ANTHROPOGENIC CONNECTION

Anthropogenic Connection by Eugenio Tibaldi, is a project developed between September 2019 and December 2020, in collaboration with Zoma Museum and the Institute of Italian Culture in Addis Ababa with the support of construction company Elmi Olindo& Co.

Two components sit at the heart of the project: Anthropogenic Bridge and Anthropogenic Herbarium, respectively, a permanent site specific-installation, and a series of studio-produced artifacts that represent, to an extent, an articulate travel journal/herbarium.

The project embodies the Italian artist’s working method. It is a synthesis of two stays in Addis Ababa that he used to conduct a social, anthropological and economic inquiry on the city. The organic intersections between nature and artifact, game and technic, architecture and art, are the project’s distinctive traits. They reflect a desire to connect different cultures for the production of an artwork with a hybrid identity, particularly in Anthropogenic Bridge – a playful and functional engine, resulted from an intense collaboration with local productive realms, which embodies the artist’s poetics and aesthetics of fragment and marginality. Eugenio Tibaldi is the first artist to participate in Zoma Museum’s Bridge Residency Program. His bridge is a non- bridge, ending in a slide. This makes it into a performative sculpture that invites the public to interact with it. The synthesis between nature and artifact returns in the decorative elements that imitate the lush surrounding vegetation with discarded materials.In the midst of pop colors and details, car tires, corrugated metal sheets, and plastic water jugs take the shape of flowers, agave and eucalyptus leaves. The bridge, a symbol of connection and exchange, turns into an access to a new view point –on the surrounding environment as well as on the city’s socio-economic dynamics, embracing the transformative potential of new generations.

Anthropogenic Bridge will be inaugurated on December 10^th, within the context of the 16th celebration of the Day of Contemporary Art, an initiative of the Association of Italian Museums of Contemporary Art (AMACI, AssociazionedeiMuseid’artecontemporaneaitaliani). The inauguration will also host the premiere of the documentary “Eugenio Tibaldi_ Anthropogenic Connection a site specific project in Addis Ababa” produced by the Institute of Italian Culture in Addis Ababa.

Anthropogenic Connection by Eugenio Tibaldi is also the last chapter of the project “Under the Spell of Africa” curated by Adriana Rispolibetween 2019 and 2020,part of the program Italia Cultura Africa of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and InternationalCooperation. The complete project involved the work of Raffaela Mariniello in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, and Flavio Favelli in Cape Town, South Africa. It is based on the idea of cultural exchange and osmosis through art, with the objective to stimulate relationships and mutual influences between the participating artists and the locality where they worked.