By pursuing a research path that has spontaneously emerged from the residency programme, Liminaria 2017 programmatically focuses on the concept of “coexistence”. Different (human and non-human) life forms exist and insist on a territory, any territory – and they are mutually implicated in one another. Sometimes, they co-exist together peaceably; some other times, they are in conflict with each other.
Conflictual coexistences are valuable too, as they generate “grey zones” within a rural territory, which can productively challenge any inherited notion of “environment”, “nature”, and “ecology”. Through its co-existences (and conflictual co-existences), the rural territory can in fact be approached otherwise, leaving aside contemplative, romantic or decadent clichés about “rurality”.
In critical dialogue with concepts recently developed within critical theory – such as a “dark ecology” of places (Timothy Morton) and a “dark ontology” of sounds – the artists-in-residence and curators explore together these dimensions.
The residency programme (taking place over 3 non-consecutive weeks in June, July and September) also test out a hybrid form of self-reflexive “joint curatorship”, sharing the research process with the communities, in close contact with the actual territory, in the here and now of the residency.
In this way, the micro-region of Fortore reveals itself one more time as a place of potentiality: a landscape of resonance and dissonance, a complex assemblage of visible and invisible forces, a challenge raised to the concepts of “place”, “rurality” and “ecology” as we know them.
curators: Leandro Pisano and Beatrice Ferrara