For the 2018 Biennale a new curatorial model is being used, with four interdisciplinary creative mediators; Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli; Dutch filmmaker, Bregtje van der Haak; Spanish architect and scholar, Andrés Jaque; and Swiss contemporary art curator, Mirjam Varadinis. By fusing different disciplines and rooting itself in a holistic urban research, Manifesta hopes to extend its impact beyond just engaging audiences with contemporary art, but towards providing Palermo citizens with tools to imagine the future of their city.
Titled Palermo Atlas, the urban study is the foundational step of Manifesta 12, serving both as a blueprint for Palermo to plan its future and as a research framework to ensure that Manifesta 12 achieves a long-term impact for the city and its citizens. Palermo Atlas represents a novel creative mediation model proposed by Manifesta that focuses on transforming a nomadic art biennial into a sustainable platform for social change, rooted in holistic urban analysis and determined to leave a tangible legacy for every host city. It is the first time that Manifesta has invited an architecture firm as the creative mediator, with the goal to provide outside expertise and a new perspective to the host city and find new ways to unlock its potential in collaboration with citizens and local grassroots organizations.
Description of project by OMA - Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli
Palermo Atlas Introduction
There is no fixed way to approach Palermo.
The city cannot be reduced to a single statement or to a precise definition. It is rather a complex mosaic of fragments and identities emerging out of centuries of encounters and exchanges between civilizations. Palermo is historically cosmopolitan. Its material archeology, cultural legacy, somatic traits and ecosystems are the tangible evidences of a long lasting syncretism.
Today, Palermo can be considered an archipelago of the global: not a globalized city per se, but rather an incubator of different global conditions, that here reveals unique problematics, characters and potentials, making the city an ideal blueprint for the Mediterranean and the EU as a whole.
At the same time Palermo is probably no longer a city as we know it; it acts as a node for an extended geography of networks and systems that reach far beyond the EU-Mediterranean Area – from Sub-Saharan Africa to Scandinavia, from South East Asia to Gibraltar – rapidly reshaping its identity and role within the geopolitical scenario.
The local realities in the city are an expression of new globalized conditions. At the same time, they bring evident traces of a highly specific autochthone culture and of the city’s controversial modern history. It is in this tension between a fluid global identity and an irreducible milieu where Palermo finds its complex and specific character in the age of post globalization.
The work that follows represents an attempt to investigate both aspects: on the one hand it uses the city to script the story of a whole region; on the other it is a reflection on characters that are specific to Palermo. It is based on an omnivorous collection of stories and testimonies gathered on the ground and supported by data. Overall, it aims to offer a critical point of view on the city, through a selection of snap-shots representative of its present status.
Based on the format of a magazine – a special issue on Palermo - the document is structured into three main sections, each one developed around a number of new maps:
Journey: is a narration on Palermo through the lens of its historical role as barycenter of the Mediterranean. Extending the notion of “journey” and “traveler”, it spans from the historical dimension of the first Arab scholars travelling to Sicily since the IX Century, to the most recent impact on the city of migration (of men and other species), tourism, and climate change.
XX City: explores the physical, political and emotional bond between the city and its controversial post-war history, through media, architectural testimonies and private memoires.
Acupuncture: is a detailed report on our field explorations. It identifies those sites and stories that are representative both of the physical archeology of the city and its current conditions, and illustrates a potential selection of places, projects and parcours for the Biennial. An urban acupuncture stands as a strategy. Manifesta will question the dominant identity of a visual arts biennial by unleashing a number of different interventions spread across the city, based on local partnerships and long term impact.
The information collected here is the result of a series of formal and informal encounters and conversations with over 100 selected citizens in the course of a three months’ study project. Our most sincere gratitude goes to them and their invaluable contributions.
As articulated in the foreword to the Palermo Atlas by Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, the work takes its starting point from the awareness that there is no fixed way to approach or define Palermo.
Using OMA’s unique methodology, Palermo Atlas attempts to investigate this complex, evolving character of the city from an interdisciplinary lens - covering architecture, archeology, anthropology, archival research, personal histories and media.
Leoluca Orlando, the Mayor of Palermo: “Offering the city of Palermo a reflection of great value, Palermo Atlas shows the story of the city’s past and recent history through the perspective of the future. Palermo Atlas captures the complexity of Palermo and its inhabitants, as well as historical and current connections between the city, the Mediterranean and Europe. The study shows the joint commitment of the City Hall and Manifesta to develop a biennial that is truly engaged with Palermo’s cultural richness, its history, hospitality, spirit of peaceful co-existence and the city’s vision for the future.”
The Palermo Atlas was presented in the newly re-opened Teatro Garibaldi in Palermo, assigned by the City of Palermo to Manifesta. Prior to the biennial, Teatro Garibaldi will be used as a temporary Manifesta 12 office and cultural hub for Palermitani including an exhibition to discover the history of Manifesta, a pop-up café, an art library, film screenings, educational tours and workshops, and more. It will also be one of the key venues of the Manifesta 12 biennial in 2018.
The European Nomadic Biennial will open in the Sicilian capital on June 15, 2018.
