“Silence does not mean surrender!” Lanfranco Aceti, Athens, 2018. Performance. Curated by Artemis Potamianou.

Peripheral but not Irrelevant: Peripheries’ Contribution to the Centrality of the Globalized Cities (Periferico ma non Irrilevante: Il contributo delle Periferie alla Centralità delle Città Globalizzate) is the talk that I will give to discuss some of my recent artworks installed at and performed as part of the Italian Pavilion, Resilient Communities, curated by Alessandro Melis for the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021. The talk will be based upon a recent performance realized in Rome in piazza del Campidoglio, the square designed by Michelangelo, as a collaboration between the Italian Pavilion and the Festival delle Periferie, directed by Giorgio de Finis for the Museo delle Periferie. Peripheral but not Irrelevant will take place at the Teatro di Tor Bella Monaca, on Sunday, May 23, 2021, 15:00 in the IPER Spazio hall, https://iperfestival.it/programma/

The images and video discussed at the Festival delle Periferie are part of a new collection of works of art titled Tools for Catching Clouds and belong to the overarching larger work of art titled Preferring Sinking to Surrender installed at the Italian Pavilion for the Venice Architecture Biennale.

Aceti’s recent body of works of art continues to engage with notions of democracy, resilience and resistance, alternative imaginaries, and counter-narratives that are kept alive, embodied, and narrated by the bodies of gender and racial minorities. The conceptualization of these works of art was developed and researched in 2017/2018 as part of a one year affiliation at ACT @ MIT.

The talk will analyze what roles the peripheries, and the people rendered peripheral, can play in determining the success or failure of the great centralized centers of power. Can the periphery propose alternatives to an idea of society and living that is centralized and centralizing and by its nature, destined to gigantism and correlated problems, and therefore not sustainable, and inexorably expanding until reaching the moment of collapse?

The artist will present the performance filmed in Rome and related works of art realized for the Padiglione Italia, Comunità Resilienti, in collaboration with the Museo delle Periferie. The performance will see its focal point in the cities of Rome and Venice to be then presented in other European and world cities. Aceti considers art and architecture as structures that the ‘body’ can alter by offering new narratives and behaviors. The performance contrasts the demands of the ‘center’ with the instances of the resilient communities of the peripheries, using the white flag as the canvas upon which personal histories, deemed ‘irrelevant’ and relegated to the footnotes of history by official historiography, can actually be written.

The artist acknowledges the support of the Italian Pavilion and of the Museo delle Periferie.

With thanks for location scouting to: https://www.cassinoadventure.com .