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Adelita Husni-Bey, Agency – Giochi di Potere, MAXXI Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI secolo, Rome

In 2014 nctm e l’arte contribution made possible Adelita Husni-Bey project Agency – Games of Power at the MAXXI Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI secolo in Rome.

Since 2011 Adelita Husni-Bey has been researching, unearthing and utilizing anarchic-collectivist pedagogical methodologies in her practice.
Agency – Games of Power, a video and photographic installation displaying the results of a collective exercise examining power relations in a model society.

Agency – Games of Power was a simulation conducted in April 2014 at the Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI secolo in Rome. It was inspired by a citizenship class exercise originally developed in the United Kingdom.
Thirty-five volunteer students from Rome’s Manara High School were asked to think through the relationships of dominance in contemporary Italy. The students were divided into five categories: journalists, politicians, workers, activists and bankers. The journalists were responsible for an hourly report on the advancement of the “society”, while the different categories responded to the scenarios by assigning each other “power-points”. The simulation was interrupted by planned moments of abstraction from the game, debates about the social conditions being created through the choices the different categories were making and the meaning and workings of power.

As part of the project, in the month preceding the workshop, various meetings were organized between the students and selected journalists, activists, economists, union leaders and publishers, in order to deepen the students’ perceptions of their chosen categories.

The work took the shape of a video and of a series of photographs shot during the simulation where students self-represented their categories in groups. 

Adelita Husni-Bey, Workshop Agency – Giochi di Potere
3, 4 and 5 April, 11.00 – 15.00
MAXXI Roma