Saplings was launched with the goal of collecting stories of socio-ecological infrastructure, more-than-human cohabitation and planetary cyclicality, as told by seeds arrived in Italy with migrants from Bangladesh, and now cultivated for more than a decade from north to south of the country. Emerging from a residency in Palermo, a lecture performance will give literary and visual form to field observations, encounters with members of the Bangladeshi community in Palermo, interrogations on the method and meditations about the constant being “in between” of who migrated.
Through multimedia diary and feminist practices, from self-narrative to collecting and preserving seeds, the work-in-progress problematizes dehumanized and dehumanizing representations of migration and the “migrant” in Italian and European public discourse, while also asking: how do we develop artistic research grounded in models of resource sharing, from collaborative video to intersectional networking, and what is its place in today’s artistic discourse and knowledge production?
Doireann O’Malley (born 1981 in Limerick, IE) is a multidisciplinary video artist based in Berlin. Their research-led practice experiments with collaborative methodologies, meditative and visualisation practices, writing, as well as theory, in an effort to manifest ecofeminist and queer futures. Characterised by a strong emphasis on new media, Virtual Reality, 3D and video nstallation, their work uses digital tools to critically reflect on the political implications of data economies, on the one hand, and explore the entangled experiences of gender embodiment in the virtual, real and theoretical domain, on the other.
Elisa T. Bertuzzo (born 1980 in Vicenza, Italy) is an ethnographer and urban studies scholar based in Berlin. In her academic and literary texts, teaching, as well as curatorial collaborations, her interest lies in the everyday life facets of solidarity, resistance and selforganisation (especially) among marginalised and migrant communities of South Asia. Research, for her, is part of the eco-feminist project to revalidate—and, where needed, reassess—epistemologies, practices of care, economies, as well as translocal solidarisations which have long been oppressed by extractivist, colonial and patriarchal logics.
Saplings is a residency curated by Aterraterra and Fondazione Studio Rizoma and is part of the Critical Seeds of Resistance program, with support from European Cultural Foundation – Culture of Solidarity Fund.