The Insurgent Archive: Counter-narratives and representations: Genoa 2001

Laveronica Arte contemporanea is pleased to announce the opening of its next exhibition The Insurgent Archive from December 30, in its own rooms and at Palazzo De Leva.

Conceived for the twentieth anniversary of the G8 in Genoa, the exhibition aims to conclude 2021 with a pressing challenge to a present that sees the alternative (any alternative to the capitalist empire) as a failure rather than with an obligatory memorial to the past. Nonetheless, the events in Genoa in 2001 represented a fundamental historic-social watershed moment making it impossible to avoid conflict, even more so today. 

Conceived by Marco Scotini as just one chapter in the wider project of his Disobedience Archive (ongoing since 2004), the exhibition in Modica brings together a whole series of visual documents, of material testimonials from artists, photographers and media-activists, the subjects of a plurality of social movements, of histories on the march. Reopening now the rebellious archives of the past means overcoming the image of the events exclusively in terms of repression and violence in order to access, once more, the entirety of the connectivity potential and autonomous collective actions that the official narratives have suppressed. The discouragement of any form of antagonistic association, just as naturalizing and legitimizing the state of exception as the exclusive form of realism, have been the complementary actions of the media powers over the past twenty years. On the contrary, Genoa today seems to us to be the pinnacle of something rather than the end of something else.

In this sense, the fact that the exhibition is being held in Sicily is not as accidental as it might appear but aims to highlight the reticular (through local nodes) and additional construction of the growth of the movement that, in late June 2001, saw Catania as the location of the fourth and most intense Hackmeeting, after that in Florence (1998), Milan (1999) and Rome (2000). It was precisely in Catania that hackers and activists from various areas came together to work on the historic nucleus of Indymedia Italia which, following on from Seattle, discovered its own action area in the subsequent three days in Genoa. 

For this reason, the articulation of the The Insurgent Archive exhibition provides, on the one hand, a location with a timeline of the days of the Genoa counter-summit where there are photos, videos and drawings by artists of different nationalities who took part in the event or, subsequently tried to elaborate its proposals and relaunch the content of those days. On the other hand, a second location is seen as a sort of Media Center and hosts entire archives of video, audio, paper and web materials that bring together a plurality of documentary counter-information material and theories at the base of the so-called No Global movement’s protests. This location offers the possibility of consulting, studying and rereading pages and fundamental moments about the emergence of new political subjects (the Tute Bianche and the Black Bloc); about the establishment of new militant movements open to the battles relating to migrants, gender, and civilian demonstrations; about the streets as areas of social demands and military oppression; about social conflict as an indefeasible moment of political action; about movement as an open and complex area of politicization and experimentation with new practices and languages: of another and substantially possible world. When every city in the world appears to be under siege and does nothing more than reproduce – on another scale but every day and right now – the Genoa of those three days in July 2001, then Genoa, in the words of some, ceases to be a mourning to be celebrated and becomes a festivity to be renewed. 

Participant list: Bernadette Corporation, Armin Linke, Emory Douglas, Jonas Staal, Oliver Ressler & Dario Azzellini, Adelita Husni-Bey, Alex Majoli, Lisl Ponger, Carola Spadoni with TPF&VA, Jean-Gabriel Periot, Stefano Serretta with Indymedia Italia Archives, Radio Gap Archives, StorieInMovimento Archives, Archivio Primo Moroni.