Curatorial Notes

 

In response to the theme of Biennale Arte 2024 "Foreigners Everywhere", Fondazione Marta Czok concludes the Biennale season by hosting Marina Moreno's public art project We All Come from Somewhere, curated by Jacek Ludwig Scarso and with the participation of Michael Meldru, Jenny Davis and Edson Burton.

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Created with the support of Arts Council England (ACE) and originally commissioned by Tate Liverpool in 2019, the project celebrates the human right to movement and migration, and the cultural richness that this entails.

Marina Moreno, a interdisciplinary artist born in Venice and living in Bristol (UK) comes from a family history of migration, whose roots can be found, in addition to Italy and the United Kingdom, in Spain, Brazil, France, the United States, Lithuania and Mongolia. Inspired by this experience, Marina Moreno was invited by Tate Liverpool, as part of the Tate Exchange program, to create a participatory work where stories of migration and displacement could be shared.

 

Bearing the symbol of the shipyard rope in reference to the port of Liverpool, the participants created sculptures, reflecting the distance from their first home and the journeys travelled thereafter.

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Now the ropes are found in Venice, the point of origin for Moreno, equally emphasized by the presence of water. The waterways, here as in Liverpool, resume a history of continuous displacement caused by multiple factors: from economic exchange to the need for political refuge and, again, to imperialism and colonialism. These global factors have a specific impact on the individual, creating an infinite number of personal narratives that reflect the fluidity of what gives us the perception of geographical belonging.

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The narratives shared in We All come from Somewhere are at the centre of a performative intervention, consisting of the oral history exchange between the participants and the artists involved: this becomes the fulcrum of an artistic experience that finds form in the sculptures created and in the documentation, through text and video, of what inspires them.

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“I see the collective assemblage of our abstract rope sculptures” says Marina Moreno, “forming an installation portraying a new surreal landscape with no borders, where our journeys and stories will be standing side by side, next to and complementing each other”.
She adds, "these sculptures represent stories of: 

ARRIVALS AND DEPARTURES

PHYSICAL, PERSONAL AND SPIRITUAL JOURNEYS

CONNECTION TO OUR ORIGINAL CULTURE

AND THE CULTURE WE DECIDE TO EMBRACE

THE EXCHANGE OF IDEAS

CONSTANT MOVEMENT AND EVOLUTION"

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Five years since its origins in Liverpool, the project itself has also migrated, now more relevant than ever, reinventing itself in a new context and engendering new narratives in this process.

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We All Come from Somewhere is presented at Fondazione Marta Czok as a living archive, merging its original exhibits from Tate Liverpool, such as the work Musigration by Michael Meldru and Edson Burton, with the ones developed here in Venice. We invite visitors to contribute to the legacy of this project, by taking part in its creative evolution.

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BIOGRAPHY