Atelier Impopulaire, 2025
video installation, b/w, sound, 30 min.
Poetry & Sound: Askia Touré, David Henderson, Sonia Sanchez, Calvin C. Hernton, Steve Cannon, Norman Pritchard, Tom Dent, Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed
Produced by Atelier Impopulaire
12 GATES is a multimedia work developed within BEFORE WE LOVE, Atelier Impopulaire's three-act opera drawing on the UMBRA Poets Workshop (1961-63), part of a trilogy examining the emergence of underground artistic movements and civil rights activism among the Italian, African-American, and Latino communities that migrated to New York City's Lower East Side in the early 1960s.
For Disobedience Archive, 12 GATES takes the form of a video installation. It integrates rare archival material with Atelier Impopulaire's new footage, drawing on UMBRA's literature to explore movements advocating for social justice against cultural oppression through multidisciplinary practices.
Disobedience Archive, initiated and curated by Marco Scotini in 2005, is a long-term research platform devoted to the visual cultures, political imaginaries, and collective practices of dissent.
Conceived not as a fixed repository but as a mutable and situated dispositif, the archive is continuously re-edited according to the institutional, geopolitical, and historical context in which it appears.
Its films and documents trace a transnational genealogy of insubordination, bringing together artistic practices, activist media, militant cinema, and forms of counter-documentation.
Rather than preserving political memory as a closed historical record, Disobedience Archive treats the archive itself as a site of conflict, negotiation, and reactivation.
Its shifting constellations address anti-colonial struggles, migration, feminist and queer movements, radical ecologies, labour, and emergent forms of collective subjectivation.
The project questions the presumed neutrality of archival taxonomies and the institutional frameworks through which histories of resistance are made visible, classified, or excluded.
Moving images operate here not simply as representations of struggle, but as agents within processes of political and social transformation.
Each iteration generates new proximities between heterogeneous times, geographies, and forms of dissent, resisting any linear or exhaustive historical narrative.
Over more than two decades, the project has circulated through museums, biennials, universities, and festivals, assuming different spatial and conceptual configurations.
In this sense, Disobedience Archive functions less as an archive of disobedience than as an archival practice that continually tests the political conditions of visibility, memory, and collective action.
2025/2026
9th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurigo; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, PROA21 / Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires
