The gossips’ chronicles

A location-based multiplayer installation, The Gossips’ Chronicles combines an IRL guided tour of a torture museum with a VR experience to tell the story of the Gossips, a population who lived around the fifth century AD and are now extinct. Skilled artisans, they made precious objects to channel the energy of the universe, interact with plants, clone DNA and master the weathers. However, their independence did not last long, their tools were stolen and used to torture and exterminate them. These objects have survived to become instruments of torture exhibited in museums all over the world. In our exhibition the Guide, the last witness of the Gossips’ traditions, welcomes the public, inviting them to discover this different point of view on history.

In the early Middle Ages, women formed a strong community, they orally passed down stories, folk cultures and were skilled healers. They were called gossips from god-sibb meaning “close kinship”. The gossips were the “women friends” (Silvia Federici). With the advent of capitalism and the strengthening of patriarchal authority, the term took on the negative connotation of female gossip, freedom was lost and those who rebelled against these restrictions were burnt at the stake as heretics. Hence the inspiration for The Gossips’ Chronicles, a guided tour that tells two different versions of the story of artefacts displayed in a torture museum. Here, the word gossips refers to a community of living beings, in tune with nature and the cosmos, who are stripped of their objects for the sake of capital possession and then exterminated to destroy their memory. The story develops from the objects of torture that have come down to us today: historical fakes, whose stories collapse, leaving room for doubt and uncertainty as to where the boundaries between true and false lie.

PRODUCTION: Careof – Marta Bianchi
Via Procaccini 4
20154, Milano, Italy
Tel. 39 0266669080
marta.bianchi@careof.org
@careof_milano
@corinzia_

PRESS OFFICE:
La Biennale di Venezia – Biennale College Cinema
Ca’ Giustinian 1364/a
30124 – Venezia, Italia
Tel. +39 041 2726644
biennaleimmersive@labiennale.org; presscinema@labiennale.org;
college-cinema@labiennale.org