Bona Dyssou, Rafael Guendelman Hales and Nana Opoku in residence at MuCiv

In October and November 2024, the Museum of Civilizations hosted three artists in residence: Bona Dyssou, Rafael Guendelman Hales and Nana Opoku, who explored objects and documents from the museum’s collections through an immersion in the storages, and focused on some histories characterized by violent appropriation and Eurocentric forms of representations.

Bona Dyssou focused on the objects that allow reflections on the intersection between gender and race with the idea to develop projects on some photographic portraits of African women taken by Europeans in the 20^th century, and a comb donated by the Ethiopian empress Taytou to the Italian queen Margherita.

Rafael Guendelman Hales worked mostly with maps and diaries of explorers – in particular, Padre Coppi’s diary in Amazonia and the ones from the former Italian colonies in East Africa. He organised two laboratories with students on the topic of the objects looted by the European explorers.

Nana Opoku (Afroscope) arrived with the objective to work on materials, especially textiles, but he felt “an unexpected overwhelming feeling of sadness” about the objects taken forcefully and starded to look deeply into this feeling through art.