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.
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’sartistic quest. The use of the past tense depends on the fact thatthe artist’s choices over how to live have led her, in recent years,to uproot herself yet again, to understand that her roots may liein having roots of her own. She chooses, however, to carry withher, in this voluntary disorientation, a sort of family album, theimages of which are printed only as negatives. They have to beheld against the light to be seen but, at the same time, the light towhich they are exposed will determine their disappearance.
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 othersimilar 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.
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.
The intentions underlying Margaux Bricler’s installation have been modified by the work itself. Originally, in fact, it was to suggest the absence of a body. This was implied by the wooden structure, by the slight impress of a silhouette conserved by the clay and by the decomposed mantle, symbolizing a sudden awakening, perhaps in the middle of the night, of a restlessness not assuaged by sleep or dreams. This project, which we wish to keep in mind in order to show the relation between intention and creation, altered over time and is even now acquiring a new conformation. The installation, as we now see it, evokes a single bed, of normal size except for the unusual height, recalling the structure of the Sleeping Hermaphrodite, in the version conserved at the Musée du Louvre of Paris, the mattress of which Gian Lorenzo Bernini sculpted with a surprising wealth of detail (1620). In Bricler’s work, the mattress becomes the body. The layer of clay, chosen also for its reference to the creation and decay of every material, reveals its own existence, its own life in the work. There is not only the memory of the body, therefore, as was originally intended. There is another body, the essence of a body that needs neither form nor semblances to prove its vitality and energy. It makes its presence felt with its own pungent odour as we enter the room. Its movements and fractures are an index of the impossibility of any container to resist its content. At the beginning of the exhibition, the layer of clay was uniform on the wooden surface, its classical composure accentuated by the alabastrine mantle, the consistency of which plays an optical trick on the viewer – is it marble or skin? With the passing of time, however, the material has gradually assumed a life of its own, proclaiming its own presence. At the same time, the widening cracks emphasize the idea of something precarious, transitory. An increasingly sepulchral image has increasingly emerged, suggesting an object with a presence of its own lasting for centuries. A table? A bed? A tomb?
Mohamed Keita, born inCôte d’Ivoire
Among Mohamed Keita’s photos, J’habite Termini is a selfportrait. The photographer immortalizes his baggage when he arrived in Italy. These suitcases might be a face and a bust, they substitute his members, without rhetoric, without exaggerated contrasts. A foreground against a scarcely defined background, a place of passage, anonymous, where the faces mingle, people hurry by, without stopping. Two bags and a box relate the departure from Côte d’Ivoire, a long journey and the arrival in Rome.
The three photos were chosen from an archive of times and places that do not correspond to the moment in which they were shot. Each is accompanied by a caption that apparently deceives the viewer, but which in reality reveals the artist’s intentions, giving us access to his memory. A code refers to a catalogue where the fictitious date has the same importance as the real one. It does not matter where and when they were made, each of these images portrays Caracas, Maki Ochoa’s native city. They have in common a tonal uniformity that makes their temporal location indefinable. The have the opaque patina of memories, even if they were taken recently. They are ephemeral appearances, immortalized by the camera in a format that also contemplates error. They are déja-vu images introducing a further environmental superimposition. With a site-specific installation, in fact, the artist takes us to the Venezuela of his memories, among mango leaves, hooters and parrot cries – alter egos that refer to linguistic and mnemonic superimpositions. The cage that held them is by now empty, losloros – the Spanish for “the parrots” – have gone. With an oneiric interference, the space becomes Quinta Elizabeth, the house of the artist’s grandmother.
Enej Gala’s obstinate insistence is destined to failure and repetition. The artist knowingly demonstrates this in his repairedobjects, where the loss of function underlines the origin. Among the sculptures belonging to this series, the materials evocative of the home reflect, by repairing their functionality, on their roots in daily life and recall lives that have been lived, lost or were not as expected. They are elements accompanying everyday – and everyone’s – existence. Elements that inhabit every home, every drawer, but which are transformed and transfigured through these obsessive repairs. What is conserved, therefore, is a sense of profound fragility and instability, emphasized and exaggerated by a forced precariousness.
Filum is an attempt to return to the artist’s origins, to analyse their distance from the present. It is a two-channel projection in which Felipe Aguila compares himself with his father. Have time, distance and different customs modified their identity or does an invisible thread – a filum – remain, regardless of the different continents and spaces separating them? The comparison evolves through a series of parallel gestures that no longer coincide. This is underlined by the subdivision in two screens, requiring the observer to pass repeatedly from one to the other. The landscapes change, the interiors change – how do the identities change? The artist emphasizes how, in his own thought, not only linguistic identity but even cultural affinity have weakened. Ways of walking, eating and travelling therefore become external evidence of a new way of conceiving time, of planning one’s own life. Attention to minute details, to involuntary gestures, measures the distance and the extent to which this thread has been stretched.
Oscar Contreras Rojas, born in Mexico
A fusion between different traditions, but which have the same idea of transformation: The Popol Vuh (“Book of the Community”) and Ovid’s Metamorphoses are the starting point for Oscar Contreras Rojas’s work. Both in the collection of myths and legends of the various ethnic groups inhabiting the Quiché land, one of the Maya reigns in Guatemala, and in the Latin epic poem, the fulcrum of the story is, in fact, metamorphosis, the possibility to change, to evolve. Thus, the small sculptures of the Mutant series are an assemblage of different materials. Some are objects found here and there, some have been artificially constructed. They are made uniform by the red wax, which helps convey the idea that this is an ongoing process, that these shapes can be further modified.
Did you notice them? Did you see them? If you were barefoot you would feel them under you. With hard bristles, on which hundreds of soles have been wiped, thousands of feet have waited. Maybe you are waiting for someone to open the door, maybe you are looking for your keys in your bag. If you have passed over the threshold, you are not outside, but you are on another threshold. Suspended, not knowing what lies beyond. In an interior, with a shift that is your first disorientation, as when you enter an area where something is out of place. Something that is no longer itself, but which conserves almost everything of itself: form, colour. Another function, certainly. It tells its own story, in another place. Now, it retains something of your footprints, of your passage.
This was the last room I designed and made for the exhibition. For its achievement I thought of Martin Creed’s work, and of a Luigi Polla’s tale. When Luigi met him – one night he told me – Martin, who was no more then a boy, showed him a salt and a pepper shakers, made in copper and steel. He leaned them on the table where they were eating. They were almost invisible among all the dishes. He explained him that, by his nature, he didn’t want to to anything. But not doing anything, for an artist, is impossible. And so he had always found the way to make the easiest thing, to do the minimal effort. I have always been struck by this tale (I recall his filled-with-air balloons, his creased papers, his metronomes…). So I thought that an empty room would have been perfect to close the course of the exhibition. Even because, then, I was too tired to do something more. But actually something was missing, a grip to the slang violence of Testori’s stories, invented and lived stories. And so I remebered his frienship/unfriendship with Luchino Visconti. Visconti who was inspired by Testori’s Il ponte della Ghisolfa for his Roccoe i suoi fratelli. At that time they were friends, respecting each other; but then happened that Alain, Testori’s partner, didn’t get a part – promised – in Ludwig, Giovanni was very pissed off and started to hate him (so hard that he presented public excuses after Visconti’s death) so bad that in the unpublished epilogue of L’Ambleto, he rails against the “sozzialista registore”, insulting him and saddling him with sins and perversions: “for you, to love, is like having a dog’s cock to lick”. That’s why I took as a starting point the playbill of Rocco e i suoi fratelli, where is depicted Simone while raping Nadia. The violence of the act is mitigated by the invisible transparence of the image obtained scratching the matt glass of the french door, whose counterpart is, on the left wall, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, a work made for my personal exhibition Postmodern, in 2006. In this work the relationship between man and woman is inverted (literaly, the woman is on the top), and the Magritte quotation is explaining also here “what love is”, playing on the fact that “pipe” in french means – as everybody knows – pipe, and blowjob, as well…
