Starting June 6, Hidden Histories returns with its schedule of performances in the public spaces of the city of Rome. Curated by Sara Alberani and Marta Federici, with Valerio Del Baglivo, the project is designed as a platform for site-specific research and artistic production and aims to critically re-discuss the city’s historical-artistic legacy, adopting approaches and methods of decolonial thinking.

In this third edition, the focus remains on the public space, a dimension that in Rome is closely connected to the notions of heritage, preservation, restoration, and monumentality, along with its collections, archives and objects that still today are read and valued within a white, patriarchal and heteronormative canon. 

The subtitle of Hidden Histories 2022 Trovare le parole / Finding the words takes its cue from an expression by feminist theorist Sara Ahmed in her book Living a Feminist Life (Duke University Press Books, 2016), and focuses on the linguistic dimension as a fundamental space in which to act and declare what is not seen and recognized within society as violent, racist, and sexist. As stated by Ahmed, finding words means naming the problems we are confronted with, “allowing something to acquire a social and physical density by gathering up what otherwise remain scattered experiences”. 

In the words of curators Sara Alberani and Marta Federici, “Hidden Histories 2022 acts through the practices and discourses of the artists involved, who open paths of reappropriation and re-signification of places in the city from which communities have been removed. In different ways and manners, the interventions detect and analyze processes of invisibilization and track down marginalized stories and voices in order to bring them out into the public space, as is the case in Iván Argote‘s work with the children of the Esquilino neighborhood; other interventions critically reread common expressions, such as Autumn Knight‘s “dolce far niente,” (the sweetness of doing nothing) whose performance at Palazzo Altemps speaks to us about racialized bodies and survival strategies. Dora Garcia, on the other hand, gives voice to books and texts that have been subject to censorship throughout history, through a public program that stems from a study of the archives of the Biblioteca Casanatense. Finally, Adelita Husni Bey offers a collective workshop that starts with an analysis of the collections of the former Museo Coloniale, which have become part of the collections of the Museo delle Civiltà di Roma which are currently undergoing a series of research activities.

All events are open to all and free of charge.