This body of work that Marco Maria Zanin is presenting – in his double role of artist and anthropological researcher – aims to overcome the
asymmetries inherited by euro-centric perspectives and yet present in the everyday speech, by building new relations among objects
belonging to different cultures. Diverse artefacts, but united by a structural relationship with the cultivation of the soil and its logic, rhythm and
rituals. For the artist, the imagination borne by these objects becomes a means of developing a biography of things that weaves memories and
knowledge through a game of free, informed associations respectful of the complexity of the present debate on the re-thinking of the role of museums in managing the ethnographic heritage that is the result of European colonial history.
Soil Kinships presents a new production developed through this last pandemic year and focused on the construction of unexpected connections between the actual subjects of the artist’s research that go from the tools of the rural life in the Veneto region of his origin to the
artefacts belonging to the communities he encountered during his anthropological research in South America and Portugal.
The objects analyzed by Zanin are treated as activators of social and human relations. These new juxtapositions and mixes result from
intercultural processes and thus no longer manufactured goods but rather new bodies, heirs of their original environment and now in a
dialogue among themselves.