Organized by BJCEM, European and Mediterranean Young Artists Biennial MEDITERRANEA 19 will be held in San Marino between 15 May - 31 October 2021. SELİN DAVASSE represents Turkey in the biennial, which brings together over 70 artists from 21 different countries. The artist's performance and installation titled “Amnio-Fountain for Public Space Gestationality”, realized within the conceptual framework of the Biennial, can be viewed until October 31st as a performative intervention on the fountain in San Marino's Liburni Garden.
MEDITERRANEA 19, which was held this year with the title “School of Waters”, curated by Alessandro Castiglioni and Simone Frangi who directors A Natural Oasis?, an education and research program open to artists and curators under 34 and supported by BJCEM since 2015. From Italy to Tunisia, from Spain to Montenegro, from France to Jordan, from Malta to Lebanon, the biennial showcases the works, site-specific installations, films, videos and performances of more than 70 artists. Also uses the common heritage of the common waters and the Mediterranean as a starting point to reinvent a complex platform for lifestyles and knowledge processes.
Eighteen editions of the biennial have been held in cities such as Marseille, Valencia, Lisbon, Sarajevo and Athens since the biennial was first launched in Barcelona in 1985, while the last edition was held in Tirana and Dürres, two Albanian cities. Turkish artists participating in the biennial are supported by Sabancı University and Kasa Gallery, the Turkish partners of BJCEM.
Selin Davasse (b. 1992, Ankara) lives and works in Berlin. Her performative practice translates research across various disciplines to poetic, operatic and speculative processes imagining alternative sociopolitical realities. Composed of narrative and sonic textures, her work interweaves strands of theory, history and fiction into feminine voices and takes shape as spoken and sung performances often with playful and participatory elements. Her performances have been presented at “Next Waves Theater” at Volksbühne, Berlin (2020-2021), “Slavs and Tatars' Pickle Bar” at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2020) and “Queer Art, Culture and Politics from Turkey and its Diaspora Symposium” at Goldsmiths College, London (2020). She is a member of “The Society for Matriarchal World Domination” whose collective works are in the collection of the Kunstbibliothek der Staatlichen Museen von Berlin (2019), Turkey’s entry at “School of Waters” Mediterranea 19 Young Artists Biennale, San Marino (2021) and a recipient of the “Centrale Fies Live Works 9” (2021-2022) fellowship.
“Amnio-Fountain for Public Space Gestationality” (2021) is a performative intervention at the fountain at Giardino dei Liburni of San Marino, commissioned by the “School of Waters” Mediterranea 19 Young Artists Biennale. A masculinist narrative springs forth from fountains in city squares, boasting man’s mastery over nature. Washing over this frozen tradition and splashing in the fluid feminine, the Amnio-Fountain sets the stage for a sonic and textual voyage through possibilities of hydro-feminist sociability and knowledge production. Setting sail from the symbol of the amniotic fluid, the Amnio-Fountain thirsts for a city that overflows with the facilitative, hospitable logic of our bodily waters gestating multiple and unpredictable forms of existence. Drowning the individualist, humanist understanding of corporeality, the Amnio-Fountain desires to heal the feelings of disconnect and devastation welling up under the dry, water-soluble logic of the Capitalocene.
https://mediterraneabiennial.org/Selin-Davasse
