DARK MATTERS | Winter Festival
in collaboration with Black History Month Torino and Unione Italiana Persone Cieche e Ipovedenti Torino
curated by associazione Donne Africa Subsahariana e II Generazione
with the support of Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo
Dark MatterS is a short-form festival that takes place at the turn of the winter season, connoting itself as a ritual that celebrates darkness as a space-time in which to learn to see the present and future with other lenses. Not a zone of fear then, but an opportunity to question the Enlightenment paradigm and decolonize the senses by subverting the primacy of vision and logic. The title alludes not only to dark matter, but also to the importance of darkness in revolutionizing the lenses through which we filter and narrate the world by interweaving in an intersectional sense, issues of blindness and blackness and thus mobilizing communities and artists often marginalized and invisibilized because of issues of race or access.
These reversals are not only thematized but translated into operational choices: in fact, the project is developed together with Black History Month Torino and Unione Italiana Persone Ciech e Ipovedenti and includes performances, workshops and moments of reflection that feature artists with disabilities and/or Afrodescendants. The program invites direct experience of darkness by translating the question into collective, experiential moments and aesthetic proposals that land in the body the change of vision intended to be generated with this event.
This edition in particular, inscribing itself in a season entitled Arcane Motions, insists on the dynamics of subtraction from vision, appearance and disappearance, which intersects the power of magical.
