EUGENIO TIBALDI

INFORMAL INCLUSION

The Italian Pavilion at maltabiennale.art presents Informal Inclusion, the new work by Eugenio Tibaldi, curated by Francesca Guerisoli and Nicolas Martino, at Villa Portelli in Kalkara from March 15 to May 31, 2024. The Italian Pavilion at maltabiennale.art is promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture and Fondazione La Quadrienna e di Roma, in partnership with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Embassy of Italy in Valletta, Italian Cultural Institute in Valletta and is organized by La Rocca Foundation.

Drawing on the collaboration with Heritage Malta, Eugenio Tibaldi deprives the spaces of Villa Portelli of a defined temporality, intending to highlight the many times of the different lives that have passed through it. On the one hand, the installation brings out forgotten stories and unveils the invisible; on the other hand, it deconstructs the rhetoric that, starting from a particular point of view, has determined a univocal narrative about Europe and the Mediterranean by creating hierarchies and subordination immediately traceable to economic and power relations.

Informal Inclusion explores the marginal dynamics through which processes of inclusion sustained by the unspeakable of our most hidden desires pass, highlights the complex relationship between economics and contemporary culture, and provides a peripheral view on immigration. In continuity with the research that distinguishes his artistic practice, Tibaldi starts from the concept of the margin, from the stories that are untold or silenced because they are inextricably linked to the exploitation of the “other.”

Emerging to the surface is the role of a reality that is submerged but, at the same time, increasingly indispensable to the economies and lives of the wealthiest part of the world. The installation refers to the contradictory relationship between good and evil: a series of unconscious “activators” shine a light on the island’s past and, at the same time, poetically unveil the violence of a world in which migratory processes redraw the maps of our territories and repropose the trauma of colonial removal.

If Informal Inclusion refers to the history and present of the Mediterranean, it does so with the tragic awareness of those who understand that the regeneration of the world passes through a marginality resisting major narratives and ultimately contaminating and hybridizing the space it traverses.