MUMASHA (Zambian for “a dance”)

MUMASHA (Zambian for “a dance”)
Video Art Exhibition
March 13, 2024
From 7:00 PM to 10:00 PM
At SuperOtium
via Santa Teresa degli Scalzi, 8 – 80135 Naples

On March 13, 2024, from 7:00 PM to 10:00 PM, SuperOtium’s spaces (art residency space and boutique hotel) will host the Mumasha video art exhibition (Zambian for “a dance”). This exhibition marks the 10th anniversary of VVV-R (an international video art residency with a critical approach for young artists, produced by Ex-Voto and commissioned by Arts University Bournemouth as part of the global networks program curated by Richard Waring). On this occasion, the celebration extends its conversations and visions to two guest projects: Panoramica*23 and L’Arsenale di Napoli.

The exhibition consists of 3 video projects:

• “Mumasha, a Hunger, an Endless Flow” (12’10”) curated by VVV-R (Alessandra Arnò and Simona Da Pozzo) Featuring Nancy Violet Down, Chanda Mwamba, William Sipling, and Prajvi Mandhani
• “Bodies Matter” (60’43”) curated by Alessandra Arnò for Visualcontainer
  Featuring Matteo Campulla, Silvia De Gennaro, Enzo Cillo, DEHORS/AUDELA, Carlo Galbiati, Massimiliano Marianni, Anouk Chambaz, Emma Scarafiotti, Sara Bonaventura, Gianni Barelli, Mariangela Bombardieri, Duccio Ricciardelli – Marco Bartolini.
• “Music” (8’26”) video installation site-specific by Piero Chiariello curated by L’Arsenale di Napoli

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VVV Residency aims to be a virtual space for critical reflection and a moment of production for video art.
The residency focuses on video-trouvé as a means of looking at one’s own research through the eyes of others: a theme that needs to be addressed nowadays in order to explore how human interaction and the perception of reality are constantly glitching within the interfaces of the screen.
Five artists-in-residence engage with different digital tools: a blog, a webinar platform, digital and physical archives, and a streaming platform.
A specially dedicated online blog is the space where the artists intervene through posts sharing the work in progress of their work with other artists and tutors. It is a kind of shared diary of images that illuminates the visual link between the research.
The residency is aimed at creating video works that will be presented as part of the ongoing online exhibition streamed on VisualcontainerTv for one month.
VVV Residency is a project curated by VisualcontainerTv and Vegapunk and produced by Ex-Voto. They have been collaborating on various projects since 2014, both in the real and digital world.

VisualcontainerTv International Videoart webchannel, edited by Alessandra Arnò, since 2009 presents video art projects and festivals curated by curators and festival directors, interviews and monographic programmes from all over the world. It is a renowned cultural project, aimed at video art lovers, students, curators and the general public, a place to find the best selection of video art for free and for cultural purposes. The project aims to disseminate the latest and freshest research in the video art scene under the care of visualcontainer and many other partners worldwide in a comprehensive overview.

Vegapunk is a space and time for sharing artistic practices run by artists. It is an extension of Simona Da Pozzo’s artistic practice into the domain of curating driven by extemporary curiosity. The focus is on artistic practice as an intellectual and physical process guided by dialogue (between people, formats, disciplines). Vegapunk tends to build collaborations with artists whose discourse extends beyond the artistic framework to include research related to the world, including in a social and political sense. The focus on the relationship between space and time, both in a physical and aesthetic sense, leads Vegapunk to favour time-based projects and to define Vegapunk as an artist-run-space-&-time. Vegapunk is a project born within the framework of the activities of Ex-Voto.

Ex-Voto realises complex projects focusing on active socialisation, co-creation and networking as tools for enhancing the activities and resources of the territory and communities. This is the case of Rooms’ Contest (a competition for inhabitants of shared flats that investigates the relationship between private and public space), the Non Riservato Talks (discussion tables between inhabitants, cultural operators and institutions) that give rise to Non Riservato (a network project with a productive vocation of realities that act in Milan’s public space in creative ways) the screening project Action Frame that anticipates the international video art residency project Camouflage, the talk Conversazioni Domestiche per Azioni Pubbliche (aimed at sharing practices where creativity becomes a tool for social transformation), as well as projects in the curatorial and artistic spheres such as Borderlight, Hacking Monuments, A New Hymn 4 New Neapolis, Glocary and others.

L’Arsenale di Napoli is a cultural start-up that aims to ensure that the Neapolitan territory and its regional area of influence are perceived as a single museum. The idea behind L’A.’s work is a new conception of the museum of the city and the territory: the museum is no longer conceived as an architectural space in which to store objects and artefacts, but as a network of places in which intangible cultural heritage is expressed, narrated and shared. In this sense the museum takes on a liquid form so to speak (Zygmunt Bauman), which changes, in content, boundaries and dimensions, depending on the visitor’s interests and the type of narration. It is not a single place, but a series of interconnected sites and realities. Participating in an itinerary or experience that connects several even distant places in the territory may be equivalent, for the visitor, to walking through the halls and corridors of a traditional museum. The author does not intend to preserve the cultural heritage as an inert testimony of the past, but to enliven it through artistic research conducted in collaboration with local artists. In this way, memory is not simply preserved, but continuously recreated and reinterpreted. The author recognises artists, and creative people in general, as the true architects of this re-creation, capable of giving new life to the past and making it accessible to the present.

SuperOtium is a house in the heart of Naples, founded by Nicola Ciancio and Vincenzo Falcione, designed to welcome tourists, artists, travellers and creative people. It is a meeting place where artists’ residencies, meetings, exhibitions and thè receptive activity coexist, to inspire artists and creatives and question travellers’ assumptions, proposing new perspectives through which to look at the city. SuperOtium’s residency programme featured, among others, Kensuke Koike, Martina Merlini, Pierre-Antoine Vettorello, Pietro Gaglianò, Massimo Uberti, Hypereden, Bianca Felicori (Forgotten Architecture), Paz Ortùzar (in collaboration with the Cervantes Institute of Naples) Giovanna Silva (in collaboration with Lorenzo Xiques), Nuvola Ravera (in collaboration with Made in Cloister), Blase (in collaboration with ShowDesk), Yasser Almaamoun (in collaboration with the Goethe Institut), Khaled El Mays (in collaboration with Edit Napoli).