The PATRIMONIO DISSIDENTE (dissident heritage) project of the artist Cosimo Veneziano curated by Connecting Cultures Foundation in collaboration with qwatz-contemporary art platform and the MAC–Museo d’Arte Contemporanea of Lissone is among the winners of the 2023 application Strategia Fotografia, promoted by the General Directorate of Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture.

PATRIMONIO DISSIDENTE will constitute an archive of 14 photographic works that will be acquired in the permanent collection of the MAC in Lissone. The project documents and reworks a memory that is not only inconvenient but sometimes even embarrassing, of mainly Italian statuary, monuments, architecture and landscapes, commissioned for different reasons and which have provoked protests or created confusion, often vandalized or even removed throughout the twentieth century up to our days.

Among these, the stele of Axum; the Bigio of Brescia, a naked colossus 7 and a half meters high; the monument to the journalist Indro Montanelli in the gardens of via Palestro in Milan; the statue of Lenin in Kyiv, removed only in 2015 following the protests of the Euromaidan; some symbols of Western colonialism such as the statue of Christopher Columbus torn down in Rhode Island and that of the slave trader Edward Colston which ended up in the waters of the port of Bristol in 2020. The collection also includes two controversial monuments dedicated to female figures: the “Violata”, created in Ancona in memory of women victims of violence and the one dedicated to the actress Manuela Arcuri in Porto Cesareo.

Cosimo Veneziano will intervene on the images with a manual aniline coloring treatment how it used to be done on the analogue photos of the past: an intervention aimed at making evident the continuous and subtle changes of history, of sensitivity, despite and in spite of the materials used for eternity such as the marble, bronze and iron.

The project includes a public program with meetings and testimonies at the Museo delle Civiltà of Rome, the Alma Mater University of Bologna, the Fitzcarraldo Foundation of Turin, the Izolyatsia Association of Kiyv and the Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan. The public program will make use of the important scientific contribution of scholars and experts including Lisa Parola, Matteo Lucchetti, Francesca Guerisoli, Anna Detheridge and Roberto Pinto.

PATRIMONIO DISSIDENTE opens in February 2024 with a residency at qwatz in Rome, to end in September with the final exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lissone.

The project is promoted by: