And Remember That Holes Can Move
Margherita Moscardini

Opening: 13 September 2023 at 7PM

Working group: Margherita Moscardini (artist) with Prof. Stacy Douglas (artist; legal theorist; Associate Professor of Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada), Prof. Isabel Feichtner (Professor of Public Law and International Economic Law at the University of Würzburg, Germany), Prof. Lawrence Liang (Dean, School of Law, Governance and Citizenship, Ambedkar University Delhi, India), Prof. Francesco Palermo (Head of Institute for Comparative Federalism, Eurac Research, Bolzano, Italy), Prof. Nora Sternfeld (art mediator and curator; Professor at the HFBK Hamburg, Germany; co-director of the Master Course for Exhibition Theory and Practice at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria) and Dr. Alexandra Tomaselli (Senior Researcher at the Institute for Minority Rights of Eurac Research, Bolzano, Italy).

For the exhibition And Remember that Holes Can Move, artist Margherita Moscardini continues a journey that began in 2015 in Za’atari Camp, the world’s largest camp for Syrian refugees that opened in 2012, with a population (currently 80,000 inhabitants)—if it were a city—that would make it the fourth largest in Jordan.

Creating holes and (mobile) spaces that go beyond territorial sovereignty, means setting precedents of inviolability that on the one hand materialise the condition of the stateless and on the other, undermine the threefold principle on which the nation state is founded, interpreting an awareness that the stateless can no longer be an exception, but the paradigm of a new historical conscience around which to sew an idea of citizenship, free at last from territorial appurtenance and blood ties, capable of suggesting alternative instruments to the nation states that arm themselves to defend their borders.

At Ar/Ge Kunst, Margherita Moscardini takes the The Fountains of Za’atari project further through the voices of a working group consisting of local researchers, art historians and international jurists, who have worked with the aim of outlining how a public sculpture can enjoy a special jurisdiction, defining it as a territory not subject to any form of sovereignty. The illegally-concrete, unsanctioned water pumps in the temporary city of a refugee camp are converted through the drafting (by the working group) of illegalities or supra-legalities, essentially black holes within the national body, into structures carrying binding legal international jurisdiction.

Margherita Moscardini is an artist, born in Italy, who investigates the relationships between transformational processes in the urban, social and natural orders of specific geographies. Her practice crosses various fields including architecture, the city and citizenship, seeking to generate sculptures meant as objects and spaces which legally differ from the territorial sovereignty. She favours long-term projects that she develops through different means including large-scale works and writings.

Don’t miss: Transart Festival, kicking off its 23rd edition on 13th September at 9PM at Transart OASIE, via Dante 32, Bolzano.

Thank you to: Italian Council (DGCC), Gian Marco Casini Gallery, Anna and Francesco Tampieri, Luca Roberti, Diego Zuelli, Transart Festival, Bolzano Art Weeks, Hotel Laurin, Eurac Research, Bolzanism Museum, Vetroricerca Studios, Archive Books, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano.