Informal Inclusion poetically unveils the violence of a world, our own, that is the offspring of our forgotten colonial world, and is crossed each day by migratory processes that transform the social and geographic fabric thanks to the paradoxically "inclusive" power of the dynamics that are generated in the marginal spaces.
For the Malta Biennial, Eugenio Tibaldi transforms the spaces of Villa Portelli without giving precise temporal constraints, and rather aiming to highlight the multiple dimensions of the lives that have been intertwined there over time. The installation reveals forgotten histories and sheds light on what has remained invisible, while at the same time dismantling the rhetoric that, from a limited perspective, has shaped an unambiguous narrative about Europe and the Mediterranean, helping to create hierarchical structures and relations of subordination based on power and economics.
The Informal Inclusion project explores the marginal dynamics that permeate processes of inclusion, highlighting the indefinability of our deepest desires. It focuses on the complex intertwining of economics and contemporary culture, offering an alternative view on immigration. Tibaldi, in the wake of his artistic research, starts from the concept of the margin and the untold stories related to the exploitation of the "other." Thus emerge the intricate plots of a hidden reality, yet crucial to the economies and lives of the more affluent world. The installation explores the contrasting relationship between good and evil, highlighting the island's tangled past and the raw violence of a world in which migratory flows reshape territorial boundaries and reawaken colonial trauma. Finally, Informal Inclusion aims to cast a critical gaze on the history and actuality of the Mediterranean, aware that the regeneration of the world depends on marginality, capable of resisting dominant narratives and contaminating the spaces it traverses.
Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition presented on the Italian Pavillon at Malta Biennale 2024.
Eugenio Tibaldi (born 1977) is an Italian artist who has always been attracted to marginal aesthetics and the complex relationship between economy and contemporary culture. Leaving northern Italy, in 2000 he moved to the Neapolitan hinterland where he began work that investigates one of Italy's most plastic and dynamic territories, beginning to draw a kind of map of informality. Through the study of the margin, Tibaldi's works activate a processual dynamic that allows alternative aesthetics to emerge. His works are exhibited in public and private institutions in Italy and abroad.
