unlearning categories

unlearning categories is the first exhibition on the artworks acquired by the Provincial Authorities (between 2012 and 2018). For the occasion, over sixty works will leave their normal habitat – the offices where they are usually displayed in a familiar context of people, plants, stones and holiday postcards – and migrate to Museion for 59 days. Inspired by contemporary thinkers, like Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing, the exhibition invites the visitor to abandon pre-existing categories and attitudes and rediscover the complexity of our place in the world through a symbiosis of human and non-human.

The curatorial narrative penetrates the earth to reach the hidden micorrhiza system, where plants and mushrooms live together in symbiosis, and uses it as a metaphor for the artworks. Accompanied by concepts of hybridism, materiality, collectivity, lines, porosity, assembly, sediments and splices, these themes weave the artworks, the different generations of artists and the visitors themselves into a unified exhibition experience.

To mark the exhibition, the second volume of the artwork catalogue “Arbeiten. Lavori in corso” will be released. This volume, published by the German Culture Department of the Province of Bolzano, lists all the artworks acquired between 2012 and 2018 along with texts and relative images.