Nature and Prey: Colonial Stories and Cartographies

Artists: Irene Coppola (with Vito Priolo), Daniele Marzorati, Edoardo Manzoni, Alessandra Messali

Curated by Marco Scotini.

The PAV Parco Arte Vivente is pleased to present the group exhibition Nature and Prey, which tackles the subject of colonial memory through the works of a young generation of Italian artists: Irene Coppola, Edoardo Manzoni, Daniele Marzorati and Alessandra Messali.

Far from being an innate condition, oblivious to its circumstances, being prey is a position conferred in relation to other subjects, the object of the predator’s deliberate strategy. We can state that something becomes the prey—and, therefore, huntable—due to a process of distinguishing, hierarchisation or exclusion from the accepted orders.

In order to trace out a theory of prey, it is necessary to consider both the politics of human and extra-human representation and the ways in which power constructs social identities through repression. With respect to other strategies of conflict, hunting is not a battle between equal partners but requires an original imbalance given the hunter’s factual supremacy. Considering our colonial memories today, Italian and otherwise, does not mean dealing only with a forgotten or repressed past: the forms of oppression that we believed we had left behind to the time of slavery and the plantations, resurface in the neo-archaic reconfigurations encouraged by the power of neo-liberalist economic politics.

The word prey, which, in Italian, has the same etymology as the verb prendere (to take), is always something that is acquired through violence and capture and is an act that we have legitimised and attributed to nature. Building a theory of prey can be an important tool when tackling the dramatic reality of colonial memory: the four emergent artists invited to take part in the exhibition are not naturalists but the archaeologists of a social history of nature and they investigate by working on the representations of the exotic, of hunting and colonial experiments on plants.

Edoardo Manzoni’s hunting scenes, the traps and bird calls reflect how the violence of the images produced in Africa during the colonial period are rendered aesthetically acceptable. The representation of the defeated and slaughtered “beasts” operates as an exoticizing device for big-game hunting, a metaphor for the subjugation of populations. Daniele Marzorati’s project retraces some of the physical signs of the repressed colonial past in Italian territories, photographic research that activates the connections between the regulatory power of official histories and objects that are apparently neutral, observing the links between Fascism, colonialism and racism, making use of the concept of “race” and “racialisation”, as expressed by Mellino or, in other words, hierarchisation by means of the ideology of “race” that invisibly permeates the Italian social structure. EMILIO SALGARI AND THE TIGER—A Story Written in Far Away Italy, Set in Guwahati 187, by Alessandra Messali, is the result of research carried out by the artist in the Indian state of Assam. The popular author Emilio Salgari (1862-1911) never travelled outside Italy, despite writing more than 200 adventure stories set in “exotic” locations: one of these is Guwahati (in Assam), an area controlled by British colonialists. The project is an experiment in which the differences between the text and the context to be found in Salgari’s books are used as tools for reflecting on the logic of cultural representation and on what it means to be represented. Lastly, Irene Coppola, presents Habitat 08°N, created by working closely with the indigenous community of Guna Yala (Panama) in collaboration with the architect Vito Priolo: beginning with the local, material culture, a codex of memories is constructed which is able to narrate the history of the territory, date the settlements and map out migrations and movements.

La Natura e la Preda opens PAV’s exhibition programme for 2022. This will continue with the solo exhibitions of works by Elena Mazzi and Regina José Galindo.

The exhibition has been created with the support of the Compagnia di San Paolo, the Fondazione CRT, the Regione Piemonte and the City of Turin.