Conversation with curator Chus Martínez - SciArt SwitzerlAnd
Thursday, 26 June at 6:30 PM, MASI Lugano – LAC Exhibition
Venue, Hall – Piazza Luini 6, Lugano
On the fortune of having nature
(as culture)
The third SciArt SwitzerlAnd event of the year will feature one of the most influential voices in contemporary art, Chus Martínez in dialogue with Barbara Casavecchia, indipendent curator and Editor in Chief of Mousse Magazine.
The event organized by IBSA Foundation in collaboration with MASI Lugano, is free and open to the public. The event will be held in English with simultaneous interpreting in Italian.
The conversation
Chus Martínez - director of the Institute Art Gender Nature of the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW as well as curator of the school’s exhibition space, Der TANK - will delve into her research path, marked by the constant investigation of the connections between art, nature, gender, technology and scientific knowledge. Working at the intersection of artistic and scientific practices, Martínez reflects on how these disciplinary contaminations can generate new perspectives and critical tools to read the present and address contemporary environmental challenges.
Starting from an emotional and open-ended approach to the future, her vision expands the boundaries of art, questioning not only those who produce it, but also those who can enjoy it-including those who remain on the margins or are distant from cultural production.
Chus Martínez
Born in Spain, Chus Martínez has a background in philosophy and art history. She is currently director of the Institute Art Gender Nature of the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW, Switzerland, and associate curator of TBA21 in Madrid and Venice.
She is a member of the board of directors of CIMAM (International Committee for Museums) and serves on the scientific committees of numerous international art institutions, including Castello di Rivoli, Turin, and the Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin. She was Chief Curator at El Museo del Barrio in New York and head of department for dOCUMENTA (13). She previously held the position of Chief Curator at MACBA in Barcelona and was director of the Frankfurter Kunstverein. Martínez has curated multiple exhibitions and edited many publications with contemporary artists. She regularly holds conferences, she writes critical texts and essays for catalogues and is a frequent contributor to international journals. Her more recent publications include: The Complex Answer. On Art as a Non-Binary Intelligence (Sternberg Press, 2023); Like This. Natural Intelligence As Seen by Art (Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2022); Coding Care (co-edited with Sabine Himmelsbach, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2022); The Wild Book of Inventions (Sternberg Press, 2020); Corona Tales. Let Life Happen to You (Lenz, 2021).
Barbara Casavecchia
Barbara Casavecchia is a writer, independent curator and educator based in Milan, where she teaches at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts. She was QuiS Visiting Research Fellow at the Städelschule in Frankfurt in 2023/24. She is editor-in-chief of Mousse magazine, and her articles, essays and reviews – often focusing on Italian contemporary art, visual cultures and feminisms – have appeared in magazines such as Frieze, Art Agenda, Art Review, La Repubblica, Flash Art, Kaleidoscope, Nero, South/documenta 14, Spike, and many others, as well as in artists’ books and catalogues. From 2021 to 2023 she led the transdisciplinary curatorial fellowship program The Current III – Mediterraneans: “Thus waves come in pairs” (after Etel Adnan) for TBA21-Academy, curating the exhibition by the same name at Ocean Space in Venice (22 April – 5 November 2023), featuring new commissions by Simone Fattal and Petrit Halilaj & Álvaro Urbano. She edited the book Thus Waves Come in Pairs. Thinking with the Mediterraneans (2023, Sternberg Press and TBA21).
What is SciArt SwitzerlAnd?
SciArt SwitzerlAnd is a project of IBSA Foundation for Scientific Research in collaboration with LAC Lugano Arte e Cultura and MASI Lugano, Museo d'arte della Svizzera italiana.
Science and the arts have always coexisted in time and space. Although with different methodologies and purposes, artists and artists, scientists and scientists, observe the world around them, opening us to new perspectives, interpretations and meanings.
Through different event formats and digital products, SciArt SwitzerlAnd intends to cast its gaze on those artistic creations that have been transformed through interaction with scientists, discoveries and research institutions.
The public will be able to get up close to fascinating proposals born out of the encounter between multiple dimensions, and hear from the living voices of artists and scientists how very different realities influence each other.
The new project fits perfectly within the mission of the Foundation, which since 2012 has been committed to spreading an authoritative scientific culture, sharing principles and knowledge with accessible language and raising awareness of issues related to science, culture and the well-being of the individual.
