TECHNO HUMANITIES
TECHNO HUMANITIES is a three-year multidisciplinary research project consisting of exhibitions, publications, and public programs.
Conceived by Museion director Bart van der Heide, TECHNO HUMANITIES is the young museum’s most extensive experiment to date, involving all staff members and regional stakeholder communities. It permeates every part of the institution with an atmosphere of creative dialogue and debate.
TECHNO HUMANITIES explores the urgent, existential questions of human existence that arise amidst the present-day dependency between ecology, technology, and economy.
TECHNO HUMANITIES includes three exhibitions alongside other formats. The exhibition design was curated by Diogo Passarinho Studio in Berlin.
The project’s research team consists of Bart van der Heide, Leonie Radine, Frida Carazzato, DeForrest Brown, Jr., Sara Cluggish, Pavel S. Pyś, Francesco Tenaglia and Florian Fischer.
The first chapter of TECHNO HUMANITIES, entitled TECHNO, was on view from September 9, 2021, to March 18, 2022, and addressed the themes of freedom, exhaustion, and compression. It was the first exhibition of its kind to reflect on the techno club as a practical model for solidarity and coexistence of different realities and to explore their meaning outside the subcultural domain. The second chapter, Kingdom of the Ill, ran between September 30, 2022, and March 5, 2023, and addressed the power dynamics that constitute a healthy or unhealthy body. HOPE concludes the exhibition trilogy in the fall of 2023 with a reorientation of the humanities toward the spaces between science and fiction. It focuses on the artistic, poetic, and speculative practices of collecting, archiving, researching, preserving, and writing history from alternative perspectives of the Xeno (foreign).
Chapter 1: TECHNO
TECHNO at Museion
Museion - Bolzano’s museum of modern and contemporary art - presents TECHNO, the first installment of a long-term program entitled TECHNO HUMANITIES. TECHNO comprises an international group show that will occupy the entire Museion building, a public program, the project “Day Rave” by artist and performer, Isabel Lewis, staged in a former power plant, as well as an extensive line-up of related events, and an anthology of specially commissioned critical texts. The interdisciplinary, multi-layered approach adopted will enable techno to be experienced outside a subcultural or commercial environment for the first time, and its multiple nuances to be appreciated.
With its 120+ machine-generated beats per minute, techno is the ultimate celebration of automation. In the 1980s, mainstream techno appeared almost simultaneously with the onset of global free-trade and de-industrialization. Since then, automation, acceleration, and the widening gap between online and offline experiences have become part of the everyday lives of city dwellers around the world. In parallel, freelance work gives rise to a lifestyle that alternates high productivity and a calculated measure of freedom. Techno music closely reflects these processes and can be seen as both an adversary and an accomplice of post-industrial life-worlds.
TECHNO is curated by Museion Director, Bart van der Heide, with the involvement of a research team including Francesco Tenaglia, Florian Fischer and Museion’s curatorial assistant, Frida Carazzato.
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Video: Domenico Palma
Assembling themes emerging from confrontations between humanity, ecology, technology and economy, TECHNO comprises an international group show that will occupy the entire Museion building, a public program, a day rave and the TECHNO Reader — an anthology of commissioned critical texts on techno and globalisation.
Articulated through three themes — Freedom, Compression and Exhaustion — the exhibition puts the techno experience center stage, adopting it as a lens through which to capture a contemporary human condition and social order. Museion invites an international group of artists, thinkers and producers to explore how cultural phenomena related to techno have become interlaced with the ways we experience our identities today.
Chapter 2: Kingdom of the Ill
Kingdom of the Ill
Kingdom of the Ill seeks to respond to the current debate on health and illness, contamination and purity, care and neglect by asking how and by whom a body is defined as healthy or sick. The title of the exhibition is a critique on American author Susan Sontag’s work Illness as Metaphor (1978), which investigates the relationship between the individual and the contemporary social, corporate and institutional systems that influence our experience of healing and well-being.
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Video: Domenico Palma
Kingdom of the Ill seeks to respond to the current debate on health and illness, contamination and purity, care and neglect by asking how and by whom a body is defined as healthy or sick. The title of the exhibition is a critique on American author Susan Sontag’s work Illness as Metaphor (1978), which investigates the relationship between the individual and the contemporary social, corporate and institutional systems that influence our experience of healing and well-being.
Chapter 3: HOPE
Museion in Bolzano, Italy, presents HOPE, an international group exhibition exploring spaces of hope between science and fiction, curated by Bart van der Heide and Leonie Radine in collaboration with musician, theorist, and writer DeForrest Brown, Jr. As the final installment of the TECHNO HUMANITIES trilogy, HOPE probes the close alliance between museums and the humanities as sites of active world-building. The exhibition, which occupies the entirety of the museum, includes works from an intergenerational cohort of artists. It is further supported by an anthology of newly commissioned critical texts as well as a rich mediation and event program.
HOPE - Official Exhibition Video
Museion Presents HOPE the final chapter of the long-term research project TECHNO HUMANITIES. HOPE transforms Museion into a spaceship for time travel across alternative histories and futures between science and fiction. As the final installment of the TECHNO HUMANITIES trilogy, HOPE probes the close alliance between museums and the humanities as sites of active world-building. The exhibition, which occupies the entirety of the museum, includes works from an intergenerational cohort of artists.
TECHNO HUMANITIES is not just an exhibition series but a think tank and an institutional manifestation of a practice of ethics. An international team of thinkers and practitioners develops and deepens the topics of TECHNO HUMANITIES and connects the chapters with alternating research teams. At the same time, projects feature active constituency building, regional representation, and partnerships. TECHNO HUMANITIES positions Museion as a global civic institution that promotes and fosters perspectives on knowledge production, responsibility, and engagement that are globally significant as well as regionally relevant.
“Museion is still a young organization and has the opportunity to create new structures faster than more established institutions can. The project TECHNO HUMANITIES requires a re-tooling of the institution within a global landscape affected by ecologic, technologic, and economic change. For Museion this is not a theoretical or philosophical discussion alone. As museums for modern and contemporary art have always operated within the power relations that constitute civic institutions, they can investigate and change these relations from within. ‘Practice what you preach,’ for me, is at the heart of the identity crisis that museums are currently experiencing.”
— Bart van der Heide
Each chapter of TECHNO HUMANITIES is accompanied by an individual critical anthology edited by Bart van der Heide, guest editors and co-curators, and published by Hatje Cantz. They include TECHNO, GLOBALIZATION, PANDEMIC (2021), Kingdom of the Ill (2022), and HOPE (2023).
TECHNO Conversations
“TECHNO Conversations” is a series of periodic podcasts in which some of the many aspects linked to the history of raves and clubs, such as communities, economies, stories and trends are investigated through the testimonies of protagonists including theorists and reporters. The series focuses on key historical moments and nightlife geography. A series of podcasts conceived and authored by Francesco Tenaglia. Opening and closing track courtesy of DJ Disrespect, released on 12” vinyl by Scum Collective.
