Role:
Senior curators: Alessandro Castiglioni, Simone Frangi
Curatorial board: Denise Araouzou, Giulia Colletti, Panos Giannikopoulos, Giulia Gregnanin, Theodoulos Polyviou, Angeliki Tzortzakaki, Nicolas Vamvouklis

Date & Location:

15. 05 – 31.10.2021
Multiple Locations, Republic of San Marino

Participating artists:
Adrian Abela, Noor Abuarafeh, Noor Abed, ALTALENA, Marco Antelmi, Panos Aprahamian, Bora Baboci, Riccardo Badano & Hannah Rullman, Hanan Benammar, Yesmine Benkhelil, Maeve Brennan, Johanna Bruckner, Madison Bycroft, Annalisa Cannito icw Wendimagegn Belete, Valerio Conti, Selin Davasse, Binta Diaw, Adji Dieye, Enar de Dios Rodríguez, Caterina De Nicola, Marianne Fahmy, Alessandra Ferrini, Enrico Floriddia, Victor Fotso Nyie, Haris Giannouras, Marco Giordano. Adrijana Gvozdenović, Bianca Hisse, Areej Huniti & Eliza Goldox, KABUL MAGAZINE, Valentina Karga Dalia Khalife, Ru Kim, Gašper Kunšič, Latent Community, Vesna Liponik, DDC | Design di Comunità, Filippo Marzocchi, Corinne Mazzoli, Dina Mimi, Tawfik Naas, Eleni Odysseos, Francis Offman, Mila Panić, Eva Papamargariti, GianMarco Porru, Gabriele Rendina Cattani, Jacopo Rinaldi, Virginia Russolo, Pablo Sandoval, Michele Seffino, Selma Selman, Vanja Smiljanić, Alcaeus Spyrou, Chara Stergiou, Valinia Svoronou, Theo Triantafyllidis, Endi Tupja, Sophie Utikal, Marina Xenofontos

Website:
External Link

School of Waters—Mediterranea 19 Young Artists Biennale is a nomadic biennial dedicated to young and emerging artists from Europe and the Mediterranean. School of Waters imagines a biennial as a temporary school inspired by radical and experimental pedagogies and the way they challenge artistic, curatorial, and research formats. It revolves around a critical rethinking of the material and symbolic agency of waters from a geopolitical and deep-ecology perspective and acts as a collective tool to defamiliarise stereotypes that manipulate our geographical imaginaries, especially those linked to the eurocentric interpretation of the Mediterranean area.

Acknowledging that humans have the ability to gather, create a community and exchange information, through gossip, storytelling and speaking about things that do not exist, Mediterranea 19 redirects its attention to arguments against human exceptionalism and aims to reconfigure the notion of learning through commoning knowledges present within non/human and human structures.

School of Waters revolves around a critical rethinking of the material and symbolic agency of waters from a geopolitical and deep-ecology perspective. The desire to learn from waters reveals ways to un-train nationalisms and rediscover watery syncretism that constituted the Mediterranean as a complex platform of life forms and knowing processes. The curatorial team develops Mediterranea 19 as an ecology of practices, trickling through various spaces in resonance with the specificity of a small state such as the Republic of San Marino. 

Τhis curatorial concept operates on a metaphorical and on a structural level. As Lisa Robertson suggests, “biting hair, writing in water, naming god, shaking cloth—the gesture is erased at the instant of its inscription, erased by the livid autonomy of its elemental support”1. In fact, the impossible act of writing in water is the core of an imagined school where water as a sentient entity is both amenable and resistant to cognitive taming. 

Oceans, seas, ice caps, glaciers, lakes, rivers, aquifers, ponds, snow, rain are fluid, they melt, condense, evaporate and are able to traverse and appear in different states. These water formations suggest the possibility of reshaping the understanding of static identities and sense of belonging in the Mediterranean, starting not from the lands but from its waters.