LOCALES presents You Have Come Among Our People and Your Life Is Safe, a lecture, a screening, and a conversation with Palestinian artist Emily Jacir. The event is dedicated to the influence and impact of Italy – and particularly Rome, where Jacir has lived intermittently since the age of 14 – on her artistic practice. It focuses on two decades of projects and interventions developed on Italian soil, including three permanent installations in Pietrapertosa (Basilicata), Palermo, and Milan. Often staging or permanently installing her works in public space, the artist has worked with photography, film, sculpture, installation, and performance, reflecting on themes such as collectivity, memory, migration, exclusion/inclusion, visibility/invisibility, and on how these elements are negotiated through the body and within public space. Following a short introduction and the screening of a selection of her film works, Emily Jacir will be in conversation with Sara Alberani and Chiara Siravo of LOCALES, tracing shared reflections and urgencies around public space and silenced historical narratives.

The event will take place at the Cinema Hall. 
Free admission until capacity is reached.

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LOCALES is a curatorial platform aimed at activating critical reflection on the public sphere through artistic practices. Through a series of site-specific programs involving the commissioning of new artworks, explorations of public space, learning moments, and performances, LOCALES addresses the complexity of contemporary urgencies starting from the political and social history of symbolic places in the city of Rome and the communities that inhabit them. LOCALES was founded in Rome as a curatorial project in 2020 and is currently co-directed by Sara Alberani and Chiara Siravo; the team also includes Marta Federici, Chiara Pagano, Giulia Caruso, and Alice Albanese.

EMILY JACIR, Mediterranean, lives and works between Bethlehem and Rome. Her  interdisciplinary practice spans film, photography, installation, performance, sound, and text. Her work explores both personal and collective movement through time and public space, examining its implications on the physical and social experience of trans-mediterranean geographies and temporalities. Through rigorous historical and archival research, Jacir’s layered and resonant body of work is rooted in gathering, community, and in social affiliations. For the last twenty years, she has been working in southern Italy, primarily in Salento but also in Basilicata and Sicily. Her most recent work, We Ate the Wind, features a large cinematic installation that combines new and archival material, addressing questions of visibility and invisibility, proximity and distance, hospitality and exclusion, exploring specific migration policies and their consequences on individuals and communities.