A meeting with International experts to discuss the new geographies of Contemporary Art. It will take place at the ateliers of the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation on the Giudecca Island, during the last day of the preview of the Venice Biennale. 

At 6 pm on May the 31st, by the courtyard of SS. Cosma and Damiano on the Giudecca island, Southernity opens its doors: a public meeting which investigates geographies of contemporary art focusing on the South, curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi with the collaboration of the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation.

Watch out though! The South is not going to be analyzed as a summit of territories located in a specific part of the map, but rather as a stance, a concept, a rhythm, a choice, an ideal. And if the conversation is going to touch the usual stereotypes, it will be in order to prove their inventive strength, the power of imagination which still can raise from them.

The discussion won’t only be about a theory of the Southern Thought, but it will look at the practice and at the cultural production. Four international guests will dialogue together with the public. From the live voice of the protagonists, it will be possible to listen to the tale about experiences which have levered on localized energies in order to strongly affect over their own borders. It is the case of Andree Sfeir-Semler, well-known art historian and gallerist, who divides her activity between Hamburg and Beirut, where she opened in 2005 one of the first white cubes of the Middle East. Polycentric is also the life of Pier Luigi Tazzi (Documenta IX; I Aichi Triennial) who is now curating The Pattaya Show – First Pattaya Biennial 2014 in Thailand, exhibition of which the assistant curator Anuwat Rattanphan will show a visual preview. Marina Fokidis will take us for a brief moment back to the Europe of the economic crisis, but only to point out a possibility of resistance: Kunsthalle Athena and South – As a State of Mind Magazine are two projects from which the Greek curator will start her considerations. A real Manifesto will end the meeting. It is the Middle-South Manifesto by Miltos Manetas, which will make us lose ourselves in a blooming digital desert.

Southerity represents a stage of PrimaVisione, a residency program held by the National Gallery in Cosenza, during the Autumn of 2012. On the occasion of Southernity the artists involved – Francesco Bertelé, Rachele Maistrello, Anja Puntari, Giulio Squillacciotti – will present, through a series of performative interventions, traces, sketches and lines of their research conducted starting from the Calabria context. These will be distance and live new elaborations after the previous episodes on the web. Unavoidable in the occasion is the presence of Vincenzo Chiarandà and Anna Stuart Tovini, who with UnDo.Net have actively contributed to the evolution and media development of the project.