Never Spoken Again: Rogue Stories of Science and Collections, the featured traveling exhibition now on view at UVM’s Fleming Museum of Art, compels visitors to ask urgent and challenging questions about the history of museums and collecting practices. Visitors are also encouraged to touch a tropical parrot made of Cinefoil.
Featuring seventeen contemporary artists working in a wide range of mediums, this exhibition and its artworks employ “rogue” strategies and reimagined narratives to explore collecting histories. From placing a Herzog quote on the gallery wall to insisting that each exhibiting museum incorporate objects from its own collections, curator David Ayala-Alfonso brings together artists whose works shed light on myths, simulations, and the slow violence of systematic racism that historically underpin collecting practices.
In this special video screening, visitors will be able to dive deeper into those themes. Laura Huertas Millán’s Journey to a land otherwise known is a self-described documentary-fiction which explores the notion and endurance of the “New World” while Fractal Access Totems by François Bucher blurs the line between the mystical, the historical, and the personal.
PROGRAM DETAILS
Saturday, March 30, 2024
2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Fleming Museum Auditorium - Lower Level, Room 101
All videos will be presented with English subtitles. Content Warning: A video in this program includes archival death imagery.
Laura Huertas Millán, Journey to a land otherwise known (still), 2011, single-channel video (color, sound), 23 min. © Le Fresnoy – Laura Huertas Millán.
Journey to a land otherwise known, Laura Huertas Millán 23 minutes
A documentary fiction responding to colonial accounts of the natural and ethnographic explorations in the Americas by conquistadors, missionaries, and scientists. Shot in the Tropical Greenhouse of Lille, France, the film uses both the architecture and the plants of this enclosed botanic garden as narrative supports. Led by the voice-over of an explorer, the film examines the notion of exoticism, evokes the violent origins of the so- called “New World” and the endurance of the imagery they engendered, explains the artist’s website.
François Bucher, Fractal Access Totems, 2012, single channel video, 40:10 min. Courtesy of the artist.
Fractal Access Totems, François Bucher 40:10 minutes
Fractal Access Totems tells the story of Regina, an incarnated spirit charged with awakening the planet. The story reveals unexpected connections between Regina, mystical forms of knowledge from traditional cultures of Mexico, and the collective mobilizations that took place around the world in the late 1960s. The film combines interviews, archival materials, and the artist’s narration of his personal encounters with the characters who revealed to him Regina’s existence. It is one of a series of films by François Bucher that question linear understandings of time, correlating apparently disparate events, and mystifying history and geopolitics.
Never Spoken Again: Rogue Stories of Science and Collections is a traveling exhibition curated by David Ayala-Alfonso and produced by Independent Curators International (ICI). It is the result of a new series of programs, pioneered with the support of the Hartfield Foundation, aimed at providing opportunities to alumni of ICI’s Curatorial Intensive as they move through the stages of their career, and reflecting ICI’s commitment to fostering and championing new curatorial voices who will shape the future of the field. Never Spoken Again is made possible with the generous support of ICI’s Board of Trustees and International Forum. Additional support for Erkan Öznur’s participation is provided by SAHA. The presentation at the Fleming Museum of Art has been organized in collaboration with Kristan M. Hanson, the Fleming’s curator of collections and exhibitions. Crozier Fine Arts is the Preferred Art Logistics Partner.
Artists: Morehshin Allahyari, Maria Thereza Alves, François Bucher, Giuseppe Campuzano, Alia Farid, Sofia de Grenade, Laura Huertas Millán, Ulrik López, Carlos Motta, Erkan Öznur, David Peña Lopera, Claudia Peña Salinas, Michael Rakowitz, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Reyes Santiago Rojas, Daniel R. Small, and Felipe Steinberg.