FUMOGENI 2017 – current
In 2017 I co-founded Fumogeni with Serena Porrati and Carlotta Pezzolo, a research-creation project at the intersection of art and critical discourse. The project took the form of public presentations (in 2017-2018), part of the Space 4235/CHAN program, two independent exhibition spaces based in Genoa, Italy. In December 2017, Fumogeni hosted a lecture featuring American anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli’s “We Are Water” and environmental historian Marco Armiero’s “Welcome to Wasteocene: Toxic Bios and Guerrilla Narrative within and against the Anthropocene,” held in February 2018 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Genoa.”
Our first guest
Elizabeth Povinelli, “We Are Water”
Space 4235, Genova, Italy, September 2017
Elizabeth Povinelli’s writing has focused on developing a critical theory of late liberalism that would support an anthropology of the otherwise. Informed primarily by the traditions of American pragmatism and continental immanent theory and grounded in the circulation of values, materialities, and socialities. This potential theory has unfolded primarily from within a sustained relationship with Indigenous colleagues in north Australia and across five books, numerous essays, and four films with the Karrabing Film Collective. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism was the 2017 recipient of the Lionel Trilling Book Award. Karrabing films were awarded the 2015 Visible Award and the 2015 Cinema Nova Award Best Short Fiction Film, Melbourne International Film Festival and have shown internationally including in the Berlinale Forum Expanded, Sydney Biennale; MIFF, the Tate Modern, documenta-14, and the Contour Biennale.
Our second guest
Marco Armiero, ´Welcome to the wasteocene´ Toxis Bios e Guerrilla Narrative inside and against the Antropocene´
Academy of Fine Art, Genoa, Italy, February, 2018
“Scientists have identified a new epoch, the Anthropocene (the Age of Humans), marked by a technostratigraphy of wasted matter, such as carbon sediments, radionuclides and microplastics, accumulating within the earth surface (Crutzen 2006). Waste can be considered the essence of the Anthropocene, embodying humans’ ability to affect the environment to the point of transforming it into a gigantic dump. For this reason I have argued that this new epoch might be called the Wasteocene (Armiero and De Angelis 2017). However, the Wasteocene frames waste not as an object – ‘waste’ – but as a relation – ‘wast- ing’. My hypothesis is that while wasting relationships are based on consuming and ‘othering’, that is, on sorting out what and who is waste -, commoning practices are based on reproducing resources and communities. Is it true that we live in the Wasteocene? And if yes, is there a way to escape from it? Or perhaps should we embrace it?´
Can we sabotage the Wasteocene? Where are the toxic stories of this age? MARCO ARMIERO, 2018
During the lecture Marco Armiero talked about the Anthropocene, asking wether we are really living in the Wasteocene and what it means for the planet and our lives.
Marco Armiero is Director of the Environmental Humanities Laboratory at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, where he is also Associate Professor of Environmental History. He is the author of A Rugged Nation. Mountains and the Making of Modern Italy (2011, translated into Italian in 2013) and co-editor of several volumes: A His- tory of Environmentalism. Local Struggles, Global Histories (2014); An Environmental history of mass migration (2017); Future Remains. A cabinet of curiosities for the Anthropocene (2017); and Nature and History in Modern Italy (2010). He has published articles and edited special issues in Environment and History, Left History, Radical History Review, Modern Italy, Southern Atlantic Quarterly, Capitalism Nature Socialism, and the Journal of Political Ecology. He is a senior editor of Capitalism Nature Socialism and an associate editor of Environmental Humanities.
In October 2023, we joined an art residency project at Casa degli Artisti, in Milano
Casa degli Artisti (House of Artists) Milano, Koinótes, curated by Olga Gambari – October 2023 – March 2024
Marea at Archivio Leonardi V – idea from the 15th of December to the 13th of January
Fumogeni is coordinated by Serena Porrati, Simona Barbera, Carlotta Pezzolo, and Ronny Faber Dahl
Fumogeni 2017/2018 has been kindly supported by Formech, UK