Museion Art Club – TALKING PAST EACH OTHER

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#Contemporary positions
18.02.2025

A journey through words, encounters, and culinary performances

17.02.2025 –31.03.2025
Final event 17.04.2025 at Museion
Curated by Museion Art Club
Supported by Dutch Embassy in Italy
In collaboration with BASIS Vinschgau Venosta

Museion Art Club presents, with the support of the Dutch Embassy in Italy and in collaboration with BASIS Vinschgau Venosta, TALKING PAST EACH OTHER (Aneinander vorbeireden / Parlare unə accanto all’altrə), an extended artistic residency project focusing on poetry and food, culminating in a unique performative dinner on April 17th.

The project unfolds through two artistic residencies in Bolzano, from February 17 to March 9 and from March 17 to March 31, 2025, involving spoken word artists from the Netherlands with a migratory background. During the residency period, the artists engage in dialogue with local creatives, chefs, and academic researchers, exploring the theme of misunderstanding—often seen as an obstacle—transforming it into a creative opportunity. The duration of the residency is a temporal answer to the question: what is the time of anencounter? Within the extended time frame, the artists have the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the territory and the local artists, to generate their own misunderstandings.

The highlight of the project will be a performative dinner at Museion on April 17th, an event where the experiences gathered over the preceding weeks take shape through food, poetry, and performance. Through this multisensory dinner, the audience will be invited to experience language beyond words, exploring the intersection of cultures, artistic expressions, and flavors, in a communion that overcomes cultural and linguistic barriers and misunderstandings.

Among the guest artists are Gershwin Bonevacia (poet, performer, and former city poet of Amsterdam) and Daniëlle Zawadi (writer and spoken word artist of Congolese-Dutch second-generation background). The residency path is enriched by the participation of innovative chefs such as Jakob Haller and others, sound artist Manuel Oberkalmsteiner a.k.a. Zolf & Saturn, musician Valentin Gasser, curator Elisa Barison, and stage designer Sara Burchia.

The project concludes with a special publication intertwining recipes and poetry, allowing readers to relive the residency experience and performative dinner. The book will be available both in physical format and digitally on the Museion Art Club platform (depositary.art/talking-past-each-other).

Talking Past Each Other is not just an event but an experience that reflects on communication, the meeting of diverse identities, and the hidden beauty in misunderstandings.

Guests and collaborators

Gershwin Bonevacia

Gershwin Bonevacia is a poet, writer and performer. From March 2019 to January 2022, Gershwin was the city poet of Amsterdam and wrote a poem every month in Het Parool. His stormy rise as a poet did not come naturally due to his dyslexia, but his struggle with words made him an inventive word artist.

Daniëlle Zawadi

Daniëlle Zawadi (1999) writes prose and performs spoken word. Her stories are often about what it means to be young in the Netherlands as someone of the second generation: born in the Democratic Republic of Congo but raised in the Netherlands. In her work, Zawadi addresses her bi-cultural background. She talks about friendship and how the definition of it changes as she gets older. As someone who is part of GenZ, she sees in her writing the opportunity to capture her world of experience as a photo; one in which others also recognize themselves through word choices that concern not only Dutch, but also French and English.

Jakob Haller

Jakob Haller trained as a chef and honed his skills in top restaurants, including four years in Copenhagen. In 2015, he returned to South Tyrol and joined his partner’s family farm, Hof des Wandels, in St. Pauls. There, he embraced a new path—growing nutritionally dense food, regenerating the landscape, and making a living from sustainable farming. Hof des Wandels is a diverse polyculture farm that follows regenerative farming practices to produce vegetables, fruits, herbs, and flowers for the local community. In addition to farming, Jakob offers workshops on fermentation and regenerative agriculture. As a chef, he combines farm-grown and locally sourced ingredients with global culinary traditions, creating delicious and nutritious dining experiences.

Valentin Gasser

The multi-instrumentalist and composer Valentin Gasser received his first saxophone lessons from his father and attended the Bolzano Music School with Hans Tutzer until 2010. From 2010 to 2018, he studied at the Konservatorium Wien Privatuniversität (later the University of Music and Arts), first focusing on jazz saxophone with Prof. Thomas Huber and later on jazz composition and arrangement with Prof. Andy Middleton. In addition to the saxophone, he also plays piano, guitar, flute, clarinet, drums, and trumpet. Since the summer of 2018, Valentin Gasser has been living in Bolzano again, where he teaches (mainly saxophone and piano), performs in various ensembles and as a soloist, and composes and arranges music across jazz, classical, and symphonic wind music.

Elisa Barison

Elisa Barison (b.1992, in Vipiteno) is a freelance curator and writer whose work focuses on the intersection of rural and urban spaces and processes. She holds a degree in Art History and Journalism from the University of Vienna, as well as an MBA in Cultural Management from ICART Paris. In addition to her work in the cultural sector, she lives and works on a farm in Bressanone, where they grow wine and slow flowers.

Manuel Oberkalmsteiner a.k.a. Zolf & Saturn

Manuel Oberkalmsteiner (*1981) is a musician and sound artist from Bolzano who has been engaged in field recordings and the sound aesthetics of places for many years. He is part of the experimental improv duo KNRRZ and co-founder of the music label LAGRINDNOIRE for experimental music. For years, he has been creating sound installations and sound performances and offering workshops on experimental, field recording-based music. With his solo musical project ZOLF & SATURN, he blends electronic music with acoustic instruments and field recordings. He has released three albums so far and regularly performs on stages both nationally and internationally.

Sara Burchia

Sara Burchia studied stage and costume design at the University of the Arts in Graz and was involved in various theater projects during her studies. Since graduating in 2015, she has worked as a freelance stage and costume designer, primarily in South Tyrol. Her work includes productions such as Punk Rock and The Boy with the Longest Shadow at the Vereinigte Bühnen Bozen. At Stadttheater Bruneck, she designed the eerie stage world for Macbeth. For several years, she has been designing large-scale and playful stage sets for the Freilichtspiele Lana. At Carambolage, she has created a series of striking stage designs, including the visually compelling Name: Sophie Scholl and Die Laborantin (2023). Her recent works also include Die Nacht so groß wie wir (Vereinigte Bühnen Bozen, 2024), Gletscher (Märchenhaftes Theater, 2024), and Der Traam (2024), an electro-electronic musical.