GEOGRAFIE / GEOGRAPHIES
March - December 2024
“History is the teacher of life”. From childhood, we are used to repeating it to the point of exhaustion. So abused is the ancient saying that it has ended up losing power, and from history, it seems we have learned little, more often nothing. The twin sister of history is geography. There is no history without land, no history without borders to cross, conquer, restore, sacrifice. There are no peoples who do not say, rightly and more often wrongly, ‘this is mine.’ There is no history without geography, therefore: yet, always, in cultural rhetoric and in the construction of scholastic and academic paths, geography is the child of a lesser God. A childhood memory of lists of capitals and names of lakes and heights of mountains, and nothing else.
It took the overbearing reactivation of history, the brutal reshuffling of the cards of the economy, the boiling of young blood that feels all the boundaries of body and soul, deserts and seas, to remind us that geographies exist, they affect us, they define us: and so do humans with them. It took the clear, incontrovertible, and swift arrival of signs of inequality to the poorest, to mobilize them to cross over. It took human action to change the global ecosystem, producing droughts and floods, to push the caravans of salvation to move northwards, precisely following the opposite route to the one that, hundreds of thousands of years ago, led a few thousand homo sapiens to guarantee a future for our species, surviving in the heart of Africa.
It was a time without nations and without borders, a time of survival without boundaries without which humanity would not have existed. An era in which the factors of an unknown and indomitable nature decided everything, and pre-human geography could only adapt: if it could manage to do so.
Today, in the time of hyper-humanity, of the Anthropocene that has irreversibly altered atmospheres and temperatures, investigating the geographies of the world and of the soul means traversing the choices of peoples and those who dominate them, and the very concept of democracy, its utopian dimension, the temptation to consider it obsolete. It means questioning, criticising, thanking or cursing humanity itself, which in space builds and names places, designs harmony or incubates domination and destruction. The geographies we look at, finally, put us right in front of a crossroads: they remind us that nothing is given, and every right promised land is only the result of choice and decision.
Jacopo Tondelli
[journalist and writer, co-founder and editor of Gli Stati Generali].
March – May 2024
FOCUS #1 · TRANSITI / TRANSITS
Faustin Linyekula / Mamu Tshi (RDC/CH)
Lina Majdalanie e Rabih Mroué (LB/GE)
June – September 2024
FOCUS #2 · TERRITORI / TERRITORIES
October 2024
EXTRA FOCUS
4 – 6 October c/o ZONA K
Guinea Pigs (IT)
October – December 2024
FOCUS #3 · ROTTE / ROUTES
The images of the 2024 season’s poster and materials are by Cesura, an independent photography collective whose work focuses on authorial photographic documentary. Founded with the desire to be a new and autonomous force on the international photography scene, Cesura also founded its own independent publishing house and printing workshop. Its publications have received countless prizes and awards over the years.
Alessandro Sala deals with social and environmental issues and has followed the migration crisis in the Mediterranean with particular attention, focusing on the reception process of asylum seekers. In 2022, he won the PAC ministerial grant with the DIORAMI project, a tale of 8 Sicilian botanical wonders exhibited at the Botanical Garden in Palermo.
Design: Neo Studio by Leonardo Mazzi