Biennale Arte Venezia 2024 – DRC Pavilion

Collective Exhibition @ Gervasuti Foundation Venice | London

Venezia, Maggio - Novembre 2024

Lithium is the bold, provocative title of this exhibition featuring artists from a land and a people exploited by outsiders. We’re witnessing a new “rush” by foreign companies to extract lithium-a key ingredient in rechargeable batteries that power everything from smartphones to electric cars, and even solar energy storage systems.

In Manono, a region of the Congo, the world’s largest untapped lithium deposit was recently discovered. Now, a foreign company is preparing to launch large-scale mining operations there, including building a mineral processing plant. This will bring major environmental damage and violate human rights, as the mining will rely on people-including children-working in conditions that amount to modern-day slavery.

AION - A Federico Garibaldi Installation

Federico Garibaldi, 2024

Music: Overwrite

Lithium Unveiled Symposium @ Fondazione Gervasuti,

Venezia - Biennale Arte 2024

Synopsis:

It stands. The heart of the world. Beyond all time.

Since before time existed. It rumbles in its own soul. Rumbles in our own.

Which everything contains and nothing contains.

Above, below, inside and outside of us.

Transparent and secret like an ice cube. Which it shows and protects.

Crystallizing every moment and every moment transforming.

The still form of our madness. Of our wisdom.

Of the oracular forms and of the Holy Scriptures.

One day the man invented the evil. He thought it up in the silence of his own mind. Then he shouted it loudly. That day, for a moment, the man broke the crystal. But the crystal restores itself the same as before. In the apparent regularity of things.

So, men have killed. Men have outraged other men. They will kill and outrage again.

Other voices, other rooms, other worlds.

The crystal is the life that returns every day.

With, or without us.

With dinosaurs or without dinosaurs.

With stars. Without stars. Inside every black hole. Different twisted universes will go scattered in the leaves of time. Always and never do not exist.

The universe is infinite and ever shifting.

The universe changes shape with each new beat.

The soul of the world. Uncaused cause of everything and nothing.

Unmoved mover that does not stand still.

And just because of this, it eternally stands.

Hic et Nunc - A Federico Garibaldi Installation

Federico Garibaldi, 2024

Simposio Lithium Unveiled @ Fondazione Gervasuti, Venezia

Biennale Arte 2024

A simple merry-go-round.

All that is in pursuit will never return. All that returns will embark on a journey.

The gaze is forced outside the center.

Brought to the periphery of things, it diffracts into the white.

The white of Mount Ruwenzori is elusive. It challenges you to look far outside the circle.

The things on the periphery are part of the whirlwind of the whole, but they go faster.

They struggle more, they have to travel huge spaces in order to get back there.

Where it all began.