Talk with Antonia Alampi, artistic co-director of SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin
within the frames of Curating Institution series
For the Curating Institutions series, Antonia Alampi will address her work with various visionary yet precarious organisations or platforms she is or was part of such as SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin, Future Climates and Beirut in Cairo.
She will share reflections around care, survival and sustainability, how to deal with predatory (art) politics dressed as good intentions, some methods to avoid acts of (curatorial) othering, the difficult negotiations between emotional involvement, economic precareity and over-identification.
She will do so by looking into exhibitions or projects she curated together with a wealth of talented and passionate colleagues, such as Geographies of Imagination (SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, 2018), The School of Redistribution (State of Concept, Athens, 2017) and The Imaginary School Program (Beirut, Cairo, 2014).
The talk will be moderated by Joanna Warsza.
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Antonia Alampi
- writes, talks, and organises exhibitions and other programs. She is born to Southern Italy but lives in Berlin where she is Artistic co-Director of SAVVY Contemporary, a space wherein epistemological disobedience and delinking (Walter Mignolo) are practiced, and a space for decolonial practices and aesthetics. In 2016 she initiated with iLiana Fokianaki the research project Future Climates, which firstly manifested in Athens in March 2017, by focusing on how economic fluxes shape and determine the work of small-scale initiatives in contexts with weak public infrastructures for arts and culture. Since 2017 she is also curator of Extra City Kunsthal in Antwerp, with a three-years program focused on the manufacturing of the notion of European Citizenship. From 2012 to 2015 she lived in Cairo where she was curator of Beirut, an art initiative that existed in city in that time-frame, reflecting on the paramount moment of transition the country was experiencing. There, she conceived and directed the research and pedagogical project The Imaginary School Program (2014/2015) looking into forms of organizing and institution building in the city. Between 2009 and 2011 she was the co-founding director of the art initiative Opera Rebis and prior to this she has worked for the Studio Stefania Miscetti (Rome), Manifesta7 (South Tyrol) and the Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea of Trento.
- Recent exhibitions include the group show Geographies of Imagination (curated with Bonaventure Ndikung at SAVVY Contemporary, 2018), solo shows of Ibrahima Mahama (Extra City, 2018), and Jasmina Metwaly (SAVVY, 2018), the group exhibition and public program WE HAVE DELIVERED OURSELVES FROM THE TONAL – Of, with, towards, on Julius Eastman (curated with Bonaventure Ndikung at SAVVY, 2018), the first monographic exhibition of Jérôme Bel (Museo Pecci, Prato, 2017), the performance, discursive and educational program The School of Redistribution (curated with iLiana Fokianaki at State of Concept, Athens, 2017), the group exhibition Extra Citizen (curated with Liana Fokianaki, Extra City, 2017) and El Usman Faroqhi Here and a Yonder: On Finding Poise in Disorientation (curated with Bionaventure Ndikung SAVVY, 2017) among the others. She has written texts and interviews for various publications, including Mousse, Arte e Critica, Flash Art International, Ibraaz among the others and has edited books or journals of artists such as Jérôme Bel, Adelita Husni-Bey, Ibrahim Mahama and Doris Maninger, among the others.
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Joanna Warsza
- a curator, researcher, writer specialised in interdisciplinary public art. She is an artistic director of Public Art Munich (2016-2018), and curated among others the Public Program of Manifesta 10 in St. Petersburg, the Georgian Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale and she was associate curator of the 7th Berlin Biennale on the invitation of Artur Żmijewski. She edited of number of publications such as Stadium X-A Place That Never Was (2009), Forget Fear (2012) and I Can’t Work Like This. A reader on Boycott in contemporary art (2017) and A City Curating Reader (2018). Joanna holds an M.A. of arts from Warsaw Theater Academy and was a PhD candidate at Paris 8 University in Paris in culture studies and performance. Since 2014 Joanna is also a head of the curatorial program CuratorLab at Konstfack University in Stockholm. She lives in Berlin.
