A biennial festival that flaunts of cultivation, and community

Manifesta+ Suites biennial festival that flaunts of cultivation and gemenskapUlrika Stahre reports from Manifesta in PalermoFoto: Zheng BoZheng Stay, ”Pteridophilia 1”, 2016, video, 17 minutes.ART

Photo: Alberto BarayaKonstgjorda plants of Alberto Baraya.

The roving biennale Manifesta was born a few years after the fall of the wall, and since 1996 has toured around Europe. Many cities have been able to grind its specific nature and shown up its unique way to be a part of the european, not the least historically.

Since the 1990s, the idea of Europe has undergone several metamorphoses, and in our modern nationalist climate, it is a statement that the build Manifest precisely in Palermo. Of all the cities that played host to Manifesta, among others, Frankfurt, Zurich, St Petersburg, Rotterdam) is Palermo so far, the clearest symbol of a Europe that has always been a cultural melting pot. The phoenicians, the greeks, the romans, the moors, the normans, refugees from various quarters – the sicilian culture is full of older and newer influences. Manifesta starts from the idea that in Palermo there are no migrants: here are all of the Palermobor.

exhibition built around collaboration, cultivation, community. Parallels are drawn (sometimes annoying if it were needed) to the plant world – the various species can spread freely and grow almost anywhere – and at the side of a handful of palaces and other historically heavy venues, it is the botanical garden that represents the hub.

shown Here Malin franzén's detailed and technically complicated locally based växttryck, inspired, and referring to a sicilian 1600-talsbotaniker. It is impressive, cool and elegant. The work marks, as well as Alberto Barayas collection of artificial plants, a sense of the botanical order is far from fixed and finished. What is toxic can also be healing, it is fabricated to be as real as nature itself.

In the botanic garden also displayed a video in the middle among the rapidly growing bamboo: Zheng Bo queerar nature by a group of naked men enjoying the plants in some sort of ritualized sexual intercourse. This track, the ritual, is a undertema, which connects large parts of the Manifesta. What do we do when we are trying to create new ways to live? When we process the trauma? We seem to be seeking ritualens symbolic repetitions.

Palermo's population had in the 1990s, enough of the mafia's domination, and the protests seem to have given any kind of result – at least, described the city now, as freed from criminal elements. However, tourism still live on mytologiseringen, souvenirs with the Godfather theme is a big part of the offer. In the Oratorio della Madonna dei Peccatori Pentini shown a tvillingverk that examine ritual as liberating action: Yuri Ancaranis Whipping zombie and Lapidi – a film from Haiti, where a bybefolkning ritually working with slaveritraumat, is combined with the turistselfies from the charged sites in Palermo, the locations of known maffiamord. Rituals frees, perhaps by allowing violence to seep up just a little bit at a time.

Patricia Kaersenhouts the large saltberg, The soul of salt, " says a caribbean myth, which was spread among the slaves, that by avoiding to eat salt would be able to fly home again. We visitors are encouraged to bring salt home, dissolve it in water, and thus also dissolve the historic suffering.

John Gerrards works Untitled (near Parndorf, Austria) is not a liberating ritual, on the contrary, almost. The artist has created a film based on photographs from the place where a truck was found in August 2015, with 71 dead refugees. Gerrards strategy is to make the place meaningful by giving the weight of time – the simulated film is a year long. The actual konstskapandet here becomes ritual, it may remind you a little bit about turistbilderna above: a way to honor, remind, and maybe check the collective pain and the blame.

These works are just examples of the small and large rituals offered at Manifesta. But there is also the ritual in the form of processions: inherited from the religious rite visible procession both as a direct performance in the city of Marinella Senatores and Jelili Atikus bottling, but also as a protest march in Tania Brughueras muralmålningslika article 11. This is about the protests against the us MUOS, a huge military communication systems used to control, inter alia, drones, built in the south east of Sicily. This military and may well still say colonial building work also Laura Poitras , in several strong movies.

So, there are concrete policies in Manifesta, the most impressive as visualized research, Cristina Lucas Unending lightning, which in a filmtriptyk shows bombing, day-to-day since man learned to fly. It is effective and strong.

Manifesta has, however, more than a fox behind the ear. Many works dealing the world with bitsk sense of humor, you can make a spy with the artists of The Peng! Collective, or enjoy the world's stupidity in the Tau Makhachevas Baida. Or see the guide and the guided change the place in the video New Palermo Felicissima, Jordi Colomer .

It is to the migrations exhibition constantly returns. What we are in the world, and how we move. Manifesta 12 is that other large projects a chaos of high and low. The ritual presents itself as a creator of order, and what it means honestly do not know nor do I.