TRENTO, ITALY.- The Cherokee artist Jimmie Durham will be this year’s protagonist of the new installation realized by the Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea of Trento for the summer initiatives that will crop up in the park behind Palazzo delle Albere of MartTrento. From July 5th to September 27th, every Wednesday night, repeating the positive experience matured over the past few years, the Trentino site of the Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea will be a sort of theater for evenings of art, music and above all relax.

The park will be transformed into a meeting point, a site of “musical apéritifs” that will give the young public the possibility of finding themselves in a prestigious architectural frame, listening to live music and taking possession of the green space close to the historic city center.

Jimmie Durham, an artist of international fame, is known for his sculptures, performances and installations, predominantly realized with salvaged materials. His works are presented as ironic, but incisive, “attachments” to the base of Western culture, still tied to a colonial structure and critically analyze the relationship between society and architecture, understood as monumentality.

For Palazzo delle Albere the artist will create an ad hoc project, an installation with strong anthropological contents, but adapted to the lighthearted nature of the summer initiative. Between the Past and the Future will foresee the creation of a sort of “discaria”, an accumulation of artificial materials, natural elements and “junk”, which will take on new functions, practices and poetics all at the same time. In fact, the structure will be a chill-out space, where the public can freely come and go, using it as a break point for sipping drinks, chatting with friends or watching the stars in the summer sky. And as the title suggests, stabilizing that connection between the past life (the collected materials), the present (their usage) and a possible future.

Jimmie Durham’s involvement in the installation at Palazzo delle Albere mirrors the ambivalent nature between cultural growth and entertainment, with which the summer evenings has been created. On one hand, the artificiality of the materials integrated in the installations, the return to “primitive” history and to the Cherokee culture can nurture that spectacular and foreign culture requested in an environment turned over to a young public. On the other, the combinatory process of the objects worked by the artist transmits a strong sense of denouncement of stereotypical aesthetics and of skepticism often demonstrated by Western culture in confront of uses and customs of minorities.

Jimmie Durham (Arkansas, USA, 1940) is a poet, writer and visual artist. He was an activist in the American Indian Movement during the Sixties. Among the international exhibitions, he can list Documenta, Venice Biennial, Sydney Biennial and Whitney Biennial.