Kudzu leaves can be cooked like spinach. Its stems can be woven into baskets and textiles. Its roots have long been used to produce starches and medicines. In Europe, kudzu is primarily known as an invasive species. In Austria, its cultivation and release into nature are prohibited by law. Kudzu reveals how knowledge is organized through particular systems of orientation. And as Mai Ling Collective suggests, Orientalism is not simply the invention of imaginary distinctions between East and West. It is also a way of orienting bodies. It is how certain directions come to appear natural, while others become unthinkable.
"Animacies", the exhibition at Kunsthaus Merano curated by Lucrezia Cippitelli and Simone Frangi, explores precisely these questions of orientation. Bringing together artists from across Asia and its diasporas, the third chapter within the trilogy "The Invention of Europe" examines how colonial histories continue to shape relationships between humans and non-humans, memory and territory, identity and belonging.
If colonial modernity sought to organize life through rigid binaries—human and nature, subject and object, West and non-West, man and woman—the artists gathered in "Animacies" propose other modes of relation. In the following conversation, Cippitelli and Frangi discuss the exhibition's conceptual framework and the ways the participating artists mobilize alternative epistemologies to imagine more plural ways of inhabiting the world.
María Inés Plaza Lazo: What shifts when a trilogy of exhibitions moves from a focus on Africa, then the Americas, to Asia?
Simone Frangi: Let us start by saying that we arrived here through an open call. Our collaboration began with the book Coloniality and Visual Cultures in Italy, which examined the persistence of colonial imaginaries in Italian visual culture. We worked with artists based in Italy—most of them with diasporic backgrounds—who were trying to unpack what is often described as a difficult heritage, but which is also a difficult present.
Our proposal for this three-year program emerged from that experience. We quickly realized that it is reductive to think about colonial relationships in bilateral terms. Instead, our research revealed multiple transcolonial connections. Lucrezia comes from a trajectory shaped by work in Africa and Abya Yala, while I have worked extensively across the Mediterranean and what Édouard Glissant would call “our worlds.”
When we came to Merano, we wanted to bring together these methodologies through what we call “tricontinental epistemologies”, drawing on experiences such as the Bandung [Conference of 1955], the Havana [Conference of 1979], and the Non-Aligned Movement. These were simultaneously cultural and political platforms, and they offered tools for understanding a territory that is anything but neutral.
Merano carries a dense history and an equally complex present. It belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and was later Italianized under Fascism. Today, linguistic affiliation remains embedded in the social organization of the region. We were also inspired by Alexander Langer, who opposed ethnonationalism and systems of ethnic affiliation. This territory, located at the crossroads of multiple histories, became a lens through which to think about Europe itself.
MIPL: The Invention of Europe formulates Europe as a historical construction. Yet that formulation risks becoming ornamental if it is detached from specific histories and material conditions. Merano does not hold the same tensions as Kyiv or Brussels, but it carries its own geopolitical positioning. How do you engage with the place itself, particularly a place that still celebrates aristocratic and class-based social structures?
Lucrezia Cippitelli: We engage with Italy as it is. Simone introduced me to Alexander Langer's idea of this region as a prism through which to understand Europe and contemporary power relations. What happened here has happened elsewhere, albeit in different forms.
In the first year of the trilogy, Alessandra Ferrini drew parallels between the Italianization of German-speaking communities under Fascism and the treatment of colonized populations in Libya and Ethiopia. These connections are fundamental to how we understand the region, and we invited artists to engage with them.
MIPL: But when thinking about Europe through its relations, how do you avoid reproducing Europe as the central reference point?
LC: As an art historian, I was trained within a framework I did not initially question. My perspective shifted when I realized that entire experiences—including those connected to my own family's history in Argentina—were absent from the narratives I had studied.
At a certain point, you stop questioning others and begin questioning yourself. Our dialogue with artists from Asia, Africa, or Abya Yala is not primarily about them; it is about understanding where we come from. I remember realizing that the art history I had studied contained virtually no artists who were not white, Western, and European. Once you notice that absence, everything changes.
SF: One of the central questions of critical whiteness studies is whether examining whiteness risks re-centering it. Yet for us, it is important to understand how the gaze itself has been constructed: not only European identity, but also the ways Europe has imagined what lies outside itself through colonialism, scientific racism, and related processes.
These mechanisms were also crucial to the formation of modern Italy. In many ways, the production of a unified and whitewashed national identity preceded and enabled Italian colonialism.
The Invention of Europe deliberately echoes Valentin-Yves Mudimbe’s The Invention of Africa. Mudimbe showed how “Africa” emerged as a colonial construction shaped by disciplines such as geography, botany, and anthropology. We wanted to reverse that perspective and ask how Europe itself came into being as a cultural and geopolitical construct.
This is why we examine multiple layers of construction, including material ones. The current exhibition focuses on transfers of matter and histories of circulation. The presence of certain organisms, plants, and materials reveals commercial routes and colonial histories that continue to shape the present.
Across the trilogy, we have also explored how local histories illuminate larger structures. In a project with Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński, for example, we investigated how Christianity contributed to the stabilization of whiteness as a norm in this region. Her research uncovered histories of young girls who were purchased, deported, and converted, some of whom ended up in local Ursuline convents.
What interests us is how seemingly marginal places can reveal global dynamics. We care about this territory, but also about its demographic transformations, including migration from the Balkans, South Asia, and North Africa. We do not want to romanticize the museum. We know it is a situated institution and, in many ways, a colonial device. The question is what kinds of histories become visible through it.
MIPL: Let’s stay with the terminology of animacy, coined by Mel Y. Chen. What interested you in this term as a curatorial framework?
LC: It allowed us to address a dimension of the program we had not yet explored. In the first year, working with artists from Africa and the African diaspora, we focused on whiteness and race. In the second year, Earthly Communities examined plantation economies, land, and the colonial transformation of landscapes and ecologies.
With this exhibition, we entered the realm of what the West calls “nature”, engaging more directly with questions of gender and binarism. If one were to simplify the trajectory, we first addressed the construction of the Other through race, then the foundations of colonial economies, and now the ways in which colonial modernity has shaped how humans conceive of themselves and their relation to the world.
Although gender is part of the conversation, reducing it to a gender question would itself be a Eurocentric gesture.
MIPL: You describe this as a political and epistemological question rather than simply a gendered one. How do the artists connect to this framework?
SF: We are wary of exhibitions that merely illustrate concepts. Animacy certainly comes from Mel Y. Chen, but also from thinkers such as Banu Subramaniam, whose work addresses the sexualization of nature, bodily autonomy, and coloniality.
What interested us was that many forms of non-binary thinking predate Western colonial modernity, which imposed binary systems in the first place. We therefore wanted to engage with epistemologies that were never structured through those categories.
Chathuri Nissansala, for example, works on forms of mothering that exceed the conventional figure of the mother, while Shivangi explores matriarchal lineages that challenge dominant understandings of kinship and inheritance.
As a small institution, we mostly work with existing works rather than commissions. The exhibition emerges through a dialogue between the artists’ practices and the questions we bring to them.
It is also important for us that the exhibition functions as a community rather than as a unified political statement. Benkhbaatar Enkhtur, for instance, is a Mongolian artist who grew up in Italy. In his work, the mother appears as the custodian of Mongolian spirituality. The pantheon she transmits is hybrid, layered, and constantly evolving.
This is why we are not particularly interested in authenticity, which remains an ethnographic category. Last year, artists from Indigenous communities in Abya Yala reminded us: “We're on Instagram, we wear sneakers—we are not people frozen in the past.”
MIPL: Let’s stay with authenticity. Do you share this refusal personally and within the project?
LC: At a certain point, authenticity simply ceases to be a useful category. Both of us arrived here through different experiences that led us to question things we had once accepted as natural.
For me, a decisive moment came when I read Samir Amin's Eurocentrism. He showed how an entire educational system could naturalize a particular worldview while presenting it as universal. What appeared natural—the nuclear family, whiteness, specific forms of cultural production—was in fact ideological.
Once you begin to recognize those constructions, categories such as authenticity start to lose their authority.
MIPL: The artists seem to propose something different: not the universality claimed by modernity, but pluriversality—the coexistence of multiple worlds, forms of knowledge, and relationships between humans and non-humans. How does this challenge the narratives of the exhibition?
SF: Perhaps this explains our growing interest in different forms of animacy.
The first exhibition we organized at Kunsthaus was called The Insubric Line, named after the geological fracture where the African and European tectonic plates meet. What fascinated us was that the African plate moved over the European one, creating the Alps. The more-than-human world constantly reminds us that narratives of European purity are fictions.
Since then, we have become interested in more-than-human entities not only as witnesses to history but also as carriers of historical traces.
This is why materials such as coffee have been central to the program. In one exhibition, Francis Offman presented coffee as a transcolonial map. There is no pure coffee; every blend contains the histories of colonial routes. In Italy, coffee is a symbol of national identity, yet what we consume every day are colonial geographies.
The same could be said of karkadè, once known as “the Italians’ tea”.
We approached other materials in similar ways. With Abdessamad El Montassir, we looked at the ecological consequences of European extraction projects in Western Sahara. With Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński's Aerolectics, we explored the politics of air and the historical association of Blackness with turbulence, storms, and disruption.
Throughout the program, we have sought allies, witnesses, and collaborators among more-than-human entities—tracing how matter itself carries and reveals histories that colonial narratives attempted to erase.
In the current exhibition, we were not interested only in how matter has been shaped by colonial histories, but also in how matter responds to them—how it retains agency and helps recover genealogies that colonial attitudes sought to erase.
This is why the exhibition is filled with traces, but also with collaborations. Watching Chaitali’s process, for example, you can see her engagement with turmeric as both a negotiation and a collaboration.
MIPL: Speaking of traces and the role of plants—the ways roots connect us to a place—the work of Mai Ling Collective seems central to these questions. What role has the collective played in the exhibition?
LC: The composition of the collective itself is significant. As a group of Asian European women and queer subjects, they already challenge ideas of purity, singularity, and fixed identity.
Their practice is grounded in being together, questioning collectively, and rethinking authorship itself. They produce artworks, but they also cook together, use food as a space of discussion, and reflect on their own lived experiences. What interests us is how they rethink Europe, language, and the role of the artist—not as a singular genius but as a relational figure.
They also operate anonymously. Rather than foregrounding individual authorship, they present themselves as a collective platform that addresses shared concerns, particularly anti-Asian racism in Europe. That gesture recalls forms of collective and digital activism that emerged in the early 2000s, where anonymity became a way of acting politically while refusing conventional forms of visibility.
MIPL: Could you give some examples of how the artists challenge the separation between artistic production and collective knowledge?
SF: Many of the artists use their position not only to make artworks but also to sustain communities and social processes.
Chathuri, for example, works between Sri Lanka and diasporic communities in Europe, creating connections across generations and building queer genealogies. Ashfika Rahman continues forms of community work initiated by her mother, collaborating with women affected by state violence, militarization, and social marginalization. She also runs an educational project on a boat.
What interests us is that these practices do not separate artistic production from activism, care, education, or community work. They move continuously between those fields.
At the same time, we remain cautious about how such processes are exhibited. This was already a question in our previous work with René Francisco: what does it mean to exhibit a process? Can a process ever be fully represented?
MIPL: Or fully transparent?
SF: Perhaps transparency is not even the point. When you encounter Chathuri's work, you may not immediately know the entire social process behind it. But through the work, you gain access to that process indirectly. The visible becomes an entry point to what remains less visible.
LC: Shivanjani Lal said something very interesting while we were installing the exhibition. She told us: “I know my work doesn't look very white-cube.” The materials are fragile, the installation is intentionally unslick, and the photographs are printed on extremely thin rice paper. You cannot always see every detail perfectly.
But that is precisely the point. She wanted the exhibition to resist a certain aesthetic of perfection.
MIPL: A cliché of purity that still needs dismantling.
SF: Exactly. And many of the materials are sourced in Fiji, reflecting a commitment to continue working with local artisans rather than adapting everything to an imagined standard of excellence.
LC: Which is also why production takes time.
MIPL: My final question brings together many of the themes we have discussed. Oppositions such as self and other, inside and outside, European and non-European, autochthonous and diasporic appear throughout the exhibition only to dissolve. Does the exhibition propose another way of thinking about identity, or does it reveal the instability of identity itself?
SF: Who needs identity? To quote Stuart Hall and many others. Raising this question is particularly important here because this region remains deeply invested in ideas of identity and tradition. In many cases, those traditions have had to be actively invented and maintained. We have encountered criticism for not working exclusively with Italian or European artists. Such reactions reveal how persistent identity politics remain.
Take Binta Diaw. Why is it difficult for some people to understand that she is both Italian and from a Senegalese family background? We are not trying to present ourselves as exemplary, but introducing this kind of productive confusion in this context still creates friction.
MIPL: Perhaps the point is not to hero-ize the artists either.
LC: Ultimately, the point is not to replace one identity with another, but to question the categories themselves.
That does not mean ignoring their history. On the contrary, it means recognizing that these categories emerged from specific structures of power and from particular ways of organizing the world. Once those structures become visible, it becomes possible to imagine other foundations and other ways of relating to one another.
//
"Animacies" is on view throughout October 11, 2026 at Kunsthaus Merano
- Cover Image:
Lucrezia Cippitelli & Simone Frangi. Photo by Lucas Batliner
