The Invention of Europe

A TRICONTINENTAL NARRATIVE (2024-2027)

The Invention of Europe. A tricontinental narrative (2024-2027) is a three-year curatorial programme in which exhibitions and public programmes critically reflect on the monolithic idea of Europe, starting from a multilingual territory – South Tyrol. Located between the “modern” Italy and Austria, its communities have over the centuries been criss-crossed by political and economic powers that, regardless of its actual existence, have alternated and challenged one another. The programme borrows from the formula The Invention of Africa by the Congolese philosopher Valentin Y. Mudimbe , which highlights how the idea of Africa is a modern invention, linked both to the European colonial vision – one that is exoticist and racist – and to the ideal projection of its global diasporas. Over a three-year period, from 2024 to 2027, Europe will be at the centre of reflections by artists – some European, some from Africa, Latin America or Asia – who will be invited to unveil and confront its identity, which has since the Renaissance been a construction of modernity: a perspective that will recall the decades of tricontinental networks forming alliances and solidarity during the period of decolonisation. The Invention of Europe highlights how the rigid and fictitious idea of Europe that the philosopher Samir Amin calls “Eurocentrism” (whiteness; religious, moral and intellectual superiority; progress and evolution) is at the same time a material reality based upon the economy of the American plantations, of mining and the unpaid labour of African slaves. An invention, Mudimbe would say, whose complex historical, social, religious and material matrix is to be highlighted together with the invited artists and the communities living in the complex – and European – territory of South Tyrol.

BULLETINS: Notes on The Invention of Europe