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closed Asad Raza: Plot

The show

Museion, Bolzano's museum of modern and contemporary art, presents Plot, an interdisciplinary and procedural exhibition by the artist Asad Raza with the participation of the architects BB (Fabrizio Ballabio, Alessandro Bava), the artist Lydia Ourahmane and the choreographer Moriah Evans.

With Plot, Museion is exploring new territories for the experiential and collaborative practices of exhibition design. It is a project that builds a dialogue between visual art, science, architecture, dance and local participants linked by a strong relationship with the earth, and is based on knowledge located in the territory, while generating new ones at the same time.


Raza's exhibition originates from his site-specific installation, Absorption, and his evolving video work Ge. Absorption, made up of more than 60 tons of artificial "neosoil" (loam), will occupy the entire second floor of Museion, and was created in collaboration with soil scientists and a "soil coordinator" who will bring together local materials and waste products , including clay, pomace, marble dust, coffee grounds, pizza oven ash, hair and much more. These materials will be mixed, moved and continuously added by a group of growers, who will offer visitors fertile soil to take home for private projects and cultivations.

Raza's work often constitutes a host place for interventions by other artists: in Plot Raza offers them the entire mise-en-scène so that they can develop their personal temporal chapters. Thus, starting from the first day of the exhibition, his work undergoes a series of metamorphoses. The former Museion library will become a repository for the ingredients used for the soil and a laboratory space where the soil will be transformed into mud bricks which will form the foundations of the second chapter of the plot.


In Chapter II, the architects BB (Fabrizio Ballabio, Alessandro Bava), together with the artist Lydia Ourahmane, will use these bricks to investigate the concept of "home", investigating construction techniques born in Egypt and still used today. Together with a brickmaker, they will use sustainable materials to build a prototype of a small structure that will refer to various enclosed spaces, from alpine bivouacs to Renaissance sanctuaries or "sacelli", or even refuges in the Algerian desert.

In Chapter III, this hybrid environment will become the setting for the Italian debut of Moriah Evans, in collaboration with Bolzano Danza. Out of and Into: PLOT contains references both to his more recent work, Remains Persist (2022), concerning different types of information that live differently in our bodies, and to one of his earlier works, Out of and Into (8/ 8): STUFF (2012) which investigates the metaphors of the "hysterical" body through expressive acting. Focusing on the processes of decay and resurgence, this work of his reabsorbs the detritus and fertile remnants of his artistic practice, thus giving life to a new site-specific iteration.


In Chapter IV, the Plot narrative returns to Absorption. The mud bricks will have decomposed into the topsoil and the farmers will go back to work rebalancing the chemistry of the soil, making sure it becomes fertile again. During this stage of the exhibition visitors will be asked to take the desired amount of potting soil to take with them.

Meanwhile, in a parallel narrative, the evolving video work Ge will be screened for the entire duration of the exhibition. Ge, whose title refers to Gaia's original name, maps several biotopes of the Earth and functions as a continuous poetic journal and meditation. The first “verse” of this open-ended work is an exploration of the seascape around the cottage of James Lovelock, who developed the theory that the earth is described as a self-regulating living system. The second part offers a recipe for making artificial clay at home. During Plot, Ge will evolve further, with the appearance of new "stanzas", set among others on Lake Erie and at the ruined convent of Hildegard von Bingen.

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Piazza Piero Siena, 1
39100 Bolzano

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