We’re pleased to announce the participation of Violeta Quispe at Relayer: D’ici 60 ans, an exhibition taking place at the Cité internationale des arts in France.
In 2025, Cité internationale des arts will celebrate its 60th anniversary and organizes a year-long series of projects that accompany this important moment. How will the Cité internationale des arts' values of hospitality, conviviality and the creation of safe spaces be transformed over the next 60 years?
The exhibition and its accompanying programme will present the artistic practices and proposals of former and current residents of the Cité internationale des arts: through the prism of ecofeminist infrastructures, supporting new social contracts of collectivity composed of humans and non-humans, through restorative justice processes, practising non-extractivism and non-violence within systems, through a critical approach to the entanglement of artificial intelligence and war...
Particularly, the two curators of this exhibition, who were born in a country that no longer exists, Yugoslavia, take as a key metaphor of this speculative exercise the Youth Relay, a symbolic relay race organised every year in Yugoslavia. The relay carried a baton bearing the promise of Yugoslav youth to Josip Broz Tito from every corner of Yugoslavia. The relay usually began in March and passed through all the country's major cities. Its final destination was Belgrade, the Yugoslav army stadium, on 25 May, Youth Day. The relay took place for the first time in 1945 and was made official as the bank holidays of Yugoslav youth in 1957. When the baton was handed over, accompanied by a greetings card containing wishes for long life and good health, a pledge by the young person to Tito was declared in their maternal language, and Tito would take it up again with an appropriate little speech.
Bearing in mind the pledge of the future and how to relay it, the exhibition would like to explore whether it is possible for the various generations, who are growing up today in the midst of genocides and ecocides, to envisage a more distant time that lies ahead of us.
The exhibition will be curated by Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, head of artistic and cultural programming at the Cité internationale des arts, in collaboration with Ana Janevski, curator of the Department of Media and Performance at MoMA in New York, and will consist of invitations extended to former and current residents of the Cité, including Violeta Quispe.
