JENNA SUTELA, nimiia contact
Permanent billboard and sound installation
29 and 30 October, MACRO
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TIMOTHY MORTON Lockdown is Reopening, Reopening is Lockdown
Online lecture
30 October, 6.30 pm, museomacro.it

On 29 and 30 October MACRO, in collaboration with Terraforma, presents the first chapter of Il Pianeta come Festival XL, the originally 24-hour event which, in compliance with the new measures undertaken due to the pandemic, will be postponed until Spring 2021, articulating itself in different chapters, through both physical and digital dimensions.
The project takes its cue from the analysis carried out by Ettore Sottsass in the visionary, iconic project “Il Pianeta come Festival” published in 1972 in Casabella, interpreted in the fields of research that have always been a part of Terraforma, namely the language of sound, architecture and environmental sustainability, which in this case temporarily expand inside the experimental platform of Museum for Preventive Imagination.

The visual-sound installation nimiia contact by Jenna Sutela takes inspiration from Il Pianeta come Festival by Ettore Sottsass, a site-specific work conceived for the museum’s terrace which can be visited from 29 October. The Finnish artist works with words, sounds and living media such as moulds and bacteria, and her approach is all about symbiosis and interspecies communication, both with organic and synthetic more-than-human life. The site-specific installation commissioned for this occasion is based on Bacterial-Martian language generated from machines and space bacteria. Here, the movements of Bacillus subtilis bacteria as well as early ideas about Martian language, originally channelled by the French medium Hélène Smith in the 1800s, were used as teaching materials for machine learning.  nimiia contact is a sign, a machine-mediated contact from the extremophilic bacteria that, according to recent spaceflight experimentation, might actually survive on Mars.

On 29 and 30 October, the billboard will be accompanied by the sound installation nimiia vibié, composed by the interactions between a neural network, audio recordings of early Martian language, and microscopic footage of extremophilic space bacteria. The project, published by PAN, originates in n-Dimensions, Google Arts & Culture’s artist-in-residence program.

The first chapter of Il Pianeta come Festival XL also sees the participation of Timothy Morton, livestreaming from the U.S. with the lecture Lockdown is Reopening, Reopening is Lockdown, taking place on 30 October, at 6.30 pm on museomacro.it. Amongst the most influential philosophers of his generation, presently a member of the group of thinkers OOO (Object-Oriented Ontology), and creator of the concept of “Hyperobjects”, Morton is an outstanding personality in the field of contemporary thinking about ecology. His lecture will offer a timely analysis of the relationship between ecology and the complex moment we are currently living through.

The second chapter has been postponed to October 2021, and will unfold itself over the course of 24 hours in an itinerary through the physical architecture of the museum and the audio-visual architectures activated by a series of performances, talks, workshops, installations and video projections with Terre Thaemlitz, Valerio Mannucci, Jeremy Deller, Cristiana Perrella, Vipra, Paquita Gordon and the execution of Vexations by Erik Satie, curated by Ricciarda Belgiojoso with the piano interpretation by Silvia Belfiore, Ricciarda Belgiojoso, Erik Bertsch, Alessandra Celletti, Andrej Koroliov, Ciro Longobardi, Irene Ninno, Fabrizio Romano, Ursula Salmista, Marco Silvi, Arturo Stalteri, Giulia Tagliavia.

The third chapter will be developed on the museum’s website through in-depth documentations and online contents.