Disobedience Archive is a multiphase, mobile, and evolving video archive that concentrates on the relationship between artistic practices and political action. Presented fifteen times in different countries, Disobedience Archive transforms each time without ever assuming a final configuration. Whether in the form of a parliament, a school, or a community garden, the project turns the archive, typically static and taxonomic, into a dynamic and generative device. For the Biennale Arte, Disobedience Archive embodies The Zoetrope – the pre-filmic machine that animated images. It investigates the representation of movement, giving rise to a centrifugal space. On this occasion it presents two new macrosections including forty films: Diaspora Activism deals with transnational migration processes in the context of hegemonic neoliberalism, as a struggle that drives new ways of inhabiting the world and questions the very meaning of citizenship. Gender Disobedience is, in continuity with the previous section, dedicated to nomadic subjectivities, conceived as a rupture of heterosexual binarism. This section brings together the alliances between activism that critiques capitalism and the LGBTQ+ movements that have emerged globally.
This is the first time Disobedience Archive is presented at Biennale Arte.
—Marco Scotini
