Gathering into the Maelstrom in Venice at Sale Docks is a four-days program curated by Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI) and Sale Docks in the framework of Museum of the Commons, a cooperation project by L’Internationale a European confederation of museums, arts organizations and universities.

Our world is warming up causing immense turbulence: the historical moment we are living in is a frightening vortex. War is at the center of the vortex, a black hole from which we can no longer escape. Gaza represents a point of no return in history, claiming for the end of colonial processes that have been going on for centuries. Capitalist extractivism has brought the planet to the brink of collapse, causing energy crisis, massive migratory processes, and a fascist and xenophobic crisis in those communities on the belief they have some form of privilege.

It is within this maelstrom that Institute of Radical Imagination and Sale Docks launched back in 2021 the Art For Radical Ecologies Platform, an international community of artists, academics, and art workers who came together and wrote a manifesto by engaging in discussions with eco-activists from around the world and participating in struggles.

Since the moment of its foundation the Institute of Radical Imagination has tried to offer itself as a platform for those forms of resistance, and to think about their possible intersections with art. The same goes for Sale Docks, a space that was occupied in Venice in 2007 and that has, since then, become a reference for international art workers’ struggles and local activist groups, having developed an institutional model alternative to the typical neoliberal art institution and its links to mass tourism and toxic philanthropy. 

The Gathering into the Maelstrom –  from 17th to 20th of April in Venice at Sale Docks Dorsoduro 265 – is an invitation to learn to inhabit this vortex, rooting artistic production in ecological struggles, and transforming the field of contemporary art into a political territory. To generate a Museum of the Commons we can not avoid questioning the toxicity that permeates institutions and, at the same time, building non-capitalistic, non-colonial, non-patriarchal, and non-anthropocentric alliances.
Opening on Wednesday 17th, the first three days of the program present talks by representatives of decolonial thought like François Vergès and Yazan Khalili, screenings of  films by Oliver Ressler, the launching of Art for Radical Ecologies Manifesto book, Museum of the Commons Climate Assembly, and an exhibition of props realized in a workshop with Taring Padi, IRI and Powernotte. The fourth day features an action on the water in collaboration with Comitato No Grandi Navi (the local Committee Against Big Cruise Ships). The goal of the action is to temporarily occupy an island in an area where Cruise Ships transit and dock, posing a serious threat to the fragile ecosystem of the Lagoon and to a city like Venice already overwhelmed by mass tourism.

Gathering Into The Maelstrom is part of EU project Museum of The Commons internationaleonline.org

Co-Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.