NoTav Tracks: Two Evenings

Ellen de Bruijne PROJECTS is pleased to host a new collaborative project initiated by Jeremiah Day.  The gallery welcomes this group of 5 collaborators for a weekend with two different programs, including performance, screening and discussion, taking as its point of departure the Italian social and political movement “NoTav.”

 

“NoTAV” is the catch-all slogan for the political project that has at its center stopping the huge destruction/construction project of a new high speed train line (TAV) between Turin and Lyon.  The illogical train line has more to do with corruption than public transportation, and risks destroying the Susa Valley’s villages, mountains, forests. 

 

“I’m fine. I am happy with the choice I made because it is the result of a just and beautiful cause – the NoTav struggle which is also the struggle for a different model of society and stems from the awareness that the present one is not the only one of the possible world”.  – Retired high-school classics teacher and NoTav activist Nicoletta Dosio, communication from prison, 2020. 

 

The movement opposing this development has largely refused to cooperate, instead developing a campaign of civil disobedience and direct action that has been sustained for decades.  Cooking and eating together, with book festivals and music festivals, gathering independent agricultural producers through the “Critical Wine” and “Critical Beer” gatherings, and other experimental public programming – NoTAV is a living manual for how to build community and a strong social movement.  This political organizing effort has come to mean much more than simply a train or not, drawing in activists from around Europe and the world to propose and sketch a different version of how we can live and work together under contemporary conditions, across generations and social class, including fierce debates about patriarchy and identity.

 

Italian writers Wu-Ming collective have speculated that the NoTAV’s story is told so little and so rarely precisely because such a story of positive experiences of political organizing is contagious in it’s tendency to inspire people to work together. 

 

In this project Jeremiah Day supports others (and vice-versa) into a collaborative performance-memory-reportage.  Day has been offering improvisational performance workshops for the last year, and a core group from those workshops joins in Amsterdam along with Davide Tidoni, an Italian sound and visual artist based in Brussels who has worked intensively documenting and making art about the songs and stories of NoTAV. 

 

Gathering in the gallery for a short working residency, the group will invites the public to two evenings of live art, almost all improvised.  Developing on Day’s ongoing work with embodiment, language and memory, the program offers the basis for sharing, gathering and discussing our own struggles, those taking place in the Susa Valley, and our own status in this unimaginable present.