A Natural Oasis? is a two years nomadic free school dedicated to the development of new curatorial research paths in the field of contemporary visual and performing arts starting from the geopolitical peculiarities of the artistic scenes of those Southeuropean and Mediterranean territories which are commonly considered remote, marginal, small, insular or liminal.
Founded in 2013 thanks to the support of BJCEM and its partners, the program has been imagined and designed by Alessandro Castiglioni and Simone Frangi, who have been serving as directors and scientific coordinators of the project since its first edition.
The purpose of this programme is to build a transnational cultural platform able to critically question the ideas of territorial remoteness/marginality/smallness/insularity through the lenses of artistic research, triggering a reflection on the fictional procedures that empowered the idea of continental Europe in its geopolitical and cultural immunity via the exclusion and/or the vampirization of its “provinces” and its “externalities”.
A Natural Oasis? aims to develop curatorial and theoretical discourses assuming geo-cultural areas as polemical fields in which a precise ecology of fluxes describe their cultural, economical and political morphology. By deconstructing the fetiche of the southern or exotic “natural oasis”, the project tries to counter-ritualize those processes of “naturalization” and “metaphorization” of mediterranean territories enacted by white and eurocentric rethorics linked to tourism and to the neo-colonial and ecological fractures it produces.
The project focuses as well on the controversial shortage of professionals in “peripheral” cultural and artistic systems in relationship with on-going processes of educational centralization and with the concentration of artistic legitimation processes in big European and Mediterranean “centres”.
A Natural Oasis? is based on the tools that social sciences provide to contemporary cultural practices and support specific context-aware figures in the frame of a global contemporary artistic scene. The aim of the project is the development of situated practices in the context of a specific locality with a transnational and transmediterranean perspective.
The research group of A Natural Oasis? 2022-2023 will be composed by Alessandro Castiglioni and Simone Frangi (founders and curators of the project) and 6 fellows (under 35) coming from Lebanon, Sardinia, France, Cyprus, Albania, Norway. Each fellow is supported by a mobility grant offered by institutions inside and outside BJCEM Network, covering all their travel expenses over the 2 years of programme.
