The program continues with a workshop led by artist Adelita Husni Bey on Sept. 19-20 at the Museo delle Civiltà. This workshop marks the second installment of a journey launched in 2022 as part of the Hidden Histories program curated by LOCALES.

During last year’s workshop, the group visited the former colonial collection stored at Museo delle Civiltà, and discussed the ways the museum is actively attempting to transform the way it narrates, explores and displays its ethnographic collections. In this second workshop, participants will begin by using the guidelines that were produced last year as a starting point to ask: what would it look like for a museum to practice, through its staff and visitors, forms of “autocoscienza”?

Born in separatist feminist circles in the 1960s, but then employed more widely as “consciousness-raising”, autocoscienza takes the “body”, the “self” and its experiences as its starting point. If autocoscienza is a practice intended for deep self exploration in groups, as an exploration of the effects of patriarchal rule, ecological collapse and the effects of social institutions on the self and by extension collectivities, can it be applied to the body of the museum? Can the participants form or access, in some ways, the museum’s “subconscious”?

Through writing exercises, theater and deep questioning of the role of institutions such as Museo delle Civiltà, and returning to the work of Carla Lonzi and Rivolta Femminile—re-read through a transfeminist lens,—the workshop will begin by addressing some core methodological questions that emerged last year and continue to propose and develop ways of working, feeling and dealing with objects removed from their original sites to be displayed in Europe. The aim is to question whether and how the museum’s “repressed memory” can be accessed through this practice.

Reservations for this workshop are required, for info please write to localesproject@gmail.com.