Isole  has been invited to participate in the round-table: Rendering a Nation: The Territories of the Dispossessed // Essere “tra”, Abitare la 25° Nazione – Un gesto di apparizione, quali territori e diritti?

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Refugees, migrants, artists and activists will discuss the notion of a Nationless Pavilion from their own expertise and experience.
The meeting will take place around a table prepared with texts, objects, photos, documents and sources linked to the interventions.
The talk will seek to better define the idea of a “nation” whose existence is based on common needs and experiences and opposed to territorial integrity.
Further the talk seeks to discuss how the notion of a pavilion and the artistic practice it includes can address the challenges of dispossession. The idea of a Nationless pavilion requires that we rethink notions of borders, identity, belonging and exclusion. The challenge is to find an element that embodies a place of belonging – one with an artistic practice relates both to social facts and imaginative possibilities.
The focus will go to “the Nationless”: 51.5 million people, to move from the abstraction of a number to the human beings with their physiognomies, visions and narratives.

GUESTS:
Jowan Akkash (journalist, Syrian refugee) – Mohamad Al Husain (doctor, refugee) – Federica Araco (journalist, BabelMed) – Marco Baravalle (Sale Docks) – Gregory Beals (photographer, journalist) – Elena Bellantoni (artist) – Giorgio de Finis (MAAM, Museo dell’altro e dell’altrove) – Nathalie Galesne (journalist, chief editor BabelMed) – Rosa Jijon (artist) – Francesco Martone (activist, Comitato Verità e Giustizia per i nuovi Desaparecidos) – Costanza Meli (Associazione Isole) – Cesare Pietroiusti (artist) – Alessandra Pomarico (curator, Free Home University) – Lorenzo Romito (architect-artist, Stalker/Osservatorio Nomade) – Federico Simonti (writer) – Don Mussie Zerai (President Agenzia Habeshia per la Cooperazione allo Sviluppo (A.H.C.S).
Visual contributions: Gregory Beals, Elena Bellantoni, Shady El Noshokaty, Rosa Jijon, Stalker/Osservatorio Nomade, Calixto Ramirez Correa, Emanuele Satolli.

☛ Nation 25 is an art project that seeks to shine a light on the lives of refugees, migrants and the internally displaced.
The project through politics and art seeks to examine critical questions around the desire and experience of flight: the nature of borders, crossing and drift, the geography of fear, resilience and imaginative places of safety.
☛ The first project of Nation 25 is The Nationless Pavilion, as this territory merits representation among the nations at the Venice 56th Biennale, in comparison with the system of national pavilions: a foundational and critical gesture at the same time, an act to rethink the concept of nation.
The project will open in Venice with a series of collective moments from May to November: open call, performance and laboratory.