressing the use of the rhetorical figure of prosopopeia (i.e. a way of speaking as another person or object) in order to foster processes of dis-identity—with Quinsy Gario, Francesco Ventrella and Arnisa Zeqo. Along the year our Associates Programme titled Biographic Disobedience with artists Goda Palekaitė, El Palomar and Mohamed Abdelkarim, focuses on the life of marginalized historical figures, whose existences resisted and questioned cultural clichés and political impositions. At the end of the year-long program each artist will present a newly produced performance at Kunsthal Gent. In April, artist Melanie Bonajo will present Night Soil – Fake Paradise an installation examining the use of Ayahuasca and “alternate states of consciousness” as moments in which we redefine socially accepted categories of body-politics and gender normativity. In June, artist Pauline Curnier Jardin will exhibit The Resurrection Puddle, an installation, performance and film that pays homage to Michel Foucault and Gunther von Hagens by celebrating metamorphosis, regeneration and hermaphroditism. 

Finally, Guerrilla against the Unceasing Hostilities of the Living, curated by Michele Bertolino, collects a series of interviews to reconsider the role of zombies as symbolic equivalents of otherness in post-human and post-capitalist critique, anti-social queer theories and post-porn productions—with Sarah Juliet Lauro, Lee Edelman, Lorenzo Bernini and Shaka McGlotten.

In times of new forms of identitarianism, The Convention of Restorative Anatomy and Prosopopeia brings together artists and practitioners to re-evoke the presence of absent historical bodies and build a genealogy of corporeal subjectivities that readdress the notion of “normality” and “alterity.”