In-ruins 2024

In-ruins 2024 \
Matera National Museums & Archaeological Park of Metaponto

This year, we will follow routes suggested by ancient geographies rather than by modern cartographies. For the first time, the residency will take place outside the borders of Calabria to land in Basilicata, which shares with the former past and present destinies. In collaboration with the National Museums of Matera - Regional Directorate of National Museums Basilicata, we will explore the National Museums and the Archaeological Park of Metaponto. This area of the Lucanian territory witnessed the rise, expansion, and decline of the great polis of Metaponto. The city minted its own currency and enjoyed great agricultural and productive wealth. It hosted the Pythagorean School in the last years of the philosopher’s life, allied with Pyrrhus against the Romans, received Hannibal and his troops, and was crossed by Spartacus and his army of rebels...

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Residents

The residency program 2024 was curated by Nicola Guastamacchia, Nicola Nitido and Maria Luigia Gioffrè, with the territorial support of Fiorella Fiore.

Nabil Aniss

MOROCCO

Works with moving images, and lives in Brussels. Aniss employs a combination of moving images and monologues to examine the intricate interconnections between political institutions, diasporic bodies, affects and intimacy. He delves into the function of political institutions in both capturing affects and mutilating bodies, as well as elucidating the violence inflicted upon diasporic bodies by political, economic and social structures. Using mutilated, tired and suffering figures and shapes as material, in the sacrificial world of the Gnawa* of Morocco. He explores suffering and self-mutilation as a ritual praxis of liberation and resistance for diasporic bodies, particularly immigrant workers from the global south.

Savannah Sather-Marquardt

U.S.A.

Art historian, archaeologist, and writer at Yale University. Her scholarship on the ancient colonial poleis of Southern Italy explores how funerary art enacted highly localized relationships between the living, the land, and the dead in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. The culturally heterogeneous, posthuman perspective on so-called “Magna Grecia” developed through her research grounds her creative work and engagement with contemporary art. Based in Athens and Naples, Savannah collaborates with artists practicing craft traditions with roots in antiquity, writing both criticism and genre-bending creative reflections on the art making process. Savannah holds a BA in Classics from Princeton University, and an MA from the Graduate Program in the History of Art from Williams College and the Clark Art Institute. Her work on ancient Southern Italy was awarded the 2022 Gruen Prize, a national award in the US for work on multiculturalism in the ancient Mediterranean, and the 2024 Alice Derby Lange Prize. She has also been named a 2024-2025 Charlotte Newcombe fellow for her work on religion and ethics. Savannah’s public facing writing has appeared in Eidolon and Hyperallergic.

Sahil Naik

INDIA

Examines the modalities of evidence and truth, through architecture, forensics, archaeology, and natural history. He examines political imaginaries, built environments, ancient histories, and challenges state-prescribed and colonial pasts with public memory and stories. He is interested in the role of the subject in history-making and nation- building and in foregrounding alternate histories, chance connections and the excavation of marginalized/minor narratives. His works are included in the 17th Lyon Biennale curated by Alexia Fabre (forthcoming), and previously in the 5th editions of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale curated by Shubigi Rao (2022) and the Art Encounters Biennale, Timisoara curated by Adrian Notz (2023). He has exhibited with TBA 21 on st_age; and at Foundation Elpis, Milan; Vitrine in Basel; Delfina Foundation and Asia House in London; Bridget Donahue as a part of Condo, New York; Beirut Art Center, Lebanon; MMAG Foundation, Amman; among others. He lives and works in Goa, India.

Iasonas Kampanis

GREECE

Lives and works in Athens. He studied silversmithing and jewelry design at the Mokume Institute in Thessaloniki. Since 2007, he is working with painting, photography, digital media and scenographic works. His work and research focus on our sacred kinship with the natural world and animistic origins in the Mediterranean culture, addressing anthropocentric views which have distanced us from our sense of universality. In 2020 he received the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship Award by ARTWORKS. He has collaborated with the Museum of Cycladic Art, Citronne Galleries, Breeder Gallery (Athens), Rebecca Camhi Gallery (Athens), curator Marina Fokidis, the 61st Thessaloniki International Film Festival and MoMus, KEIV (Athens), Victoria Square Project (Athens), kunsthallekleinbasel (Basel), architect Pulcheria Tzova, Onassis Stegi (Athens), and others.

Danila Gambettola

ITALY

is a dancer, performer, and researcher engaged in a transdisciplinary investigation aimed at deconstructing the concept of choreography by superimposing dramaturgical fragments of movement, voice, writing, and installation components. She is currently researching transmagic, a speculative space of alternative practices and the aesthetics of the body, where the theme of magic is addressed from a materialist perspective. Danila is based in Venice and is a recent graduate of the Department of Theatre and Performing Arts at Iuav University.

Fanny Souade Sow

FRANCE

Addresses how monuments – from memorials to statues, as well as other cultural heritage intended for commemoration or remembrance – become the vehicles of an authorised and controlled narrative, defending a certain legitimised vision of History. Whether in the form of editions, sculptures, performances or video, she questions the effects of colonial heritage on racialized bodies.

Jury

Bruno Barsanti & Sofia Shubert

Director and Project Manager, Fondazione Elpis

Stella Bottai

Curator, Pompeii Commitment

/ Curator at Large, Aspen art Museum

Simone Frangi

Curator and researcher

N i o v i - V a s i l i k i
Z a r a m p o u k a - C h a t z i m a n o u

Curator and Co-director Counterpoint Arts

Savannah Sather-Marquardt

How

a cup remembers the river

Lecture-performance by Savannah Sather Marquardt_In-ruins residency 2024_Courtesy Associaz

Lecture- performance exploring the possibilities and limits of a landscape’s material memory. In the fifth-century BCE, the region of southeastern Basilicata around the Greek colonial polis of Metaponto was known for two things: its rich ceramic tradition and the prevalence of Pythagoreanism, an ancient philosophical school of thought predicated on the possibility of metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls. By considering the process of harvesting and crafting wild clay alongside a speculative history of Pythagoras’s life after death at Metaponto, this piece considers the inter-substantial relationship between distributed personhood and the land itself. If land is not just empty space or claimable territory but an active participant in the creation and destruction of bodies, its very understanding as a passive matter to be claimed and controlled starts to decay. Photo Daniele Notaristefano.