Earthly Communities
Artists: AMAZON, Minia Biabiany, Marilyn Boror Bor, Carolina Caycedo,Ismael Condoii, Luigi Coppola, Etienne de France, Alexandra Gelis, Mazenett Quiroga, Laura Huertas Millán, Eliana Otta, Amanda Piña, Naomi Rincón-Gallardo, Sallisa Rosa, Samuel Sarmiento
Curators: Lucrezia Cippitelli, Simone Frangi
From 22 June to 12 October 2025, Kunst Meran Merano Arte presents the collective exhibition project Earthly Communities, which, through visual language, performative action and film production, explores ecological, economic and geopolitical issues in respect to the history of relations between Europe and Abya Yala, i.e. Latin America interpreted in a decolonial key, and starting from the South Tyrolean context. The exhibition marks the second year of the three-year curatorial research programme The Invention of Europe. A tricontinental narrative, curated by Lucrezia Cippitelli and Simone Frangi, dedicated to presenting a critical investigation of the idea of Europe as an ideological and physical construction, focusing on the historical processes that led to its definition at the expense of other continental spaces and the impact they have had on the contemporary world.
Following the speculative image of a human hand digging into the ground, Earthly Communities brings together artistic practices that have a connection to Abya Yala and their diasporas that investigate the invasive action of European imperialism in the contexts of agriculture, archaeology, urbanism and extractivism, revealing forms of relationships based on coloniality.
Earthly Communities features an exhibition - with works by Minia Biabiany, Marilyn Boror Bor, Carolina Caycedo, Luigi Coppola, Etienne de France, Alexandra Gelis, Mazenett Quiroga, Eliana Otta, Amanda Piña, Sallisa Rosa, Samuel Sarmiento - a performance programme - with works by Amazon, Ismael Condoii, Alexandra Gelis and Amanda Piña - and a film programme - with works by Laura Huertas Millán and Naomi Rincón Gallardo.
The artists are invited to articulate, each through their own language, urgent global issues starting from the specificities and history of the South Tyrolean context and its complex network of historical and economic relations between inhabitants, agriculture, Alpine economies and macro-geopolitics.
Inspiring the title of the project is the essay Earthly Community by Cameroonian philosopher and historian Achille Mbembe, in which he explores the relationship between colonial rifts and the ecological rifts that emerged in Abya Yala after the European conquest of indigenous territories. The unrest caused by colonial intervention can be read as the two sides of what Mbembe calls «a vast process of laceration, the consequences of which no one can predict.”
Part of the works in the exhibition will be the result of the residency, research and production programme Resistenze Viventi - activated thanks to Euregio funding - “Guardare Oltre”, which will bring to Merano the Mexican-Chilean artist Amanda Piña, the Colombian-Venezuelan artist Alexandra Gelis and the Italian artist Luigi Coppola, invited to realise new works and performances. The residency programme is inspired by the experiences of resistance against forms of domination and social struggle for justice inherited from the peasant wars of 1525 and expands them also to non-human living forms involved in the ecological relationship, thinking of living resistance as also belonging to the plant and mineral world.
The elements that make up the programming of Earthly Communities seek to shed light on the paradigm of governance that has been progressively establishing through imperialism and neo-imperialism. Through contemporary artistic practices, the exhibition project looks at the resilience of indigenous knowledge related to the land, both in Abya Yala and in South Tyrol, and offers new possible forms of sustainable relationship with it.
