At the Milan Triennale, the exhibition The restless earth explores the migrations of our era through works by artists from 60 different nationalities.
Art, in its most distinct forms – that is, different expressive languages and exponents of different nationalities – becomes the means to recount, almost as if in a news report, what more than any other phenomenon is changing our present history: migration, the subject of the exhibition La terra inquieta. At the Milan Triennale from 28 April to 20 August.
The exhibition is the result of a collaboration between the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi and the Triennale, two institutions that have always placed the present, in all its meanings, at the heart of their mission, paying attention to the most experimental and innovative languages of contemporary art and culture and with the capacity to give voice to phenomena that carry profound change.
La terra inquieta – which borrows its title from a collection of poems by Caribbean writer Édouard Glissant, long fascinated by the question of coexistence between different cultures – is thus the sharing of an urgent and necessary project that has the ambition of portraying the present as an unstable, restless territory. Through works by more than 65 artists from various countries around the world – including Albania, Algeria, Bangladesh, Egypt, Ghana, Iraq, Lebanon, Morocco, Syria and Turkey – and with an installation that will extend through the ground-floor gallery of the Triennale and continue on the upper floor, the exhibition speaks of the epochal transformations marking the global landscape and contemporary history, addressing in particular the problem of migration and the refugee crisis.
The aim is to awaken consciences, to guide them towards an understanding of events that have become everyday occurrences yet are mistakenly referred to as a "phenomenon". Migration is no longer a phenomenon; it is a constant of our time that must be accepted, understood and given a human face.
Beatrice Trussardi, President of the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, shares this view: "…the goal of this exhibition is to give the public back at least a part of these experiences, so that they may be transformed into knowledge, providing resources and tools useful in the search for a harmonious balance between human beings."
Through installations, videos, reportage images, historical materials and objects of material culture, La Terra Inquieta reconstructs the odyssey of migrants and the individual and collective stories of the journeys of the new wretched of the Earth. The route will unfold through a series of geographical and thematic nuclei – the conflict in Syria, the state of emergency at Lampedusa, life in refugee camps, the figure of the nomad and the stateless person – interwoven with works of powerful impact: true visual metaphors and precarious monuments erected in commemoration of this brief and unstable stretch of our century.
The exhibition will be open at the Triennale until 20 August, Tuesday to Sunday from 10:30 to 20:30; tickets cost 8 euros.