“Archive of Disobedience”: So Far from the News

"I'm one hundred percent woke!" Marco Scotini blurts out in the dimly lit Proa21 gallery, as his "Archive of Disobedience" is hanging. We respond with a frontal honesty . "And I've had Argentina in my head since before I started putting together this Archive; not only because of its early initiatives related to the memory of the dictatorship, in the 1980s, but also because of the images that reached Italy of the financial crisis," says the Italian curator, referring to 2001. He concludes that these collective memories can take "the form of a parliament, a school, or a community garden."

Until July, the “Disobedience Archive,” curated by Marco Scotini, brings together 36 video pieces from artists and collectives, organized into three segments of 12 rotating videos. Their themes and provenances are combined according to four general axes : gender disobedience, insurgent communities, radical ecologies, and diaspora activism. It is a mobile and expanding platform, and its genres are predominantly political art and artivism—political and social actions in different formal styles, all in video. In some cases, these are traditional documentaries, even though their subject matter goes against the grain. They are truly anti-newscasts ; they expose the underside of mainstream television narratives.

More than a sample, this Archive should be seen as a vast video library that houses all points of the globe , "simultaneously and without overlapping", an Aleph of episodes overlooked or peripheral to history that the mass media returns to us.

When it arrived in Venice in 2024, at the politicized Biennale curated by Adriano Pedrosa , it surprised with two factors: the diversity, almost inexhaustible, of its geographical scope, and, second, its spatial deployment, in the heart of the Arsenale sector, in hemicycles that favored an immersive experience, with the thirty videos playing in unison. At Proa21, the aestheticized staging of the urban barricade was chosen, also immersive although more trench-like, with the screens mounted on metal street fences, like those used to contain riots. In fact, this edition is subtitled (the street), the setting in which the insurgency takes hold. The room is almost dark, illuminated by the videos, with their leaps of light.

The Argentines GAC and Etcétera , Ursula Biemann, Seba Calfuqueo , Marcelo Expósito, Maria Galindo & Mujeres Creando, Pedro Lemebel and Carlos Motta , are just a few among the dozens of participants then and here.

The "Archive of Disobedience" is, in truth, an inexhaustible reservoir of images. Some are avowedly artistic, while others are agitating and denouncing—like the historic ones included from Argentina, the GAC Street Art Group, and Etcétera. Others were made clandestinely .

Each of them has preserved an insurgent experience from their own perspective: each video treasures a precise historical crossroads , to which we return after many years. What's shocking, precisely, is seeing how each narrated case evolved over time. For example, the Argentine archives: the "helicopter" theme and the impeachment protest is a metaphor that ended up being deactivated as a political action, eventually becoming proto-fake news.

The fate of the young women and men in the jungle of Luzon Island, in the Philippines, who are being trained as guerrilla fighters, in the video by Spanish filmmaker Paloma Polo , fills us with unease. Since these footage was recorded, which follows instruction in guerrilla attack and survival tactics (along with Marxist doctrine classes at the camp), then-Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte launched a horrific "anti-drug" offensive in the jungle areas of the archipelago. Duterte was removed from office and, just a month ago, indicted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague on charges of crimes against humanity.

Other videos are more relatable. From Chile: Pedro Lemebel 's work evolves into the work of trans ceramist and artist Seba Calfuqueo . There's also a piece by Colombian multidisciplinary artist Carlos Motta , Requiem . With a queer aesthetic, his projects explore the historical tensions between religion and homosexuality. He recently opened the retrospective "Prayers of Resistance" at the MACBA in Barcelona.

In a time of overproduction of visual recordings and fake news fabricated by AI, with audiences strained between the narcissistic banality of social media and covert political manipulation, this Archive wants us not to forget, to avoid being distracted by triviality or virality . It has its own agenda; it wants to implant other memories, the silenced and buried ones, those left out of the picture.

The curator has taken his "Archive of Disobedience," launched in 2005 and comprising pieces created between 1975 and 2023, to numerous institutions, including the Prague and Istanbul Biennials.

Marco Scotini, who was in Buenos Aires in May to set it up, is artistic director of the FM Center for Contemporary Art and has directed the Department of Curatorial and Audiovisual Studies at the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti (NABA), both in Milan, since 2004. In addition to curating national pavilions at various Biennales (Prague, Istanbul, and Venice), he is a film critic. His project has been touring museums in Europe, the United States, and Mexico for a decade.

This work by video artist, curator, and critic Ursula Biemann (Geneva, 1955) is an extraordinary documentary, both in terms of materials and script, about the transit of migrants through North Africa . It tells of the land-based odyssey that precedes the journey of fragile migrant boats across the Mediterranean to Europe. If anything can be described as "biblical" in our age of technological display, it is this incessant journey of thousands of people in their attempt to leave their continent of origin behind. The documentary ( Sahara Chronicle , 2005/2006) was originally produced for the exhibition "The Maghreb Connection," shown in Cairo and Geneva in those years.

Since then, the journey across the vast desert and through several countries, covered by trains and trucks – five days on the road in the desert, atop crates loaded with merchandise – has become incredibly complex in the 20 years since it was filmed . Sudan descended into civil war and broke apart; Mali was subject to military intervention by the Touareg rebels of the Azawad group, who eventually took Timbuktu (2012) and later allied themselves with the jihadists Ansar Dine and the Algerian branch of Al Qaeda, sending thousands of citizens scattering across the region due to famine. Libya, which temporarily hosted migrants in the 1990s, only liberated itself from Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Meanwhile, the precarious boats crossing the Mediterranean remain full.