Careof presents Ursula Biemann, an internationally renowned artist and theorist, who has made space and mobility her primary category of analysis, emphasizing how the nature of being in a place is determined by its relationship to space and its specificity rather than being defined legislatively.

Her methodology is based on video-narratives, intended as a tool for connecting a high-level theoretical system of thought (the theoretical essays she writes) with micro-observation of cultural and political practices. Given the position and role that Italy plays in the system of absorbing sub-Saharan migration, Ursula Biemann has chosen to present in Careof’s spaces the project Sahara Chronicle, part of the broader project The Maghreb Connection, on the politics of mobility and the containment of migratory flows in the Maghreb.

The video-narratives were created by the artist over the course of numerous trips to Morocco, Niger, and Mauritania. The work is not constructed as a homogeneous narrative; the artist invites viewers to seek the meaning of the stories told in the interstices, tracing lines that go beyond the images. Sahara Chronicle is distinguished by its situated gaze. It observes the making of a ‘counter-geography’ through dissident practices, often semi or totally illegal.

Ursula Biemann’s work experiments with aesthetic and theoretical forms more akin to the essay than to the documentary genre. The narrative expresses a personal, feminine, migrant, white perspective. It is the ‘translocal’ voice of a mobile subject who does not belong to the place but knows enough about it to reveal meanings and change the discourse about the world. Her authorial position and the place from which she speaks are not synonymous with immobility. It is not an absolute and unchanging category of being, but rather a “unity in difference” (S. Hall), an awareness of one’s own position (which moves through space and experience).

On the occasion of the exhibition, other videos by Ursula Biemann will be available for consultation at DOCVA – Documentation Centre for Visual Art: Performing the Border (1999), Remote Sensing (2001), Europlex (2003), X-mission (2008).

The event with Ursula Biemann at Careof represents the first step in a series of reflections curated by Daria Filardo on the theme Distanza come identità?, a broad project on the reconstruction of authorial identity in contemporary art in recent decades. The project will continue in different spaces – both institutional and research-based – with exhibitions, workshops, and meetings that will address each time a specific form of the narrative of distance (geographical, cultural, ...) understood as a metaphor for the representation of authorial identity, specifically that of a situated identity. The narrative of distance is conceived as a gaze upon the other not as postmodern dispersion, but rather as a necessity for reclaiming a position, a place, and a path that allow for its narration.

Ursula Biemann’s project is realized with the support of the Istituto Svizzero. The lecture by Ursula Biemann takes place as part of the series Politiche della Memoria, organized by Naba, curated by Marco Scotini, and part of the public lecture program Mercoledì da NABA. Distanza come Identità? Critical text by Daria Filardo

With the support of Fondazione Cariplo and Istituto Svizzero.