Fondazione Imago Mundi is pleased to introduce When the Globe is Home, the new exhibition with which Gallerie delle Prigioni (Treviso) has recommenced its activities starting the 3^rd of July, 2020. The exhibition will run until February 28, 2021.

Curated by Claudio Scorretti and Irina Ungureanu, the exhibition starts from the concepts of home and the world to investigate globality and question its implications, projections and consequences. The continuous contemporary mediation between global and local here takes art as a field of application – a starting point for creation and a cause for reflection.

Globality implies a multicentric perception of the world, where the distinctions between local and global, in the logic of the “liquid society” illustrated by Zygmunt Bauman, become increasingly fluid and identity is enriched with new meaning and nuance. “We can no longer accept that the identity of a man can be adequately established by preserving and fixing what he looks like from a single viewpoint in one place,” said John Berger, British writer and art critic.

When the Globe is Home is a manifesto for the diversity and plurality that contribute to defining “our world”, attributing a positive meaning to the idea of globality. Through art, globality symbolically assumes the function of the ancient Greek agora: a space open to dialogue where the pressing problems that affect everyone – not only some people or the places where they originated – are brought to light.

In a critical approach to the new global condition, Okwui Enwezor (art critic and curator of the Biennale Arte Venezia 2015) observed that the “will to globality” led to the collapse of distances: everything appears close to us, and we live in a world of too many proximities. How can we prevent the global vortex from generating a pseudo-proximity that risks flattening local identities? Leaving aside “fashionable globality,” or the globalization that insists on unification of consumption, branding and approval for commercial purposes, we can imagine a layered interaction, which gives space and voice to local characteristics, without giving in to the temptation to mitigate the differences.

“As long as a single particularity is missing, globality will not be what it should be for us” – these words of the French Caribbean writer Édouard Glissant summarize the basic idea of this exhibition. Any global image would remain an abstract, virtual and lifeless concept if it were not composed of the sum of local stories and identities: When the Globe is Home feeds on this proliferation of stories to tell the world.

Wars, migrations, the climate emergency, sustainability, exile within and outside of one’s own country, gentrification – these are some of the global themes addressed by the 13 artists selected from Imago Mundi’s Art Theorema collections. It is significant to notice how, when it comes to focusing on the trauma related to these topics, the recurring association is loss and the attempt to find or to rebuild a house.

By analogy, every cell of Gallerie delle Prigioni made available to the artists who were invited to create their works here – which include video, painting, sculpture, photography and site-specific installations – has been envisaged as a sort of “home” – a closed, intimate and familiar space in which to express, exorcise, compress or expand one’s world view.

When the Globe is Home also presents the first two Art Theorema collections, a project curated by Claudio Scorretti and Irina Ungureanu, which each year complements the Imago Mundi national collections with a selection of works created by artists from all over the world, selected by a committee of experts. On display are the 10 x 12 cm works by the 382 artists from over 120 countries – from Eastern to Western Europe, from African nations to Australia, Canada and the United States, from Latin America to the Caribbean, from Central Asia to the Middle and Far East – who contributed to the collections.