The Insubric Line

The Insubric Line is the debut exhibition of the three-year curatorial programme The Invention of Europe. A tricontinental narrative (2024-2027). The collective exhibition brings together a group of artists connected to the African continent around the speculative image of the Insubric Line, a geo-point that runs through the city of Meran(o) and forms a seam in the Earth’s surface that emerged following the collision of the European and African tectonic plates. During the Jurassic era, Africa and Europe were in fact separated by the Tethys Sea: the following epochs saw the African plate move northwards towards the European plate, causing a gradual narrowing of the Tethys that culminated in the collision of the two plates. As the European plate slid under the African plate, the latter gave substance to the mineral material that today forms the Alps. The Insubric Line, composed of the fusion of the “more-than-human” substances deposited along the edges of these plates, is a material metaphor through which to bring out the complexities that have constructed the present-day Europe. The narrative of European identity and purity is deconstructed from a geological reality: the orographic image of the line that, today visible as a scar, gives form to the complexity of a history that, in the case of the encounter between Africa and Europe, began 65 million years ago.