Everything Passes Except The Past

Everything Passes Except the Past

17 September-18 October 2020

Reservation is required please click here to book your visit or send an email to biglietteria@fsrr.org

“Everything Passes Except The Past” is an exhibition and online-festival organized by the Goethe-Institut in collaboration with Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin. The growing public awareness of racist violence and historic injustice has put colonial monuments, ethnographic collections and film archives into the spotlight of political and social debates. For the purposes of ”Everything Passes Except The Past“ we propose an artistic and discursive approach to the residues of colonialism in order to redefine power structures and envision alternative futures.

The exhibition took place from September 17 - October 18 2020 at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and presents art works by Bianca Baldi, Alessandra Ferrini, Grace Ndiritu and the collective Troubled Archives. Colliding reality and representation, the presented art works put in question the Western idea of the colonial image as neutral “document“ and expose tensions between past and present. The exhibition is accompanied by a rich, discursive online-festival on October 17: Alongside a keynote contribution from Bénédicte Savoy, round-table talks with activists, artists, experts, curators and researchers from Africa, Latin America and Europe took place. The debates discussed the challenge to decolonize museum collections, public space and film archives in order to bring views from the Global North and the Global South into intensive dialogue. Besides, the presentations focus on the question how we could learn from the methodologies of art, critical theory, and activism to provoke politicisation and critical metamorphosis.

The festival is part of the Goethe-Institut’s 2-year long international project “Everything Passes Except The Past” which organised various workshops and events in Belgium, France, Portugal and Spain in 2019. Many of the participating artists and experts present works and statements that have been developed during this research period. A publication of the results in bookform is foreseen for October 2020.

Everything Passes Except the Past
Digital Festival
October 17, 2020, h.11 am-6.30 pm CEST

11am: Introduction by the organisers
Aloña Elizalde, Jana J. Haeckel, Irene Calderoni

11.15am: Keynote speech by Bénédicte Savoy
Amnesia. 40 Years‘ Debate on African Cultural Heritage in European Museums

12pm: New Museum Practices: On the Ethics and Politics of Return
Panel participants: Bénédicte Savoy, Didier Houénoudé, Christian Greco, moderated by Ayoko Mensah

2.30pm: Critical museology: Revisiting Colonial Collections through Artistic and Curatorial Perspectives
Panel participants: Carolina Orsini, Simona Berhe, Bianca Baldi, Grace Ndiritu

4 pm: A Difficult Heritage: Rethinking Representations of Italy’s Colonial Past
Panel participants: Rosa Anna Di Lella, Alessandra Ferrini, Angelica Pesarini, moderated by Liliana Ellena

5.30pm: All Statues Must Fall? Conflicts and Iconoclasm in Public Space
Panel participants: Daniela Ortiz, Yann Le Gall -Berlin Postkolonial e.V., moderated by Tania Adam