Teatro Della Terra Alienata

Ecology, xenofeminism and the political imagination

Activity

General public
Free entry, limited capacity to 55 people

Halfway between theory-fiction, speculative fabulation, audiovisual research, and dramaturgy, Teatro Della Terra Alienata stages a fictional scenario of territorial secession of the Great Barrier Reef and its catchment areas from Australia’s Commonwealth sovereign control for its inclusion into the Archipelago of Territories Alienated from Capitalism (ATAC). This geopolitical fiction brands itself as a distributed and porous post-national constellation of techno-cosmovisions and culture-territories that exist “outside” capitalism.

The project addresses the urgency raised by the UN´s IPCC report published in 2018, which framed the decay of the Great Barrier Reef as part of a wicked problem that demands radical political actions, along with new imaginaries and aesthetic paradigms. The artwork proposes a re-appropriation, expansion, and concatenation of existing technologies of surveillance and ecological management embedded in the life cycles of the reef, as well as the takeover of the infrastructures of extraction operating in the region. Inspired by the Xenofeminist Manifesto, these technologies become the poetic arsenal for a rational and universalist project of emancipation, “cutting across race, ability, economic standing, and geographical position.”

Teatro Della Terra Alienata was the Australian Pavilion at the XXII Triennale di Milano (Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival) in 2019, where it received the Golden Bee Award for the best international contribution. The publication by Bartlebooth of the homonymous book, in 2022, coincides with the acquisition of the work by the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne) for its inclusion in the permanent collection of Contemporary Design and Architecture. The book consolidates five years of research, pedagogical projects and critical spatial practice by GRANDEZA (Amaia Sánchez-Velasco, Jorge Valiente Oriol & Gonzalo Valiente Oriol) and BAJEZA (Miguel Rodríguez-Casellas), which engages with the crisis of political imagination as a form of institutional critique. The project was produced in collaboration with six complicit artists (Cigdem Aydemir, Liam Benson, Madison Bycroft, Shoufay Derz, Janet Laurence and Patricia Reed), and reflects upon the conversations, research, and testimonies of scientists, activists, Aboriginal elders, miners, designers and thinkers, as well as the academics and students from the University of Technology Sydney’s schools of Design, Architecture and Life Sciences.

The film and book Teatro Della Terra Alienata will be presented as part of the exhibition The Irruption, at Santa Mònica. The film screening will be followed by a roundtable moderated by Antonio Giráldez López and Pablo Ibáñez Ferrera (editors at Bartlebooth) with Amaia Sánchez-Velasco and Jorge Valiente Oriol (two of the authors of the project). In addition, Laura Benítez Valero and Toni Navarro will delve into the questions raised by the project, providing perspectives from philosophy and the arts.

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