23 May, 7–9 pm
The Falcon of Karachi
Elisa Caldana in conversation with Veronica Pecile
Free entry
Dutch-based Italian artist Elisa Caldana will be in Termoli to present her project The Falcon of Karachi, after a residency in Pakistan and an exhibition at West Den Haag art space in The Hague. Caldana's work will become part of the MACTE Museum's permanent collection after winning Italian Council 12 (2023) funding from the Ministry of Culture's General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity.
For this series of works – which includes a three-channel video shot in Pakistan and Europe, a bronze sculpture, a fabric piece and a sound piece – Caldana investigated the story of the Laggar falcon: a species endemic to Pakistan, India and Myanmar, which is slowly disappearing in the wild. The artist elaborates counter-narratives and counter-images that attempt to shift the perception of this bird of prey, considered a minor falcon, and draw attention to its right to life, regardless of its reputation or usefulness in the eyes of human beings.
Elisa Caldana will be in conversation with researcher Veronica Pecile, who investigates the relationship between law, time and subject with an interdisciplinary approach, focusing on legal techniques to represent non-human entities and non-linear temporalities. The talk will be moderated by Marta Federici, Assistant Curator at the MACTE museum.
Elisa Caldana (1986, Venice) lives in The Hague, The Netherlands.
Caldana studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, after graduating in visual arts at the IUAV University of Venice. Caldana works mainly with sculpture, film and writing. Her works adopt abstraction to bring attention to political and social issues, analysing the paradoxes and liminal spaces that result from the coexistence of different perspectives on understanding the world (e.g. dealing with architecture, public spaces, monuments, collective identity). Her works have been exhibited in international exhibitions and institutions, including: MAXXI, Rome; MAMbo, Bologna; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Tokyo Arts and Space.
Veronica Pecile is a researcher at the Swiss Institute in Rome and the University of Lucerne. Using an interdisciplinary approach (legal theory, legal history and critical theory) she studies the transformations of property as a legal form of the relationship between persons and things in modern Western thought. Pecile was a postdoctoral researcher at the Collegium Helveticum in Zurich and at Harvard Law School. She obtained a doctorate in law and social sciences at the EHESS in Paris with a thesis on the movement for the commons in the cities of Southern Italy, which she is turning into her first book.
