By drawing a connection between a local condition such as that of an alpine valley in Italy – the Valle Camonica – with its artisan knowledges and some untranslatable words belonging to languages from across the globe, artist Stefano Boccalini brings out territoriality and biodiversity as new-found precious awareness against loss and homologation.
Silver Rights focuses on the ancestral bond between the communities and the land (mapu), a bond eroded and denied by colonising forces that have mutated over the centuries to gradually establish themselves in recent decades through neo-extractivist practices; a settlement process resulting from the convergence of investment policies and commercial agreements between South American governments and foreign multinationals, including the Italian Benetton.
The publication takes a fresh look at Aby Warburg’s prominent Mnemosyne Atlas. Reflecting on the fact that research, be it art or science based, is a historical and anthropological procedure that is closely related to colonialism, the film and the two essays rethink how Warburg creates a relational and trans-cultural methodology. Inhuman and animating forces of images, things, animals, people, minerals, amulets and dices, solar and lunar eclipses, intestines, magic stones and starry heavens stemming from Iran, Iraq, Syria and Jordan suggest exploring Mnemosyne Atlas outside of European cultural history and the imagination of itself.