Massimiliano (Mao) Mollona

writer, filmmaker, and anthropologist

Massimiliano (Mao) Mollona is a writer, filmmaker, and anthropologist. He is an associate professor teaching political and economic anthropology and anthropology of art at University of Bologna, Bologna. He has a multidisciplinary background in economics and anthropology and his work focuses on the relationship between art and political economy.

He has conducted extensive fieldwork in Brazil, Italy, Norway, and the United Kingdom, mainly in economic and artistic institutions with a specific focus on work, class, and post-capitalist politics, and uses a methodology that combines pedagogy, artistic prefiguration, and activism. He is a member of the collective freethought (with whom Mollona was part of the 2021/2022 BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice program) and a co-founder and president of the Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI), which is a collective of activists, artists, and curators who aim to imagine and implement post-capitalist forms of art and life. Mollona lives and works in Bologna.