
04/06/2026, 06.00 PM
To Lecture or Not: Rough Cuts for a Living Museum
Giulia Grechi
04/06/2026, 06.00 PM
Talk
The conversation with Giulia Grechi, anthropologist and author of Decolonizzare il museo. Mostrazioni, pratiche artistiche e sguardi (2021), is conceived as an initial space for reflection on the idea of a museum of and for the living. Imagined as a moment of open dialogue with the public, the talk seeks to question the museum not as a stable and normative apparatus, but as an open field traversed by tensions, relationships, and forms in the making. The act of transmitting knowledge is put into question and redefined as a situated, embodied, and transformative practice, activating conditions of listening, co-presence, and critical imagination. The event is intended as a starting point for this inquiry, open to contributions and unforeseen trajectories.
The talk is part of the public program The Museum in Draft: Provisional Formats for Multispecies Mediation by Lisa Andreani.
Image: © Installation view of The Heart of the Andes by Edwin Church, 1859, oil on canvas. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum, New York
Giulia Grechi is an anthropologist, curator, and professor of Cultural Anthropology and Anthropology of Art at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Napoli, where she also serves on the doctoral board of the PhD program in Visual Arts, Performing Arts, New Media, New Technologies, Music and Cultural Heritage. Her research interests lie at the intersection of cultural and postcolonial studies, museum studies, and contemporary artistic practices, with a particular focus on the cultural legacies of colonialism, racial imaginaries, and processes of museum decolonization. She was a researcher at the Università degli Studi di Napoli L’Orientale as part of the European project MELA – European Museums in an Age of Migrations, dedicated to the relationship between museums, migration, and contemporary art. She is a co-founder of the curatorial collective Routes Agency, now part of Attitudes_spazio alle arti, as well as of the journal roots§routes and the network yekatit12-19febbraio. She has curated exhibitions, residencies, and research initiatives at institutions including the Museo delle Civiltà. Her major publications include La rappresentazione incorporata. Una etnografia del corpo tra stereotipi coloniali e arte contemporanea (2016), Decolonizzare il museo. Mostrazioni, pratiche artistiche, sguardi incarnati (2021), and, with other authors, Disimparare. Politiche, poetiche, immaginazioni altre (2024). Her work intertwines research, teaching, and curatorial practice as tools for cultural transformation and social justice.