HOPE

Name: HOPE
Start: 2023-09-30 00:00:00
End: 2024-02-25 00:00:00
Location: Museion

Museion

Bolzano, Trentino-Alto Adige, Italy

The show

HOPE is the third chapter of TECHNO HUMANITIES with an international research group including Bart van der Heide, Leonie Radine, DeForrest Brown, Jr. and Gruppo Museion Passage.

Since its inauguration, exactly 15 years ago, the Museion building has often been described as extraterrestrial architecture, like a UFO that landed in the center of Bolzano. HOPE underlines this symbolic image of the museum as a spaceship, a time capsule, a portal to another dimension. Museion is thus transformed into a place of production of wonder , where science and fiction merge to affirm hope as an active critical practice. As the philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote in the preface to his book Das Prinzip Hoffnung, 1954 (The Hope Principle): “One needs the most powerful telescope, that of the polished utopian conscience” to penetrate the darkness.

HOPE invites audiences to move between real and imaginary spaces and times, to explore alternative points of view . The architecture of the exhibition leads first to the fourth floor, off the usual route, to an observatory where, through various artistic time capsules, new perspectives on terrestrial and celestial spheres open up. The path, through individual and collective artistic cosmologies, offers the opportunity to explore the Self and the Other beyond an anthropocentric vision of the world. The video installations, sculptures, costumes, paintings and drawings create a science fiction atmosphere between apocalypse and new beginnings, where human sciences, technology, ecology and economics meet.

The artists exhibiting on the third floor sometimes use new world-building tools in the age of artificial intelligence and virtual reality. With their installations, which are reminiscent of video games, they create immersive spaces between the virtual and the real, memory and oblivion.

The second floor houses the archive of the Afrofuturist myth Drexciya . Here, the extensive research DeForrest Brown, Jr. undertook into the history of techno for his book Assembling a Black Counter Culture (2022) takes shape in the space. At Museion, Brown arranges, in dialogue with the digital paintings of AbuQadim Haqq, numerous techno albums from the Detroit music scene along maps and timelines. In parallel, a sonic story is developed with his album Techxodus (2023), his mixes The Myth of Drexciya (2023) and Stereomodernism (2020). Thanks to the multi-year dialogue between Brown and Haqq and the record collection of DJ Veloziped / Walter Garber from Bolzano it was possible to make tangible, for the first time in a museum, this artistic form of writing history and building the world, which until now was otherwise neglected.

Following the logic of a space-time tunnel – also represented in Haqq's painting on the exhibition poster – a passage is created on the ground floor that invites very fast travel between distant points in space-time. The juxtaposition of reactivated works from the Collection and new projects creates a bridge between Museion's past history and future as an institution that collects art. At the same time, a space opens up for listening and discussing the central questions posed by the HOPE exhibition: where do we come from and where do we want to go?