Multidisciplinary Alliances

For years now, Centrale Fies has been opening to the public with LIVE WORKS SUMMIT, the result of a whole year of work developed through artistic residencies, cultural projects, and multidisciplinary alliances that have given shape to works, thoughts and visions capable of interrogating the present. 

During the first weekend of programming, from 18 to 20 July, for LIVE WORKS SUMMIT, Centrale Fies will present the final performances of the 2024 edition of Live Works, one of the longest-running Italian calls for proposals with a decolonial curatorial approach, and the project selected in the context of the Agitu Ideo Gudeta Fellowship, a research grant in its 4th edition, conceived for racialised artists with Italian citizenship. 

The programme opens on Thursday 17 July with the opening of Undomesticated Ground (18 July–20 September), a Group Show and Live Programme featuring Giulia Crispiani and Golrokh Nafisi, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Théophile Peris, Marcos Kueh, Adam Christensen with Tom Wheatley and David Aird, curated by Simone Frangi and Barbara Boninsegna, with Maria Chemello as Executive Curator. The Group Show is accompanied by a Live Programme: Giulia Crispiani and Golrokh Nafisi will present the performance The City We Imagine during the opening on 17 July, followed by a textile art workshop titled Green, Red and Black on 19 and 20 July. Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s film The Inheritance will be screened from 17 to 20 July. The live programme also includes performance-concerts by Adam Christensen with Tom Wheatley and David Aird, and a workshop on the ancient Celtic wool-working technique of “wool waulking” by Théophile Peris.

Within the LIVE WORKS SUMMIT (18–20 July), curated by Barbara Boninsegna and Simone Frangi with Maria Chemello as Executive Curator, Centrale Fies presents for the fourth year the AGITU IDEO GUDETA Fellowship—conceived as an affirmative action measure and realised this year in collaboration with Palazzo Grassi–Pinault Collection (Venice) and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. The Fellowship arises from the conviction that the lack of diversity in the art world is tied to concrete material and symbolic barriers, often related to racialisation, and sees sociologist and curator Mackda Ghebremariam Tesfaù and curator-activist Justin Randolph Thompson supporting the Live Works curatorial board. Omar Gabriel, the artist selected for the 2024 affirmative action edition, will present Nine-Night (Sunday 20), a musical-performative work born of the encounter between two instrumental bodies: the berimbau and the piano. This piece explores the idea of transcorporeality as the possibility of being manifold, reflecting on the diasporic body and the multiplicities of identity that traverse it. Also showcased are projects by the 2024 Fellows realised over a year of research, alongside Guest Artists Deena Abdelwahed (Friday 18 July), DJ, electronic composer and Tunisian producer known for her distinctive fusion of Arab influences and cutting-edge sound design; Dengue Dengue Dengue (Saturday 19 July), a Tropical Bass duo from Peru; and Caterina Barbieri & Space Afrika (Sunday 20 July), presenting Last Track (w/ MFO and Ruben Spini), blending Barbieri’s haunting musical textures with Space Afrika’s dub to forge a wholly new sonic landscape.

Central to the Summit’s programme are Adam Seid Tahir’s Dawn (Friday 18 July), reinterpreting Norse mythology and the Elder Futhark runic alphabet through an Afro-Nordic queer lens; fake and extinct by Klara Kofen and Cameron Graham (Friday 18), a performative-installative work traversing sovereign infrastructures; Noha Ramadan’s And we shimmered as we crossed from one reality to another… (Friday 18), commissioned by the Mophradat Consortium; The Transition Pieces by Hot Bodies aka Gérald Arev Kurdian (Saturday 19), exploring gender transition’s impact on musical expression; Yesterday’s Forecasts by Tewa Barnosa and Ghenwa Noiré (Saturday 19), examining ecological exploitation and genocide through Bedouin poetry and Libyan rhythms; and Chōri Collective’s culinary exploration of “Asian body disciplines” (Sunday 20). The weekend also features free schools—open lectures and lessons reinforcing the cultural undercurrents of Centrale Fies’s programming—led by Fatima Ouassak in conversation with Mackda Ghebremariam Tesfaù (Friday 18); Elizabeth A. Povinelli with Simone Frangi (Saturday 19); and Emma Dabiri FRSL with Justin Randolph Thompson (Sunday 20), addressing ecology, antiracism, postcolonial thought and political imagination.