SEDIMENTS. AFTER MEMORY

Victor Fotso Nyie

Victor Fotso Nyie’s sculptures intervene in the contemporary perception of African sculptural forms. Triggered by the global and commercial ubiquity of stylised African masks, Fotso Nyie’s own sculptures mimic the features of the Black  body but allegorise the alienation of contemporary African  subjectivities by the use of surrealist and speculative inflections. Transcending ongoing debates around restitution of  African material culture, Identità Sospese (Suspended Identities) is at once aesthetic as it is material, concerned both with a new artistic language as well as with a rehabilitation and repair of historic sculptural renderings that have a long lineage in many African countries, including in the artist’s own (Cameroon). Fotso Nyie strategically deploys a specific formalism that acts as a repository of supernatural forces and energies. In this installation, the sculptures may appear relatable by their hyper-realism, but also alienating by their fantastic features. For Fotso Nyie, Suspended Identities is grounded in the alienation of contemporary African identities exemplified by the perpetual anathema of restitution of African material culture that was pilfered during colonialism. Yet, as current examples show, a simple return of some objects does little to repair the destroyed connection to epistemological references that African sculptural practices are rooted in. Fotso-Nyie responds to this challenge by creating sculptural witnesses that are contemporary while borrowing and carrying forward African figurative forms.

 
Victor Fotso Nyie (Cameroon, 1990) is a multidisciplinary artist, he lives and works in Faenza. After earning the Higher Technician Diploma for the design and prototyping of ceramics at the Tonito Emiliani Higher Techni- cal Institute in Faenza, he graduated from the Ravenna Academy of Fine Arts in 2017 and went on to attend the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna for sculpture. The core of his artistic research is the condition of the contemporary African man, alienated and wounded by an unfinished past of enslavement and exploitation. His solo exhibitions include: Quella terra tra le mani, Galleria comunale d’Arte di Faenza (2022), Radici aeree, Le Scuole, Pieve di Cento (2022), Memoriae, Off Gallery, Bologna (2022), Resilienza, Museo MAGA, Gallarate (2021), Museo Carlo Zauli, Faenza (2021), Rimembranza, Palazzo Turchi di Bagno, Ferrara (2021). In 2022 he takes part in Una Boccata d’Arte. 20 artisti 20 borghi 20 regioni, supported by Fondazione Elpis, in collaboration with Galleria Continua.

 
 
Muna Mussie     

In የቦሎኛ ጎዳና  | عراش اینولوب | Bologna St. 173 (Riverberi Roma) the artist evokes the Eritrean Festival Gatherings that, between 1974 and 1991, hosted thousands of Eritreans from all over the world in Bologna in support of the fight for Eritrean independence. 
Mussie’s work is an immersion into the iconography of struggle, only to haunt it with the present. The raised fist and outstretching arm, the ever-present sun – that rising rainbow semicircle, ever-shining poster-art symbol of a dawn to rise, is fluoresced with a sensibility of contemporaneity, highlighted with alternating silver scotch tape and party-streamers. Except, these party tapes are printed with vorticist dazzle patterns, ubiquitously adopted as the pattern of camouflage on military uniforms. Mussie’s work is constructed from these ambiguities and gaps between meaning. Not unalike her voice, a terse poetry of abbreviations which splutter out, like the pop of the popcorn hitting tin-lid-covers. It is her fluorescent aesthetics, that chooses to brandish a kitschy inelegant popcorn machine across her installation, spewing the room with a thousand bullets of corn (Zasha Colah, Sigla/Sigillo, 2022).
With this installation, Mussie stages the concept of a transitory and precarious home. On display in the space are numerous netsela, a typical white cotton gauze fabric, which are embroidered with the initials of the many movements that were born during the Eritrean resistance. Netselas are used traditionally by Eritrean women in various daily events and occasions: they provide shelter from the sun, and from the cold, they surround the head or cover the shoulders, they make a home and are on display to redefine an affective, political geography and its historical legacy. For Bologna St. 173 (Riverberi Roma), the artist introduces a new element: a video of the festival in loop, accompanied by the story of a young Eritrean woman who lived in Bologna St. in Asmara.
 
 
Muna Mussie (Eritrea, 1978, lives and works in Bologna) began her artistic career in 1998, as actress/performer with Teatrino Clandestino until 2001. Muna Mussie’s work investigates the performing arts and the scenic languages through gesture, visual and words, to give shape to the tension that arises between different expressive poles. Recent performances and installations include: PERSONA (2022), Bientôt l’été (2021), PF DJ (2021), Oblio (2021), Curva Cieca (2021), Curva (2019), Oasi (2018), Milite Igno- to (2015). Other exhibitions include: Bologna St. 173, Archives sites, Milano (2021), Punteggiatura (2018).

 
 
Las Nietas De Nonó    

 
For the artist duo Las Nietas de Nonó, theatre, perfor- mance, interventions and everyday life converge in processes that are anchored in the biographies of siblings mulowayi and mapenzi nonó. The siblings transformed their grandfather’s former home in Barrio San Antón, Puerto Rico into Patio Taller (2011-2019), a community art space and internation- al artists residency that galvanised the community’s rhythms of work, leisure, and production. This impulse is documented in their film FOODTOPIA: después de todo territorio (2020), which could be read as a nascent critique of the sensory dis- connect between the modern consumer and the food that keeps them alive on one hand, and the natural environment that provides it on the other hand. Yet, their motivations were closer to home in a very literal sense. For 28 days, mapenzi and mulowayi decided to hunt and gather all of their food in a predetermined area in their neighbourhood. For Las Nietas de Nonó, FOODTOPIA: después de todo territorio became an audiovisual investigation and living archive of their surround- ings, as well as an evaluation of (new) risks and possibilities of living in an ever changing environment. Though the hunting came organically, the industrialised space of Barrio San Antón presented insurmountable obstacles to finding food such as polluted water and air quality, which influenced both avail- ability and quality of food. Not only were they dealing with hunger, but also with the sadness and frustration of encoun- tering environmental deterioration in a space they presumed they knew well. They emerged with a new awareness of how looking for food changes how one moves through space and what one pays attention to. Most importantly, the time invest- ment needed to find, clean and otherwise prepare the food was humbling: to eat the amounts of meat currently con- sumed in Europe for example, there would be no time for any other activity other than hunting.
 
 
The afro-diasporic siblings mulowayi and mapenzi are Las Nietas de Nonó. In their creative process, they evoke ancestral memory through personal archives. Their practice incorporates performance, found objects, organic materials, ecology, fiction, video and installation. In 2016, they created Ilustraciones de la Mecánica, a multimedia installation that was also commissioned by the 10th Berlin Biennial (2018) and by the 79th Whitney Biennial (2019). They have received the United States Artist Award (2018), The Art of Change from the Ford Foundation (2017), and the Global Arts Fund from the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice (2017 and 2020). La Nietas de Nonó are the recipients of the 2022 Rome Prize in Visual Art at the American Academy in Rome.

 
 
Christian Offman

 
Barocco (2022) is a new site-specific installation by Christian Offman commissioned for this exhibition. The title is Off- man’s explicit reference to t’s Poetics of Relation (1997), by Edouard Glissant, and his interpretation of baroque. Drawing from his artistic practice that blends history and memory into sculpture and installation, as well as from his personal experience of being of Rwandan descent but raised in Italy, he tackles a defining issue in contemporary societies: citizenship. In this work, the artist positions fifteen barriers following a precise scheme in order to design a course for the visitor, who is guided along a defined path. Barocco emerges from auto-analytic investigation and reflection on the condition of being a citizen and a foreigner at the same time. It references the disheveling experience of foreigners who regularly have to apply for or renew their documents. The constraints of this path are metaphorically rendered as barriers that immigrants have to go through to have their legal status recognised. These obstacles are often overly bureaucratic and opaque while perpetually producing discriminatory and inefficient effects. Offman deliberately chooses to wander, both as an act of resistance to a denied status and as a way of mediating the desire to belong to a specific place while embracing his multiplicity. Blending with the post-industrial context of Mattatoio, the installation also comprises two damaged fridges: found relics that are re- purposed to hold Offman’s concrete sculptures. The sculptural forms do not epitomise any specific gender or shape but are part of abstract and subconscious visual and material musings that the artist developed through his research drawing on his family’s image archive.
 
 
Christian Offman (Rwanda, 1993) lives and works between Munich and Bologna. He moved to Italy in 1999, growing up between Rwanda and Italy: the sum of these two cultural and geographical poles is reflected in Offman’s aesthetics and artistic practice. The focal points of his research are identity, memory and historical repression, elements which guide the contradictions and ideological defects that define postcolonial contemporaneity. Offman’s artistic practice is the result of different layers of research, in which history, sociology and tradition are questioned. He attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Bolo- gna, the Kunstakademie Münster Hochschule für Bildende Kunste and the Akademie der Bil- denden Künste München. He participated in YGBI Research Residency in Florence.