Part of Sowing Archives, conceived and curated by Sara Alberani and Chiara Siravo (LOCALES)

The program Sowing Archives ends on 20 November with a newly conceived puppet show by Peruvian artist Daniela Ortiz. Through an exploration of the subterranean—physical and metaphorical—as a place of life and of death, as a site for refuge and one where those in power repeatedly banish opposition, the artist will suggest an alternative history made up of forced silencing and underground struggle. The buried anti-colonial and anti-imperialist histories of the 20th century were in fact seeds, and the roots they generated are the protagonists of Ortiz’s tale of resistance. 

The Italian Cultural Institute of Barcelona presents the second edition of IT Out OFF, a program conceived by the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture in collaboration with the Directorate General for Public and Cultural Diplomacy of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, for the internationalization of Italian art.

The 2024 edition features Sowing Archives, a public program conceived and curated by Sara Alberani and Chiara Siravo of the Rome based collective LOCALES, is presented at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, a contemporary art space run by the Barcelona City Council. The title of the programme refers to the importance of the archive as a visual, imaginative and knowledge-building medium within marginalized and invisibilized contexts. The project is based on the belief that artistic practices have the capacity to locate and gather traces of the past and plant the necessary seeds for the recognition of histories and experiences whose memory is at risk of being lost. Just as there are potential histories, there are also potential archives that can take root through the sowing and irrigation of their subterranean substances, which often only appear to be hidden

Through the work of the international artists involved in the programme, Adelita Husni Bey, Muna Mussie and Daniela Ortiz, Sowing Archives recognizes and celebrates the importance of counter-narratives, particularly in the context of Europe’s colonial past. The project initiates a dialogue between Italy and Spain, where multiple artistic practices are searching for and bringing to light a critical perspective towards the persistent aesthetic and ideological reverberations of colonialism, also through alternative pedagogy geared towards reformulating collective memory.

Composed of performances, video projections, workshops and a series of editorial releases, Sowing Archives consists of three main events hosted by La Virreina Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona from 1 October to the end of November 2024.

Sowing Archives is a public programme conceived and curated by Sara Alberani and Chiara Siravo (LOCALES) and promoted by the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture and by the Italian Cultural Institute of Barcelona in conjunction with the 15th edition of Manifesta. 

The project is supported by La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, àngels Barcelona, Laveronica Arte Contemporanea, and with the collaboration of Calafou and Nero Editions.

LOCALES is a curatorial platform founded in Rome that aims to inspire a reflection on the public sphere through artistic practices. It is directed and curated by Sara Alberani, Marta Federici and Chiara Siravo. Through a series of site-specific programmes involving commissions of new artworks, explorations of public spaces, educational activities and performances, LOCALES addresses the complexity of contemporary urgencies starting from the political and social history of symbolic places in the city and their local communities. 

The LOCALES team that is active in the Sowing Archives project is composed of Sara Alberani, Chiara Siravo (curators), Chiara Pagano (curator of narratives), Giulia Caruso (project manager) and Alice Albanese Ginammi (intern).

Daniela Ortiz lives and works in Urubamba, Peru. Through her work, she aims to generate visual narratives in which the concepts of nationality, racialization, social class and genre are explored to critically understand structures of colonial, patriarchal, imperialist and capitalist power. Her recent research concerns the need to recover historical internationalist and antiimperialist political experiences from the global south that have been erased in a context of persecution. During the last few years her work has also dealt with Europe's migratory control system, its link with colonialism and the legal mechanisms created by European institutions. She has also developed projects about the Peruvian upper class and its exploitative relationship with domestic workers and the colonial role of extractivism of the mining industry. Her work has been recently exhibited in the Kunsthaus Zürich (2024), the Fondazione Sandretto (2023), the Neumarkt Theater Zürich (2023), the Hamburger Kunsthalle and the Kadist Art Foundation in Paris (2020–21), the Kunsthalle Wien (2021), the 11th edition of the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art in the Röda Sten Konsthall in Göteborg (2021) and the Triennial at the New Museum in New York (2018).