exCHANGE

Border Motherhood investigates the inequalities associated with motherhood. Sara Parolari and Astrid Kofler explore this topic in varying contexts through interviews with women from around the world, aiming to highlight the inequalities that women, particularly mothers, encounter in their everyday lives. How do factors such as geographical origin, social background, and state-provided benefits impact access to opportunities? What insights do the experiences of mothers provide? The exhibition features selected excerpts from interviews and photographs chosen by the participants themselves, illustrating their journeys as women and mothers.

Through interviews with experts in hydrology, climate physics, and environmental psychology, Elena Maines and Ingrid Hora explore the right to access the scarce and unevenly distributed water resources around the world. Their research focusses on the Mediterranean region, specifically Italy, Spain, and Morocco — areas particularly affected by climate change. It examines innovative and sustainable technologies such as CloudFisher, which extracts drinking and utility water from the moisture in fog in North Africa. The photo installation creates a space to question ecological and social issues: the photographs portray three active experts on the front lines, capturing their emotions, hopes, and technologies, while also serving as a call to action.

What happens to playgrounds when those for whom they are intended are not there? Who is drawn to these in-between places that anyone can visit but often does not; semi-public areas that are free of charge and oscillate between the hidden and the visible? Playgrounds in the evening hours: for process artist Katharina Theresa Mayr and sociolinguist Verena Platzgummer, these serve as ideal microcosms to observe social dynamics and inequalities, exploring the societal disparities — across socioeconomic positions, genders, and cultures — they reflect. Their observations and audio recordings have been transformed into an installation that does not impose conclusions but aims to foster discourse and discussion, evoking feelings and reflection.

This project is a performative research initiative in public space. This transdisciplinary collaboration between the artist and the researcher explores inequalities from the perspective of bus drivers at the intersection of mobility and work. Bus drivers serve as a compelling example to highlight inequalities in our mobile society: the increasing demand for labour, the recruitment of foreign workers, and the discrimination they often encounter, all compounded by the widening gap between high- and low-skilled workers and the shift from fulfilling professions to impersonal services. The final installation and sound work draw on the experiences and opinions gathered by Maria Walcher and Verena Wisthaler during interviews with representatives from SASA, bus drivers, and passengers.

Reinterpreting the artifacts of our ancestors to shed light on the theme of inequality. With this concept in mind, Luca Trevisani and Fabio Carnelli involved various individuals — considering their professions, backgrounds, ethnicities, and social contexts — in the examination of the objects belonging to the man from the ice, the thousand-year-old mummy preserved at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology. Researchers and artists facilitated the discussion, listening to the intertwined reflections and dialogues. The installation offers insight into the journey undertaken and combines fragments of voices in different languages, subtitled through additional interpretation by artificial intelligence. Inequalities are explored from two perspectives: the relationship between humans, the environment, and technology in both the past and present, and the comparison between the visions of those already integrated into the social fabric and those who come from different realities and encounter it for the first time.

The installation aims to give a voice to the “voiceless” elements of nature — water, air, earth, and fire — whose complex and delicate systems sustain life but can also lead to destruction when out of balance. For millennia, living beings have evolved by adapting to these elements; however, the rapid pace of climate change leaves little time to do so. The concept plays with notions of time and space, highlighting the interconnectedness of all elements, which convey an urgent message to us. Without knowing their language and sense of time, we seek to understand the significance of climate change through immersive experiences.