MuSa

Muna Mussie e Sara Manente
7th of June 2024 – performative installation

MEETING POINT
Atelier di Benoit Bouhier, via Trento 1, Ameno (NO)
From 4PM

All activities are free. To participate we advise you to sign up, we will keep you updated.

Artistic residency 25th of May – 8th of June 2024 – Ameno

MuSa is the space-time in which Sara Manente and Muna Mussie meet to interweave their practices, desires and obsessions, bringing manual activities closer to the body, performative practice, and to experiments with artificial intelligence. Their understanding is based on trust, rather than consensus, and emphasizes the richness that comes from differences rather than communalities.
The project is thus composed of different practices, techniques, and experiments they have materialized in the past, then mixed with what is new to learn in the rural context: the arts of wicker weaving and embroidering meet cultivation of mycelium.
Their process becomes a choreography of narratives, without necessarily “producing” in the strict sense. To stitch together the dramaturgy of this making, however, a third subject is introduced: what if an artificial intelligence like Alexa could watch, listen, and answer our questions as a playwright would? Let us imagine this encounter between ancient technologies and those we have at our fingertips today. Let us imagine Alexa talking to us, speaking a text that would be a surrogate for our thinking brain, reversing roles and planes. Can we become study material ourselves?

Credits:
Concept and creation: Muna Mussie e Sara Manente | Performers: Muna Mussie e Sara Manente | Project supported by: BUDA (Kortrijk), Nadine (Brussels) e VCG – Flemish Community Commission.

BIO
Muna Mussie is a multidisciplinary artist based in Bologna. Her work moves between gesture, vision and word, traversed by the practice of embroidery. She investigates the languages of the stage and performing arts to shape the tension between different poles of expression, the private and the public, the visible and the invisible, memory and oblivion. Recent performances and installations include The Perfect Human from Sunrise to Sunshine (2023), Oblio/Pianto del Muro (2022), PERSONA (2022), FORO FORO (2022), Her work has been presented in various national and international contexts including Fondazione Sandretto (Turin), Hangar Bicocca (Milan), MAMbo (Bologna), Santarcangelo Festival, Archive Books (Milan), SAVVY contemporary (Berlin), Short Theatre and Il Mattatoio (Rome), Manifesta 2020 (Marseille), Workspace (Brussels). Muna Mussie is among the winners of MiC’s Italian Council 2022.

Sara Manente graduated in Communication in Bologna with a thesis on the semiotics of dance, then she moved to Brussels where she now works as an artist and researcher. Drawing on living imaginaries and subject matter, her most recent projects reflect on the possibility of contamination between pedagogy, research, performance and publication, resulting in a variety of formats: from the choreographic and sculptural work of MOLD, which considers shaping and contaminating as logics of the body, to the editorial and curatorial practice of ROT, magazines and Gardens. Together with Sébastien Tripod and Debora Robbiano he collaborates on RUINED and Towards a Ruined Theatre, a process of mycological construction and degradation that iterates the idea of fertile ruin in different architectures. The situations she promotes are highly collaborative and often emerge from long-term research such as Wicked technologies/Wild Fermentation (from 2019) and Spectacles (2016-2018). In 2021 she was artist-in-residence in Wiels (Brussels). She has been part of a.pass since 2008, as a post-master’s program participant and research center, as well as a curator and mentor. She has taught at KASK, ISAC, ZUYD, DOCH and EXERCE. She has collaborated with Marcos Simoes in performances and workshops. Her projects are funded by Flemish authorities in Belgium and have been exhibited in Europe, Brazil and Korea.