SCHOOL OF INTERSPECIES DIPLOMACY
An experimental communication project on sustainability by the Mali Weil collective
Produced by: Museomontagna
Curated by: Andrea Lerda
As part of the: Museomontagna Sustainability Programme
With: Club Alpino Italiano, Città di Torino
With the support of: Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo, Regione Piemonte, Camera di
Commercio Industria e Artigianato di Torino
With the collaboration of: Biblioteca Nazionale del Club Alpino Italiano
Technical sponsor: Ferrino
The School of Interspecies Diplomacy is an artistic project by Mali Weil that hybridises fiction and real knowledge production practices around interspecies and caring relationships between human and beyond human in times of climate change.
Based on an act of worlding by Mali Weil, where one imagines a world in which interspecies diplomacy is politically recognized and fully operational, the School is an institution that offers continuous training courses and dissemination of the complex interdisciplinary skills needed to negotiate relations between human and non-human.
In resonance with the exhibition The Mountain of Advanced Dreams curated by Andrea Lerda, premiered at the National Mountain Museum in Turin in 2023, invited the School of Interspecies Diplomacy and Lycanthropic Studies as a resident project to develop a research path in close dialogue with the institution sustainability program and communication strategy.
The project focused on some relational assemblages and cultural practices specific to Alpine territories, investigates narratives and imaginaries of the past, present and future of the Mountain as a place of multi-species knowledge. The result will be a body of visual and textual narratives, focused on the mountain ecosystem as a living archive of diplomatic practices. An important step in the worlding which expands and spreads an imaginary of the future inhabited by a series of diplomatic institutions, schools, embassies, assemblies
capable of transforming the way in which we inhabit the mountains and the entire planet. This residency period is in fact a first opportunity to develop the school lines of action, its network of relationships and its communication, but also the museum itself, studying the real impact a fictional institution can have.
From February 2024, the School will produce a series of online interventions, which will be published on social channels and on this dedicated page of the website, through which an experimental sustainability communication project will be shaped. The content will intersect video, performance languages and text-based, fruit of the collective research process, of direct dialogue with diplomatic figures who inhabit mountain territories, interfacing with the broader cultural and artistic vision of the museum institution and involving the CAI National Library.
The collaboration with Mali Weil continues the work undertaken by Museomontagna since 2018, aimed at proposing speculative narratives capable of generating a paradigm shift in the relationship between human beings, mountain ecosystems and inhabitants of Planet Earth more generally.
The project is realized with the support of the Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo within the framework of the Next Generation You call.
MALI WEIL
Mali Weil is an artistic platform made up by Elisa Di Liberato, Lorenzo Facchinelli and Mara
Ferrieri, based in Trento (IT). Since 2012 Mali Weil has been developing research investigating the potential of performance as a space for the dissemination of political imagery. His visual production ranges from performance to product and speculative design, from editorial products to cinema, but also operates through curatorial projects and workshops, creating participatory and relational set-ups, platforms for discussion and exchange, open and itinerant schools dealing with imagery related to ecological and political issues.
Characteristic of Mali Weil approach is her ability to mix tools borrowed from art with fiction, philosophy and scientific languages.
He has presented his work at prestigious venues and events including Hamburger Bahnhof, Mart Museum, Galleria Civica Trento, The Milan Triennale, GAMeC, Museo MUSE, Milano Design Week, Centrale Fies, Parco Arte Vivente, National Mountain Museum, Circolo del
Design in Turin, SAAL Biennaal Tallinn, Trento Film Festival, Museo MAXXI, Venice Design Biennial during the Venice Architecture Biennale and others. Mali Weil also collaborates regularly with Centrale Fies and MUSE for which she is the creator and curator of the Like Life platform, which has been reflecting on relations with the living since 2020, crossing the gazes of science, speculative design, philosophy, fiction and art through public programmes, master classes, workshops, visual productions and conversations both online and in the museum.
