Agne Raceviciute, born in Lithuania 

From the spaces and times of the memory of her native land and of her grandparents, Agne Raceviciute’s quest assumes a different form, exploring individual movements and interpersonal relationships. Two monoliths are brought together by the title Schautrieb, a Freudian term that indicates a scopic pulsion and that embraces every way of seeing, being seen or seeing oneself. Moving away from the idea of the naivety or innocence of the observer’s eye, the artist investigates this condition, constructing a narration that unites reality and fiction. Thus the protagonist, immortalized in a life-size photo, generates images and thoughts that create a fluorescent lattice of connections. The representation of these trajectories and these relationships is the object of this investigation, and is part of a long-term project.

T-yong Chung, born in Korea

T-yong Chung’s sculpture is a perfect fusion between east and west, between origin and destination. Taking the classical canons of ancient statuary as its starting point, it seeks, with a removal of material far beyond traditional chisel work, the most extreme, and at the same time the most interior, limit of the object’s recognisability. A search for the essence carried out with constant tension as it strives to maintain an equilibrium that risks overbalancing at any moment, if too much or too little is taken away. The work presented at Casa Testori, in what was once Giovanni Testori’s study, is a double tribute to the house owner in a foreign language, offered both through a plaster bust and through a mask dominating the landscape from the balcony. The academic nature of the classical portrait is cancelled with the use of a sander, which enables the creation of a relationship between solids and voids. The image is to be completed, therefore, only through the observer’s memory or imagination. The lack of one part compels us to reconstruct, to activate our gaze. The person who once lived in these rooms is brought back by the artist.

Stefan Milosavljević, born in Serbia

Midnight Sunrise is a pair of iron rockets, painted in pastel colours. Its title evokes two natural moments that cannot coexist and refers to the artist’s childhood memories, and in particular to the light that follows the explosion of a bomb. The starting point, in this case too, is therefore the artist’s personal memories and his attempt to create a tangible testimonial to his memories of the war, after realizing that he has no actual proof of his presence at a historical moment of such importance. The colour of the sculptures derives, therefore, from his analysis of images in the public domain, photos of the Belgrade sky after bombing, and from a sampling of pixels and colours, creating a luminosity that evokes that of the sun, but taking place at a moment when everything is dark. Boom, just fireworks, his mother always said, to reassure Stefan during the bombings.

Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-35

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Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-36

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Adi Haxhiaj, born in Albania

A painting is, first and foremost, an object. Starting from this premise, Adi Haxhiaj’s poetics have modelled and remodelled over time, confusing and superimposing subject and object, mingling views and viewpoints. O.T. has as its support the cushion of a divan which the artist found in a tip for oversize refuse and which he used as a backrest for years. When he moved house, he realized he could transform it into a pictorial support, like many other objects around him, on which to immortalize the view of the divan itself. The cushion became a collector of memories, fragmented and almost unrecognizable. It conserves traces of events that, with an inversion of its viewpoint, it has witnessed. His painting, in turn, reveals its material essence, clotting and leaving most of the surface bare. This consistency, at times repellent, is exaggerated in the frame of the small drawing made with washable ink on paper, born as a sketch to pass the time and then transformed into a self-portrait. A wasp is immortalized as it collides with a mosquito net that prevents it from returning to where it had built its nest. The starting point is a real experience, the observation of conduct dictated by violence and a tear. At the same time, the chequered line portraying the mosquito net cannot help evoking the place where the drawing was made, that is to say the cloakroom of the Fondazione Prada and its metal grid, on which the artist got caught.

Agnese Skujina, born in Latvia

Agnese Skujina, who usually uses paper as the support for her liquid landscapes, has chosen to work on wood for this occasion: planks from an old parquet that the artist’s grandfather bought for his house but could not lay because of the damp. Fifty years later, Agnese Skujina’s father used it, choosing it as the floor for the home he was building little by little. A third generation, that of the artist, gave new life to this material, painting two distinct landscapes on it, one Latvian and one Italian, then decomposing them and recomposing them to make a new unit. The painting emerges on the surface like a patch of damp, fluid and indistinct in form, without any apparent figuration or any possibility of recognizing a subject.

Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-32

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Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-34

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Saba Masoumian, born in Iran

Two miniature theatres show signs of life that once was. Saba Masoumian’s boxes depict a space in which memories are superimposed on the subconscious, in which symbols, metaphors and allegories predominate to the extent that they become, in some cases, repellent in their excessive cruelty. They portray scenes of man’s abandoning and abandonment, images made truculent by the contrast between elements linked to childhood innocence and references to blood and bodies. Uninhabited rooms, dense with memories, of scraps of life and slices of flesh, rooms waiting to be inhabited once more, or to be forgotten at last.

Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-5

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Barbara Prenka, born in Kosovo

Rhapsody is an itinerary embracing twenty-four canvases. Twenty-four stages conceived as referring to a movement towards destinations that unceasingly shift and alter. In each of the works, colours, shapes and brush strokes flow and reappear, are conserved and transformed, return unexpectedly. A journey that is broken, interrupted, begun again. In the artist’s intentions, the work arises from a sense of the rhapsody as a complex that unifies, in which each single piece is a narration, but also the sequel to another tale. A continual evolution of migratory movements, a continual evolution that does not stagnate in rooted stability, but maintains the echo of an impossibility to settle, remaining in suspended tension. 

Hsing-Chun Shih, born in Saudi Arabia

Hsing-Chun Shih’s installation includes three elements that revolve around an audio track, a recording of the sounds of a textile factory in Taipei, Taiwan, where the artist grew up. It is impossible not to think, then, of the noises arriving, in workdays, from Testori Group, a factory alongside Casa Testori, and which are superimposed upon those from another distant factory. At the core of the project is a fabric, dismantled so as to show, in its central part, the profile of a landscape, white on white, the evanescence of which depends on how it is manipulated, in a precarious equilibrium implemented through a precise creative destruction, to which a photo bears witness. These same threads, having been detached, are then resewn and used to recreate a map. Embroidery on the curtain defines another silhouette, glimpsed only against the light: it is the profile of Taiwan in one of the first maps made of the island.

Alek O., born in Argentina

In the work of Alek O., the original function, and sometimes the texture, is lost, but the memory remains under other semblances. They are reassembled, with an apparent rigour that reveals an imprecise geometry, dictated by the material itself and therefore by the story of these objects. Thye change shape, but do not lose their memory, they conserve it even in their titles, which sometimes refer to their first situation, they transform the object into its previous owner. This is the case both with Flatland, a composition of doormats found here and there, and with Paolo, a curtain that belongs to another space, marked by the sun, impressed on it like a long exposure photo. Frozen on a canvas, it no longer separates interior from exterior, it no longer protects from other eyes, it shows this life to new observers.

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Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-4

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Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-16

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Felipe Aguila, born in Chile

Space, on the other hand, is the central element of the work that Felipe Aguila has created specially for Appocundria and which will continue to evolve until the end of the exhibition. The artist, in fact, first drew his own idea of home, then asked a series of friends who live far away to do the same thing on the same sheet of paper. To depict heimat / hogar / home. A letter in drawings, therefore, one that crossed the world, sometimes getting lost, sometimes not reaching its destination, sometimes not returning to the sender. The title of this work is Nyumbani, a word that means home in Swahili, a language especially disseminated in Africa but also common in communities far distant from the African continent, in virtue of its links with maritime commerce. The reference to temporal and spatial distances continues in the drawings of the series called Urbanización de la memoria. Here the reference to architecture, society and politics becomes more explicit. Drifting through these sheets of paper of varying weights and background tints are buildings and landscapes that seem suddenly to disappear, whether for the lightness of the pencil strokes, or for the precariousness of the structures portrayed – lacking foundations, propped up by scaffolding or threatened by natural disasters. These visions take as their starting point real buildings that the artists has seen personally or in photographs. Some of these places no longer exist, however, or have been altered over time, and Felipe Aguila rebuilds them, as in a dream, relying on his memories. Allusion to duration and distance, to stable points of reference, is limited to a small number of these drawings. Their removal from the others implies the presence of a constellation of other times and spaces.

Aleksander Velišček, born in Slovenia

The prepustnica was a pass that enabled those living close to the border to cross between Slovenia and Italy, before the former country entered Europe. A document that avoided long queues at the frontier, enabling holders to move freely between the two states. For Aleksander Velišček it is inevitably linked to childhood memories. His work also becomes a socio-political reflection on the sense of frontiers, on the shared conviction that a historical moment and its features have been left behind, whereas in reality they are reappearing today. The twelve canvases painted by the artist portray this document, decomposed between figuration and abstraction. They tell the story of a single family, but of many nations. The installation opens up at the corner between two walls, just like the pass itself. Above it is the one painting that does not have this document as its subject: a European flag unfurled against a leaden sky.

Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-12

Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-15

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Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-13

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Stefan Milosavljević, born in Serbia

In Carnivous Carnival, too, the dimensions of play and disguise are essential. It is a reflection on the relationship between prey and predator, on the capacity for camouflage and penetration of every form of violence and cruelty, especially in their subtlest forms, which become fascinating even while remaining bestial.

Mohamed Keita, born in Côte d’Ivoire

This autobiographical narration, though never explicit in Mohamed Keita’s work, is essential if we are to understand why his gaze dwells on certain details and the direction it takes. The photographer left his native land at the age of 14 and undertook, alone, a journey through Guinea, Mali, Algeria, the Sahara, Libya and Malta. After three years he reached Rome, now aged 17. He experienced living on the street and immortalizes this same street with his attentive, unrhetorical gaze. He portrays his Rome, sunny and luminous, and gathers traces of those passing through or who live there.

Nicolas Vamvouklis, born in Greece

In 2016, Berlin Zoo took its flamingos into care as a cautionary measure after the first cases of H5N8 ’flu were confirmed in Germany. Filming this moment in a loop that repeats ad infinitum and keeping a birdwatcher’s distance, as an observer external to the system, Nicolas Vamvouklis traces a parallel between human and animal society, underlining elements of dominance, oppression and exclusion. He also refers, obviously, to his own native island, Lesbos, one of the focal points of the migratory flows and of the European humanitarian crisis, as well as a paradise for photographers of birds.
Underlining this relationship, the environmental installation Granted there is a wall, what’s going on behind it? gathers a series of objects that accompany the artist in his movements between Greece and Italy and that summarize the relationship between inhabited space, object and body. They are elements that appear shorn of context in the exhibition space, but which in reality are found everywhere: they often belong to other lives, other homes. They are the reification of persons and moments that were essential to the artist’s formation.

Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-10

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Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-11

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Gosia Turzeniecka, born in Poland

A new memory can only enrich, it cannot cancel previous ones. So thinks Gosia Turzeniecka, who brings her childhood home to the interior of Casa Testori. The monumental dimensions of her work contrast with the lightness of her technique, of the liquid colours the artist has used to paint from afar, remaining distant from the work, using a long rod that renders her movements even more fluid. The supporting felt is that produced by Testori Group, a material that determined the construction of Casa Testori and which becomes bricks and cement once again in the coloured building drawn by Gosia Turzeniecka. It is one of the Soviet blocks of flats of her native Poland, on the roofs of which she hid to play while a girl and the balconies of which, nicknamed “boxes”, concealed lives and histories.

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Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-39

Délio Jasse, born in Angola

The relationship between photography and time is central to the work of Délio Jasse, whose artistic quest inserts and superimposes distinct moments, condensed into a single image. The time of the original shot, that of the development, that in which the image comes to life. Then another shot and more development. Ongoing development, as is revealed by the reddish light of the dark room in which we find ourselves. The artist works, in fact, with archive photos, for the most part products of his wanderings through street markets. Images and materials that, without his intervention, would not have been conserved. Moments immortalized to be remembered, yet destined to oblivion. His quest takes as its starting point the collapse of the Portuguese empire and the conditions of the retornados re-entering Portugal from Africa, from their loss of a native land and their need to replace it with another place able to generate the same feeling. Délio Jasse therefore concentrates on details, inverts the levels. He highlights, in his bitter research, official stamps, writings, annotations, and captions that relate a lyrical and political story. It reactivates other people’s memories, showing how the legitimization of a person’s identity is subordinate to bureaucracy, just as the faces are in the background, a mere backdrop to the words.

Olga Schigal, born in Russia

What defines a man? What does he belong to and what belongs to him? Why are we sometimes induced to set out for distant lands, while at the same time desiring to return to our roots? I wonder if childhood is not simply our home, which becomes a memory, an image, when we are adults and transforms itself into an unreachable place. This reflection represented an essential point in Olga Schigal’s artistic quest. The use of the past tense depends on the fact that the artist’s choices over how to live have led her, in recent years, to uproot herself yet again, to understand that her roots may lie in having roots of her own. She chooses, however, to carry with her, in this voluntary disorientation, a sort of family album, the images of which are printed only as negatives. They have to be held against the light to be seen but, at the same time, the light to which they are exposed will determine their disappearance.

Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-17

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Stefan Milosavljević, born in Serbia

Three works speak of identity construction as stretching the truth and of the relationship between play and violence, of a bestial conduct that superimposes itself, of necessity, on human conduct. Conduct where the law of the fittest becomes an action code for betterment and survival. Three works by Stefan Milosavljević illustrate this theme through a formal coherence that enables him to develop the same argument starting from personal and autobiographical references to reach a universal statement independent of its origins in the artist’s own story. The installation Butterfly On Fire dialogues with Massimo Kaufmann’s permanent work on the walls of the ground floor room of Casa Testori. It recalls children’s games, coloured enclosures in which toddlers love to immerse themselves while the adults are busy in commercial centres. Butterfly On Fire is a chronological and conceptual genealogical tree, the title of which refers to the well-known butterfly effect, an expression used in the theory of chaos to describe how small changes in initial conditions determine large long-term variations. The drawing tells a personal and collective story constellated by violence, a tale to be discovered among the fragments of coloured sponge that occupy the room and prevent us from having an overall view, and from knowing all the stages of the narration. An itinerary that imposes choices, proposes alternatives, but always leads to the same result.

Caterina Erica Shanta, born in Germany

Caterina Erica Shanta’s installation consists of a film and a book, mirroring elements in which the artist implants the micro-history, in Carlo Ginzburg’s definition, of her family in History, from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the Second Gulf War, starting from photos in her private archive. The photos undermine our capacity to distinguish between reality and fiction, between belonging and uprooting, between an image and a memory. it’s too close to get it in focus is an autobiographical documentary telling the artist’s life through the camera lenses of her father and her stepfather, both soldiers who served in Italy and on foreign missions. In the sequence of images, accompanied by the artist’s voice commentino and placing them in context, the works of the two photographers snow the possible coexistence and interference between the public and private dimension, between exterior and interior. Originating from the same material, the same archive, is And other similar stories. Here, though, it is the lack of references that poses questions. The book, in fact, gathers all the images of which Caterina Erica Shanta was unable to identify the paternity or the context, the subject portrayed or the author, even though they were conserved in her family’s album. They are orphan images, without objective or external references for the cataloguer, photos that resist cataloguing, suggesting memories and new stories.

Iva Lulashi, born in Albania

Iva Lulashi’s memories of her country of origin, Albania, are filtered. Firstly, through the stories of her parents, chats with her mother, some paintings by her father, a few photographs. Indirect information, from undoubtedly plausible sources. Then from period films, posted online by unknown people and now seen by the artist on YouTube. Films that relate a collective story conditioned by censure, by the limits imposed by the dictatorship, by state control. A story that Iva Lulashi tells solely through the images, eliminating the audio, in order to silence in some way the rhetoric of the propaganda. The artist translates these narrations into the language she knows, that of painting. This makes the boundaries uncertain, the identities unfocussed. Blurring becomes a conceptual choice, not a stylistic one. She paints on canvas, or she superimposes her appropriation of a nation’s memory on other people’s recollections: on small objects, saucers, wooden trays. Her leitmotif is the political removal of a nation’s eroticism, which she underlines, not with the details or realism of pornography, but with the carnality and sensuality of allusion.

Natalia Trejbalova, born in Slovakia

On her first visit to Casa Testori, Natalia Trejbalova was struck by the niches, by the movements of the walls in the rooms. Her attention focused on one of these cavities, one of the fireplaces that immediately reveal a space as a dwelling. A fireplace that had been out of use for years and which, for this very reason, reminded her of that of her native home, which housed, not a fire, but their pet animals. A loss of function that created a new intended use, a different destiny. A fireplace that, though rooted in an internal room, in reality represents an invisible connection with the exterior, with elsewhere; an entry point and an escape route in fairy tales and novels. It becomes a miniature theatre, the set for an alternative landscape, it becomes a means of transport through which to see another landscape. In construction and in deconstruction, composed of plants and artificial flowers, it the souvenir of an unstable reality that – in reality – does not exist.

Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-37

Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-38

Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-24

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Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-22

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Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-23

Agne Raceviciute, born in Lithuania

The video Genovaite Raceviciene in Juodkrante Neringa tells the story of a place and a journey. A space without colour, the landscape features of which determine and blend with the identity of those who travel through these places. A peninsula linked to mythologies and legends, a tongue of earth between sea and lagoon, between sand and woodland, where the dunes increasingly become a Nordic forest. We follow a figure, in a rhomboid-shaped mantle that hides the figure’s appearance and amplifies his or her movements, secure as those of an animal in its habitat, camouflaged between tree trunks and stones, following a route with a precise goal, a road that speaks of origins and ancestry. We follow two figures, a grandmother and granddaughter, retracing a space akin to retracing a life.

Oscar Contreras Rojas, born in Mexico

Rojas’s canvases, which assume several different formats, display the artist’s typical fluidity and lightness of touch, the fruits of his years of study in Venice. The evocation of indistinct landscapes is here accompanied, and at times alternates, with suggestions of figures in the process of construction or disintegration. This is true even of the small paintings – almost a pocket art gallery – partially hidden from view by a large screen. They portray landscapes from two very distant countries, Mexico and Italy, that co-exist in the figure, experience and memories of the painter. They are two sides of the same coin. Starting from the presumption that they cannot be experienced simultaneously, the very fact that they are gathered within a single personality enables infinite combinations to take place between the surfaces. Surfaces that can be deconstructed to demonstrate, with still more violent evidence, the possible cohabitation, even physical, of worlds apparently distant from one another.

Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-26

Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-28

Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019_via filo © Maki Ochoa-27