Mediterranea Biennale, San Marino 2021

Design by Theodoulos Polyviou

Mediterranea 19 Biennale
School of Waters

15 May - 31 October 2021

San Marino

UK New Artists is delighted to be supporting Maeve Brennan and Tawfik Naas as the UK representatives in the 19th edition of the Mediterranea Biennale: School of Waters.

Please join us on Saturday 22 May at 4pm BST for

‘Practising from afar: engaging with Libyan history’, a conversation with Tawfik Naas and Alessandra Ferrini with Simone Frangi and Sabel Gavaldon (curator at Gasworks), In collaboration with UKNA – UK New Artists. Livestreamed from Gasworks, London.

See the full School of Waters programme here

Between 14 - 23 May there is a free public programme of talks, performances and events which you can watch online. See the ‘Digital Swamp’ programme here.

About the Biennale

MEDITERRANEA 19 - School of Waters presents artists, writers and researchers coming from or based within a constellation of territories related to the Mediterranean Sea.

Mediterranea 19 – School of Waters imagines a biennale as a temporary school inspired by radical and experimental pedagogies and the way they challenge artistic, curatorial, and research formats. From this standpoint, School of Waters acts as a collective tool to defamiliarise stereotypes that manipulate our geographical imaginaries, especially those linked to the eurocentric interpretation of the Mediterranean area.

Acknowledging that humans have the ability to gather, create a community and exchange information, through gossip, storytelling and speaking about things that do not exist, Mediterranea 19 redirects its attention to arguments against human exceptionalism and aims to reconfigure the notion of learning through commoning knowledges present within non/human and human structures.

School of Waters revolves around a critical rethinking of the material and symbolic agency of waters from a geopolitical and deep-ecology perspective. The desire to learn from waters reveals ways to un-train nationalisms and rediscover watery syncretism that constituted the Mediterranean as a complex platform of life forms and knowing processes. The curatorial team develops Mediterranea 19 as an ecology of practices, trickling through various spaces in resonance with the specificity of a small state such as the Republic of San Marino.