Adelita Husni-Bey: Il Principe, la Classe e lo Stato

Since 2011 Adelita Husni-Bey (b. 1985, Italy) has been researching, unearthing and utilising anarchic-collectivist pedagogical methodologies in her practice. The solo exhibition at Galleria Laveronica that opens on the 27th of December continues this trajectory with Agency- giochi di potere (Agency- games of power), a video and photographic installation displaying the results of a collective exercise examining power relations in a model society.

Agency is a video installation accompanied by the photographs of a simulation conducted in April 2014 at the MAXXI Museum in Rome. Inspired by a citizenship class exercise originally developed in the United Kingdom, thirty- five volunteer students from Rome’s Manara High School were asked to think through the relationships of dominance in contemporary Italy.The students were divided into five categories: journalists, politicians, workers, activists and bankers. The journalists were responsible for an hourly report on the advancement of the ‘society’, while the different categories responded to the scenarios by assigning each other ‘power-points’. The simulation was interrupted by planned moments of abstraction from the game, debates about the social conditions being created through the choices the different categories were making and the meaning and workings of power. Agency-giochi di potere was conducted in April 2014 at MAXXI Museum in Rome and is accompanied by photographs shot during the simulation where students self-represented their categories in groups.

As part of the project, in the month preceding the workshop, various meetings were organized between the students and selected journalists, activists, economists, union leaders and publishers, in order to deepen the students’ perceptions of their chosen categories.

The exhibition also includes a film that will be projected at the C19th Aurora theatre in Modica shortly before the opening of the exhibition.