A MOUNTAIN OF ADVANCED DREAMS
A project by Mali Weil
Curated by Andrea Lerda
The solo exhibition The Mountain of Advanced Dreams by the art platform Mali Weil is part of the Museomontagna’s Sustainability Program and it is the winner of the 10th edition of Italian Council, a program that aims to promote Italian contemporary art in the world by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture.
The Mountain of Advanced Dreams deepens Mali Weil’s multi-year research on the reconfiguration of cultural, social and legal relationships between human and Other-than-human beings, and on the emancipation from the self-referential perspective inherent to anthropocentrism.
Through fiction and with a speculative approach, Mali Weil activates a narrative breakthrough that propels our imagination towards a near future. The artists give substance to a different cosmology based on interspecies and relational paradigms, employing concepts such as forestation, diplomacy, reciprocity or co-evolution.
The Mountain of Advanced Dreams focuses on interspecies diplomacies, understood as the possibility we have of thinking about different interactions among living beings. The artists combine critical tools, narrative approaches and visual interventions with a reflection on the ritual aspects of the relationships with the living.
The installation that gives the title to the exhibition, produced within the framework of Italian Council X 2021, dialogues with some previous works that are thematically significant for a more comprehensive and complete understanding of a wide-ranging and highly transdisciplinary practice.
Mali Weil, The Mountain of advanced dreams, 2023. Courtesy the artist and Museo MADRE. A project realized with the sustain of Italian Council (2021)
The first part of the show displays a selection of works created between 2019 and 2022 as part of the Forest project. A polyphonic narrative that identifies the forest as the legal, narrative and political space from which one can embark on transforming some foundational categories of Western thought. This layered project at the same time develops practices of social dreaming aimed at exploring new modes of interaction with Otherness. The “Forest”, in the artists’ idea, generates a space in which the human relinquishes the unifying notion of the individual to recognize oneself as a multiple being, both inhabitant and inhabited.
In the second part, a body of new works outlines a possible world in which “interspecies diplomacies”, imagined as already active and globally widespread practices, rewrite relations between the living entirely. This fiction sketches the narrative of a possible Other-than-human politics, where different instances are performed on the plane of negotiation rather than just conflict. In this cosmogony, two symbolic figures serve as an escape point for the artists’ research: that of the diplomat and that of the werewolf, ideally connected through the paradigm “Divina et Devorator.”
These two entities, both “beings of metamorphosis,” act as interpreters of an attitude of interspecific dialogue, while also acknowledging the inherent violence between human and animal, within a perspective of mutual belonging to a single living matter. They lay the foundation for a new cohabitation with the living, fostering acceptance and understanding. “Divina et Devorator ” are thus two attitudes that reframe the Anthropos, when properly accepted even in their most radical aspects.
Mali Weil, The Mountain of advanced dreams, 2023. Courtesy the artist and Museo MADRE. A project realized with the sustain of Italian Council (2021)
Within this powerful exercise of rewriting the dynamics governing humankind’s cultural framework, Mali Weil also chooses to act on a pedagogical level, creating and activating the School of Interspecies Diplomacy and werewolfish Studies. This institution positions itself as a space for interdisciplinary training and research, offering innovative pathways for the deepening of the legal, scientific, cultural and narrative skills that were once familiar to the Western tradition. Its goal is to train the future generations of diplomats. Training in interspecies diplomacies and werewolfish studies means -for Mali Weil- honing different skills in order to move skillfully in all future international and interspecies contexts of politics, sciences and cultures of the Other-than-human.
With this objective, and constantly teetering between the real and the fictional, The Mountain of Advanced Dreams steps out of the merely artistic space in order to activate discussions, imaginaries and practices with the power to redefine the symbolic representation of the subjectivities involved in every form of interspecies relationship.
Mali Weil, The Mountain of advanced dreams, 2023. Installation view. Photo by Roberta Segata.
