A tavola con... Wu Ming e Antar Mohamed
Careof presents, in collaboration with Cantiere per pratiche non-affermative, a public reading of Timira with Wu Ming 2 and Antar Mohamed Marincola.
Timira is a 'mestizo novel' written by six hands that mixes memory, archival documents, and narrative invention. Published in 2012 by Einaudi, Timira tells seventy years of history seen through the eyes of a dark-skinned Italian woman, from the beginnings of fascism to the end of the Cold War, investigating Italy’s connection with Africa from a highly personal point of view.
A tavola con... Wu Ming 2 and Antar Mohamed is a meeting around the dining table of FDV Residency, a residency for creatives at Fabbrica del Vapore curated by Careof, featuring designers from Cantiere per pratiche non-affermative, Wu Ming 2, and Antar Mohamed Marincola. The informal setting of the meal, prepared by the Cantiere, will frame the discussion on the sustainability of collective practices with a critical approach. The use of the web, the creation of shared common processes, and the practice of copyleft are some of the topics that will be discussed.
The conversation will also focus on the creation of collective imaginaries, a shared point of interest: the designers of Cantiere are engaged not only in creating objects but also relationships, processes, languages, and social imaginaries; Wu Ming has made the construction of “other” imaginaries the starting point of their work.
FDV Residency Program is a residency program for creatives born from the collaboration between the Culture Department of the Comune di Milano and FDVLAB. The project is curated by Careof with the contribution of Fondazione Cariplo.
Bio
Wu Ming
In 1994, traveling around Europe, hundreds of artists, activists, and pranksters chose to adopt the same identity. All renamed themselves Luther Blissett and organized to unleash chaos in the cultural industry. It was a five-year plan. They worked together to tell the world a great story, create a legend, and give birth to a new kind of popular hero. In January 2000, at the end of the Plan, some of them reunited under a new name and founded Wu Ming, a band of novelists from Bologna. This latter project, although more focused on literature and storytelling in the strict sense, is no less radical than the previous one. The group is the author of numerous novels, translated and published in many countries, self-defined as part of the corpus (or “nebula”) of the New Italian Epic.
Antar Mohamed Marincola
Born in Mogadishu on the third anniversary of Somali independence. Raised under the Siad Barre regime, he has lived in Italy since 1983, where he has studied, written, acted, mediated conflicts, translated, and taught. In 2012 he published Timira for Einaudi (with Wu Ming 2).
Cantiere di pratiche non-affermative
It is a group of young Italian designers who formed in autumn 2011 in Milan during a collectivized artist residency at Careof, a non-profit art space at Fabbrica del Vapore. Through a series of shared projects, Cantiere questions the modes of interaction between designer and society, specifically asking to which society it is possible to contribute through creative work and within which economy it is possible to operate. Cantiere is the place, both virtual and physical, where the group carries out research projects and actions aimed at experimenting with support structures for design practices with a critical approach.
Careof, besides being the operational base where the group periodically works and presents part of its ongoing research, hosts the Cantieroteca, the archive created and curated by the collective.