About Menocchio we know many things.

View of the exhibition "About Menocchio, we know many things." Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research, Paris, 2012. Image: Aurélien Mole

Etel Adnan, Mohammed Aïssaoui, Mounira Al Solh, Anahi Alviso-Marino, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Michèle Firk, Michel François, Olivier Hadouchi, Pierre Joseph & Jacques Rivet, Carole Roussopoulos, Larisa Shepitko, The Berwick Street Collective, Eric Watier, Peter Weiss

About Menocchio we know many things. About this Marcato, or Marco – and so many others like him who lived and died without leaving a trace – we know nothing.

Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a 16th-Century Miller, 1980 (1976)

Mounira Al Solh, Moment 4, photograph extracted from the project The Sea Is A Stereo, 2007- 2010. Courtesy of Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hambourg / Beyrouth

In The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller (1976), the his­to­rian Carlo Ginzburg recounts the story of a miller’s life in the XVIth cen­tury who was arrested and exe­cuted by the Church because of his rad­ical ideas about Christianity. Through an inves­tiga­tive study of archival mate­rial, Ginzburg exam­ines and inter­prets the signs and traces left by this meta­physi­cian miller’s thought, revealing the pop­ular cul­ture of the time. This nar­ra­tive is a sym­bolic example of Ginzburg’s notion of micros­toria: by reducing the scope of obser­va­tion, one can expand the field of History towards unique sto­ries.

The exhi­bi­tion "About Menocchio we know many things." uses the micro-his­tor­ical method of Carlo Ginzburg to shed light on indi­vidual paths, specif­i­cally drawing atten­tion to those little con­sid­ered by tra­di­tional his­to­ri­og­raphy. Gathering works by artists, writers, soci­ol­o­gists and activists from 1960s until today the exhi­bi­tion tries to make vis­ible diverse forms of resis­tance to the for­mat­ting of a glob­alised world. In giving par­tic­ular atten­tion to details, clues or frag­ments, "About Menocchio we know many things." explores the poten­tial of agency and empow­er­ment of these sin­gular posi­tions through art and nar­ra­tive.

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