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Diversity/ Inclusion | Participation | Sustainability

Giocherai nel quotidiano, correndo | Temitayo Ogunbiyi

Temitayo Ogunbiyi, “Giocherai nel quotidiano, correndo”, 2020. Courtesy l’artista. Foto © Amedeo Benestante.
CATEGORY
Diversity/ Inclusion | Participation | Sustainability
YEAR
2020
DURATION
3 months
LOCATION
Onsite
FORMAT
Installation + Workshop
WEBSITE
https://www.madrenapoli.it/mostre/temitayo/
TARGET
Kids, Teenager, Families
In 2020, during the first Italian lockdown due to the Covid 19 pandemic, the Donnaregina Foundation for Contemporary Arts, through the artistic director Kathryn Weir, commissioned Temitayo Ogunbiyi (1984, Rochester, United States, lives and works in Lagos, Nigeria) to create a sculptural playground – a garden and a space for playing and learning – specially designed for the Madre’s courtyard space. The commission was carried out in preparation for MADRE FACTORY, which took place in the summer after the first lockdown, from 17 June to 13 September 2020, and offered a series of free activities, workshops and artist’s laboratories dedicated to adults and children and carried out as part of the broader ‘Madre per il Sociale’ project. Temitayo Ogunbiyi, whose research draws inspiration from botanical forms and histories, women’s work and cooking traditions, created the installation ‘You will play in the everyday, running’ for the museum’s large outdoor courtyard and launched a series of workshops entitled ‘Planting and plant love’.
‘You will play in the everyday, running’ consists of a large installation of interactive sculptures whose forms are inspired by twisted vines, African hairstyling techniques and the itinerary traced by Google Maps between Lagos and Naples. It transformed the museum’s inner courtyard into a playground and garden, where children and families were invited to interact, as well as a school and stage for theatre and music. Ogunbiyi re-enlivened spatial play as an educational process in this period when many people in the areas directly around the Madre had been locked down in very small spaces. In collaboration with educators working at the museum, she organised a series of workshops which, through references to local botany and comparisons between the culinary histories of Campania and Nigeria, located the work within cultural and geographical contexts, building an ideal space in which people of all ages and cultural origins could learn to take care of a garden to be understood as a collective heritage. The museum worked with the artist and educators to include communities of different origins in the activations of the work.  Planting and plant love Starting with references to botany and a comparison of culinary stories from Campania and Nigeria, the commissioned work ‘You will play in the everyday, running’ was built as an ideal space in the museum courtyard in which to play and learn to take care of a garden that would become a collective heritage.

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