E X I L E curated by Zasha Colah & Valentina Viviani
„Extraneous“

Zasha Colah is co-artistic director at Archive Milan/Berlin/Dakar (Milan, 2021–). Lecturer in Curatorial Studies, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti (Milan, 2018–)and on the editorial board of Geoarchivi (Meltemi, 2021–) a series of books reopening rebellious archives. She co-founded the curatorial collaborative and union of artists, Clark House Initiative (Mumbai, 2010–2022).

Valentina Viviani is an artist and researcher and a member of Poly Marchantia art collective. She focuses her practice on notions such as plant-thinking, reading sites as ecosystems, and conversation as a method of research. She lives in Turin where she collaborates with different editorial and curatorial projects.

The extraneous domestic gesture of placing a pot of drinking water on the street outside for the stray passer-by creates a small space, the tiniest space of reprieve, a narrow opening for the not-quite encounter. The invited artists make work at the edges of legality, entering directly within international law and its processes, dissect genocide; and expose the absurdities of the state, fixed identities, and borders. The artisanal water pumps in refugee-camp courtyards, the fountain in the window-shattered piazza, the matka at the doorstep are extraneous. They fuse with the possibility of extraterritoriality, exceeding national ideas of jurisdiction, sovereignty and constitutionally given identities, and monumentality. Their extraneousness make them sites of meeting, capable of encounter, capable of reimagining affiliation, the polis, citizenship, refuge. Can territory be exceeded? How to be out of territory? What extraneous space is opened by the extraterritorial or the unidentified? Can a failed forensic identifier open space for abstract, infinite possibilities of identification against identity politics, and constitutional, nationally-sanctioned communities and borders?