Counterlexicon. The Shifting Sands of Cultural Memory

Justin Randolph Thompson

The workshop explores language as a mobile space, marked by memory, conflict, translation, and transformation. Voice, collective reading, manual practices, and writing become tools for interrogating words and concepts, questioning their established meanings and forms. Books, archives, and toolkits from the research center The Recovery Plan constitute a toolbox to be opened and activated together. Starting from readings and conversations, each group will develop words, fragments, and counter-definitions that will flow into a Counter-Lexicon built over the course of the afternoon. The texts produced may be presented to the public at the end of the day.

Limited places available; registration required no later than three days before the event by writing to: iscrizione@lungomare.org

Justin Randolph Thompson

Justin Randolph Thompson is an artist, cultural facilitator and educator born in Peekskill, NY in ’79. Based in Italy since 1999. Thompson is a recipient of a 2024 MAP Fund grant, a 2022 Creative Capital award, a 2020 Italian Council Research Fellowship, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, a Franklin Furnace Fund Award, a Visual Artist Grant from the Fundacion Marcelino Botin and an Emerging Artist Fellowship from Socrates Sculpture Park amongst others. His work and performances have been exhibited widely in institutions including The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and The American Academy in Rome and are part of numerous collections including The Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Museo MADRE. His life and work seek to deepen the discussions around socio-cultural stratification and the arrogance of permanence through hybrid objects grounded in notions of functionality and through performative works that employ fleeting temporary communities as monuments and fostering projects that connect academic discourse, social activism and DIY networking strategies in annual and biennial gathering, sharing and gestures of collectivity. Thompson is Co-Founder and Director of Black History Month Florence and of The Recovery Plan.
 

Manuela Pacella

Manuela Pacella (Rome, 1977) is an art historian and critic. She writes regularly for books, exhibition catalogues and specialist journals. Her publications include Bertille Bak. La fiaba del reale (Postmedia Books, 2018) and Tell me stories! (Politi Seganfreddo edizioni, 2024), a book based on the column of the same name published in Flash Art Italia (2020–24). In the fields of publishing, writing and teaching, she has long been committed to analysing that liminal zone of critical writing that blurs the boundaries between genres, leading to theoretical fiction. Her course in Critical Writing within the two-year programme in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies at NABA, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti (Rome campus), is characterised precisely by a trajectory that shifts from academic and critical writing towards a freer and less regulated textual form.