Disobedience Archive

Disobedience Archive is a multi-phase, mobile, and evolving video archive that focuses on the relationship between artistic practices and political action. Developed by art theorist and curator Marco Scotini in 2005, the project generates an atlas of contemporary tactics of resistance, ranging from direct action to counter-information, from constituent practices to bio-resistance. The archive also functions as a “user guide” to social disobedience, including hundreds of documentary materials spanning decades. Disobedience Archive investigates artistic activism that emerged after the end of modernism and encompasses hundreds of video works revealing the mediated nature of history. On one hand, it aims to show precisely what corporate media, as central agents of political authoritarianism, attempt to hide or remove from view. On the other, it seeks to reclaim control over the violent expropriation of experience, thereby producing history and making it visible. Presented twenty two times across different countries, Disobedience Archive transforms each time without ever assuming a definitive configuration. Whether in the form of a parliament, school, or community garden, the project turns the typically static and taxonomic archive into a dynamic and generative device.

Gender Disobedience 

Traditional notions of gender and sexual difference, based solely on equality, are increasingly insufficient to understand contemporary social emancipation. This section explores transnational feminist and queer movements whose anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, and antipatriarchal character arises not only from questioning fixed identities but also from addressing the exploitation of women, LGBTQ+ communities, and racialized bodies. By linking struggles across gender, sexuality, race, and class, these movements form a global force of resistance, often rooted in the Global South. They occupy public spaces, organize assemblies, and build networks, revealing how capital and state policies shape the control of body-territories. The section emphasizes alliances between feminist and LGBTQ+ activism and the radical potential of collaborative disobedience. 

Marco Scotini (1964, Cortona Italy) is the Artistic Director of NABA – Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti and FM Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea. He is also responsible for the exhibition program at PAV – Parco Arte Vivente in Turin. As a curator, he has collaborated with numerous international institutions, including the Venice, Bangkok, Istanbul, Yinchuan, and Prague Biennales, the Van Abbemuseum, Museo Reina Sofía, SALT, Castello di Rivoli, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 2015, he curated the Albanian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale.

His most significant project, Disobedience Archive, has been presented in museums and art spaces around the world since 2005. Among his publications are Politiche della memoria. Documentario e archivio (DeriveApprodi, 2014), Artecrazia. Macchine espositive e governo dei pubblici (DeriveApprodi, 2016), Utopian Display. Geopolitiche curatoriali (Quodlibet, 2019), L’inarchiviabile. L’archivio contro la storia (Meltemi, 2022), and the forthcoming How Things Appear. Narratives and Politics of Exhibition Display (Quodlibet, 2026).