Studio Imaginalis - Marta Pagliuca Pelacani

Marta Pagliuca Pelacani is an artistic researcher, editor and storyteller.

Based in Amstedarm (NL) she curates exhibitions and helps others with their words, as consultant, tutor or moderator.

Exploring the potential of artistic research in yielding methods to deal with intergenerational trauma, she is currently developing an rMA thesis on subaltern memory and heritage under the title of 'The Magical Atlas of Italian Sharecropping'.

For Studio Imaginalis, she works as curator, project manager and writing consultant. She takes care of overseeing administrative matters and collaborations with third parties.

As a herbology apprentice, she likes to walk around and forage for plants. In her spare time she knits, crochets and play chess.

Mother's Milk [Jap Sam Books, 2022].

Written by artist Marie Ilse Bourlanges, Mother's Milk is an artist's book focused around remembering and healing. Following the line of transmission that tie her life to that of her grandmother, the author journeys back and forth across time and artistic modes of expression to rely the tale of a life untold.

Interned in a psychiatric hospital for almost half of her life, Ilse Kratsch leaves behind an inheritance that is difficult to unpack. Her position as an unwelcome German citizen in postwar France toughens her experience of marginality as both a woman and someone struggling with mental health. In dealing with her grandmother's memory, Marie Ilse Bourlanges makes use of artistic research as a tool for soft rummaging inside the archives of La Timone psychiatric hospital: chewing, spitting and remaking the story until it can again be passed on and be treasured - a gift from mother to daughter.

This kind of work, which meddles with and happily steals from the archives, we call "archival fiction".

Editing and "Introduction" text by Marta Pagliuca Pelacani. Design by Alix Chauvet.

Join us for the official launch of Mother's Milk at Looiersgracht 60 on January 19th!

Foragers [2022] by Jumana Manna. Q&A at IDFA Film Festival [Nov 2022].

Talking about her latests film, filmmaker Jumana Manna and I discussed with the audience the ways in which Israeli Occupation of Palestine infringes upon the Palestinian people's heritage and memory by placing restrictions on the ancestral practice of foraging, thus attempting to deepen the process of alienating the Palestinian folk from their land.

The Artistic Research Knitting Club [22/23].

Sponsored by The Netherlands Institute of Cultural Analysis, the Artistic research Knitting Club is a joint collaborative initiative by Marta Pagliuca Pelacani and Liza Prins.

The purpose of ARKC is to join the many threads that unite Amsterdam’s artistic research community, fostering a space of informal discussion and knowledgeable craft: something like a knitting club. Sitting together and learning with and from one another are important fundamentals of ARKC. What we propose is a broad understanding of this way of coming together, one that spans across the many crafts comprising artistic research practices: ARKC is open to everyone. Come with your knitting, your punch ‘n needle or latest crochet project, take your loom, embroidery and stretch routine. We welcome lines of code, a piece of rope, gellak work, stripped bark or an oil carrier (bag).

ARKC welcomes beginners of all kinds, as well as passive, saltuary and one-off members. We are happy to supply the knowledge and materials to help you get started with a craft we master (like knitting, mending or crochet), or learn from you how to do things in which we are interested (like weaving, basketry and spinning).

For information and sign-up: https://www.nica-institute.com/nica-arkc-artistic-research-knitting-club/

The Documenta Issue - Jrg.30 - Simulacrum Magazine [Oct 2022].

This special edition of Simulacrum Magazine curated by Niels Noot and Marta Pagliuca Pelacani features contributions by Cem A. aka @freezemagazine, Eszter Szakács (OFF-Biennale Budapest), Yazan Khalili (The Question of Funding), Florian Cramer, Christa Maria Lerm-Hayes (University of Amsterdam), Maria Chiara Miccoli, Merav Krone and Kenneth Geurts.

Centred around the fifteenth Documenta, the issue places this edition within its larger historical context and discusses the lines of flight departing from ruangrupa's curatorial direction with an eye to the subversive potential of collective thinking in contemporary curation. Refusing unilateral modes of knowing, The Documenta Issue holds space for constructive conversations to unfold.

Front Cover "The Documenta Issue"

Editorial by Niels Noot and Marta Pagliuca Pelacani, List of Contributions

"Bring a friend: learning with lumbung practices at documenta fifteen" by Yazan Khalili and Eszter Szakács in conversation with Marta Pagliuca Pelacani

Back Cover with meme by Cem. A aka @freezemagazine

COMUNICAZIONI SOCIALI - 2022 - 1. MIGRATIONS / MEDIATIONS Promoting Transcultural Dialogue through Media, Arts and Culture. [May 2022]

This special issue of the Journal is the outcome of a three-year-research program funded by the Università Cattolica and begins with the assumption that migration is a historical and natural phenomenon, but its definition is political, linked to the time frame and socio-economic context, and influenced by the media, as the infrastructure that constitutes the world, in material and symbolic ways.

Our contribution focused on performative and collaborative research based on a participatory exhibition held in Palermo in 2021. Using a trans-disciplinary methodology for collaborative exhibition-making we worked on producing engaging academic knowledge starting from an arts-based approach within which the relations of power held by our position as white women as well as curators, academic researchers and contributing artists, become explicit objects of inquiry.

The Special Issue was edited by Pierluigi Musarò, Nikos Papastergiadis and Laura Peja.

(Un/En)closure [2022] by Dennis Buckland And Aljoscha Lahner. Rietveld Uncut, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

Text editing for Dennis Buckland and Aljoscha Lahner.

'A Tapestry of Rules: Institutions and cloth industries in global comparative perspective, 1750-2000" [30th JUNE -1st JULY 2022]. Utrecht University - TextileLab, Economic and Social History research group.

Academic Workshop held by the TextileLab of The University of Utrecht to gather knowledge about cloth industries, institutions and household economies.

Public presentation of paper "An embroidery of futures: the demise of Italian sharecropping and the role domestic embroidery in 'unstitching' the institution".

Within a theoretical framework informed by subaltern historiography, embroidery is understood as a catalyst for socio-economic change within Italy's illiterate sharecropping families throughout the long 20th century. Arguing in favour of the pivotal role of domestic embroidery work carried out by women sharecroppers, I demonstrated the way in which the economic agency gained through this textile work enabled sharecropping families to provide the conditions for the schooling of children. In my conclusion, I argue that the gaining of literacy by younger generations accelerated the process of "esodo dalle campagne" which characterised the demise of Italian Mezzadria throughout the 1960s and 70s. In my paper, I dwell on two archives of sharecropping embroidery: the collection of the Museo Genti d'Abruzzo in Pescara, Italy and my own family's private linens, embroidered by my mother and grandmother.

Presentation Slides below.

https://www.textilelab.net/news/textilelab-looks-back-at-another-successful-workshop-event/

LATEMODE - A PODCAST IN SEARCH OF THE ZEITGEIST [april 2022 - april 2023].

Critically engaging with the idea of 21st century ‘zeitgeist’, we embark on a journey across others’ lived experiences. In an effort to answer the question: what is now to others? LateMode asks its speakers to share with their audience the way they conceive of themselves and the experience of being human today.
The idea that a single spirit of the age can be apt to describe a particular period of history is by now obsolete. As far as our understanding of reality goes, nonlinearity has become the keyword. Within a present characterized by the extreme fragmentation of time and lived experience, should we instead speak of multiple zeitgeists? Or rather just ditch the concept?

https://open.spotify.com/show/7BOerTiQqd6FcbAMgdB1Wu